E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Six poets read last night for Oxfam, Tuesday, November 28th, in support of the Life Lines project, at Oxfam's flagship bookshop in London, at 91 Marylebone High Street, from 7.30 pm to around 11 pm. They were: Tobias Hill is one of the leading British writers of his generation. Selected as one of the country's Next Generation poets, shortlisted for the 2004 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and named by the TLS as one of the best young writers in the country. Byatt has observed that "There is no other voice today quite like this." NYC-born Eva Salzman trained as a dancer/choreographer. At Columbia University, she studied with Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott Stanley Kunitz, Jorie Graham, C.K. Williams and Elizabeth Hardwick. Awards include a Cholmondeley from the Society of Authors. Her writing has been widely published and broadcast on the BBC. Double Crossing: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Ruth Fainlight was born...

Sad news. BBC is reporting that anti-smoking hero Allen Carr has died. Of lung cancer. Mr. Carr helped me quit smoking (though I sometimes lapse). His method was simple and profound - to suggest that life without smoking was better (and less anxiety-prone) than with it (since most smokers feel they need the crutch of a cigarette) and celebrated every smoke free day as liberation from a terrible disease. Meanwhile the legal sale of tobacco products by major corporations, resulting in millions of preventable (and often painful) deaths each year, is one of the world's enduring evils, and in a hundred years will be viewed with the same moral disgust as the slave trade. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6194670.stm

Had my father (pictured here with my mother) not died two months ago, he would have turned 67 today. Here is what was written in his memorial booklet. ---- Thomas Edward Stanley Swift November 26, 1939-September 9, 2006 ----- The poet Larkin wrote: "What survives of us is love". Tom Swift survives in that he has left each of us - family, friends and colleagues - with a great sense of love: both for him, and radiating from him. Tom's signature character traits were gentleness, a sense of humour, modesty, protectiveness and tremendous empathy, especially for the disadvantaged (both animal and human). The defining element of Tom's life was his family, for whom he would do anything. And, at the heart of his family stands an extraordinary love story - the 41-year marriage that he shared with Mary Margaret Hume, his beautiful soul-mate, who stood by him through health and sickness and gave Tom his greatest gift of all: love like a flame that never once swerved or threatened...

In order to get votes in Quebec, the governing Tory party has made a gesture that will satisfy only seccesionists and nationalists, by putting forrward a parliamentary motion that the Quebecois form a nation within Canada. Nationalism has a long history, and it has rarely been a good one; pandering to nationalists is a bad idea. Quebec is not a nation, for several reasons - chief among them the fact that Quebec is instead a province of a federation. It was founded by the English and the French, after being violently removed from its indigenous first peoples. The land now called Quebec is not by some kind of mystical union strictly identical to the aspirations of its "Quebecois" (that is French-speaking) people. Quebec belongs equally to its native and multicultural inhabitants, including the large Anglophone minority, none of whom wishes to see Quebec as a separate nation outside of Canada. Canada has but one nation, which is Canada. It is subdivided into various provinces, ...

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Kimberly Burwick (pictured) to this feature. Burwick obtained her B.A in literature from the University of Wisconsin, and her M.F.A. in poetry from Antioch University- Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Indiana Review , The Literary Review , Fence , Conjunctions and others. Her first book of poems Has No Kinsmen was recently published by California-based Red Hen Press. She currently teaches at the University of Connecticut, and lives on a farm in northwestern Massachusetts. I first met her in New York at the panel discussion on politics and poetry I was chairing, which featured Paul Muldoon , Pascale Petit, Mimi Khalvati , Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage , during the week-long series of events celebrating the launch of Short Fuse , an anthology I co-edited a few years back for Rattapallax. Since then, I've been following her work with much interest, and have been glad to publish her at Nthposition. She strikes me as...

Last week-end was one of the happiest in my life. I spent it with my wife in Berlin, as I was there for a poetry festival. I was last there 19 0r 20 years ago. I have many memories of that time, but one of the best was when a painter friend of mine brought me to see the works of the artists kept in the Bruecke (The Bridge) museum - the earliest Expressionists, all of whom were later described by the Nazis as "degenerate". One of the smallest museums in the world, it was designed to house just these artists, and its modern style, set among trees, makes it both beautiful and solemn. Even the chairs were designed to be exactly where they are. I love sitting in them, quietly meditating on the work of Fritz-Rotloff. I hope to return again. Few places on the planet make me so glad. I think it is the passionate use of colour in these troubled painters that, in such thoughtfully-controlled surroundings, is so moving. Order and chaos together are always lovely when in tangible equipoi...

I'll be chairing a panel called Screenburn on Writers and the Internet at the Norwich-based conference tomorrow. Hope to see you there. ip.org.uk/nwp/site/programmelist.acds?instanceid=1515057&context=1515048