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

The New York Times has a good article about geniuses being rejected by Knopf . The initial reaction for any struggling or younger (or expatriated or exiled) writer and poet, on hearing the news that Lolita , On The Road , and works by Sartre, Richler and Plath , were all thrown away by apparently undiscriminating dolts, is that, hey!, I am like them. This moment of inverse glory, basking in a great writer's failures, soon vanishes, however, as one recalls the grosser inequity - they did go on to be published... I am rejected all the time, often by leading presses and poetry journals. Hurts like hell, but one has to keep going. Fact is, my heart's half-broken by the doors that keep slamming shut over here. It's an odd feeling, because I know I have done so much to promote poetry, it feels like misplaced Karma, having all this indifference visited upon my work. I confess to sometimes thinking of throwing in the towel. Just quit writing. You know, if I wasn't a poet tryi...

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Jacob McArthur Mooney (pictured) to its storied pages. Mooney is a 24-year-old Canadian with something of a meteorically-rising poetry career on his hands - something I'm quite glad of, having been publishing him these last few years , when my editorial eye came across some poems of his. Mooney, having recently split his time into quadrants (Toronto, Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, Halifax), now lives in a small house with a pear tree in the backyard (as I am informed in his bio note; whether, like Augustine, he is tempted by the pears, he does not say). He was shortlisted for the 2007 CBC Literary Award in Poetry. His first book of poems is due out in March of 2008 from major Canadian press McClelland and Stewart, and is titled The New Layman's Almanac . He is the poetry editor at ThievesJargon.com . A Guide to Alternate Histories Take a step to the left. Take another. There was this photograph I shrugged off once while moving, me and the hard lo...

Mr. Luciano Pavarotti , opera singer, has died , at the age of 71. I was surprised by my reaction. His death has moved me a great deal this morning. As time passes, such iconic public figures embed themselves in our memories, in the weave of our own lives and experiences. Pavarotti was a great pop star, as significant as any other in the 1990s, reaching, literally, via TV, live performance, and hugely popular recordings, billions of fans and casual listeners won over by his apparently effortless command of operatic bravado. He performed with the two other tenors of his time, as The Three Tenors , The Muppets and U2 . His singing of Nessun Dorma became the theme of the World Cup. Sadly, this rendition has become every lowbrow's high-culture touchstone - but that doesn't make it any less magnificent. As far as high passion and superb operatic performance goes, this must be a benchmark. But Pavarotti was also an artist, and a performer of something close to genius (if not for mu...

Sipping Coke and playing games ... words from David Sylvian's exquisite song " September ". The burnished month of mellow sunlight, fading like sepia, from summer into autumn, has arrived, full of pencils for school, sharp and yellow, and tinged with sadness, tinged with a remembrance of those July kisses, those August goodbyes. With September comes responsibility , but, like a first date with winter, the serious business of dark night is yet to come, there is still a dalliance on the sun's doorstep, a last tilt at youth.

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Valerie Lynch (above, reading at the Poetry Cafe) this Friday, especially as she recently turned 80 (on Tuesday of this week - congratulations). Lynch has been a part of my Poetry School seminar groups for several years now, and I have been much impressed with her determination, and talent. She began writing poetry at 77, after various interesting careers as teacher (Economics), archaeologist (in a City Museum), assistant editor of an encyclopaedia, and finally a psychoanalytical psychotherapist (still practising). She has quickly developed a sometimes startling, often painfully honest, voice, dealing with themes of palpable interest to her - and all people in due course - ageing, memory, the body, loss, desire, sexuality, love, and time - and how anger and beauty twine around these subjects. I think she has some work well worth reading, and someone in the UK should publish her collection before she turns 100, so a wider audience can benefit from ...

Scott Rosenberg has an article in today's Guardian about how blogging is, in some ways, turning ten this year - and how that relatively impressive anniversary has yet to convince blog-haters of the inherent literary, or other, value of the form. He notes, particularly, how once-countercultural-guru-and-white-dressing Tom Wolfe (now apparently just as bland as the Man from Glad) is dismissive of people who write blogs, and the blogs they write. As Eyewear has been quick to observe, these last few weeks - and more generally since starting this blog a few years ago - the UK, while innovative in so many cultural and technological ways - has been stuck in a neo-Edwardian moment, poetry-wise, in relation to the web, and blogs. Bluntly stated, poetry on the Internet is still a second-class citizen, in British and Irish literary circles. Why? There's a one word answer that fans of the American 60s comedy-action series Get Smart will recognise: Control. The larger, mainstream publi...