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

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article in today's Saturday paper on Ruth Padel and British poetry, for those who might want to check out the Canadian perspective . I'm quoted. Meanwhile, the University of Alberta has hired Derek Walcott to be poet in residence, starting this autumn semester.

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome American poet Jim Dolot this Friday - the last poet to be featured before the summer break. Dolot wanted a trimmed bio note and no photo, so here goes: Dolot's poems have appeared intermittently on The Best American Poetry blog site since August 2008. First Three Paragraphs of a Lower-Middle Class Novel Never To Be Written There was a man who was so lower middle class that he had no name except Lower Middle Class. On his checks his middle initial was M. Friends called him Low, and some people, including professors, thought Lower M. Class a very prestigious, not to say upper middle class name. Live and learn. Lower lived in a small one family house in Queens, New York, where his father, a not very successful and somewhat embittered accountant had brought them from the Bronx in the early 1950s. Lower's best friend when he was growing up was Semi Conductor. Everyone laughed at Semi because he had only half a body - one leg, one arm, half a hea...

Not, not a reference to non- Eyewear readers. Readers of Eyewear will know that I love Simple Minds - that grandiose 80s band founded in 1977 that has somehow survived until 2009, with a few of its founding members still extant ( Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchhill ). My love of Simple Minds is not entirely logical, and much of it has to do with the fact that I consider their album New Gold Dream to be, along with The Queen Is Dead and Closer , one of the three masterpieces of British "new wave" and alternative music. And that critical claim is based on feeling as well as thought, and that I was young then, and liable to swoon. However, there is an aesthetic that supports this judgement, and it is this: the 80s "New Romantics" are not so far from the poetic 40s "neo-Romantics" - they both explored excess, emotionality, religiose mannerisms and personal symbolism, and verbally-dense textures. I happen to think excess is as valid as austerity - both hav...

Alistair Noon reviews Collected Poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson This collection of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s curious, witty, observant, crafted, exploratory poems includes, as your average Collected might do, a section entitled ‘Uncollected Earlier Poems’. But unless you’re a reader able to put a restraining order on all prior biographical knowledge, it’s hard not to read all of these poems as early work: Forrest-Thomson died at the age of 27. The obvious question is what another fifty-odd years of writing might have produced. Though one shouldn’t make too much of this of course: when Hendrix died, at the same age, he had demonstrated that rock can be art. Some people just get it all done faster. Forrest-Thomson’s first book Identi-kit (1967) gives, in places, a sense of having being written by a young person. Late-teen/early-twenty-something cynicism comes through in the imagery of stasis and decay, the themes of banality and theatricality in conversation, and the use of psycho...

Many of my best friends - and some of the best poets - are published by Salt , in the UK. Its highly innovative marketing and production design has meant a state of the art online presence, superb distribution in shops, and beautifully-made books. Over the last few years, its publisher and main editor, poet Chris Hamilton-Emery , has written enthusiastically about the new wave of publishing strategies Salt ushered in to the UK, in books, and online posts. At times, there was a Salt swagger, and a suggestion that some poetry editors used amateur techniques. Now, Salt is in financial trouble (aren't we all?) and has thrown itself on the mercy of the poetry-reading world, with an email message asking that everyone buy a Salt book, since sales are down 80% (!) - and keep its liquidity above the red line. I think that everyone should buy a Salt book. I also wish everyone would buy a Salmon book - my Irish press is also facing a toughmoment, if only because poetry sales are down everywhe...

The misappropriation of ‘ Orwell ’ (the mythical version of Eric Blair ) by different factions has gone on for much of the six decades since his death. During the Cold War, and the years running up to the actual 1984 in particular, his last great fictional dystopia was routinely misinterpreted as a frontal assault on all forms of socialism and, in some cases, a defence of the individual libertarianism favoured, at the time, by Margaret Thatcher . Such distortions of both 1984 itself and Orwell’s ‘position’ generally were promulgated by right and left alike, the latter resorting to some quite peculiar means to ‘prove’ that the man who’d committed the fundamental leftist sin of criticising the Soviet Union in the 1930s was a reactionary. In Inside The Myth , for example, a collection of ‘views from the left’ edited by Christopher Norris and published in 1984 (of course), you’ll find Alaric Jacob’s ‘Sharing Orwell’s ‘Joys’ - But Not His Fears’, an essay which, in attacking Orwell’s dep...

The news that Ruth Padel has resigned from the position of Oxford's Professor of Poetry - after only holding this most-honoured post for a week or so - is sad enough. But seeing how the media has - as if this was a replay of Frost/Nixon - hounded a serious poet out of a serious house - makes it bad, too. Eyewear believes Padel, once appointed, should have been allowed to remain. While I think it was low to send out anonymous packages smearing Walcott , it is also clear Padel herself did not do this; and, it is also clear that Walcott's academic misconduct was documented and real. Why shouldn't a man or woman worried about harassment be able to mention this openly? There is something loathsome about the way a bunch of eminent older male establishment figures from broadcasting and academia began to pile on the abuse - against Padel, the brilliant poet, not against the allegedly-predatory older poet. The media fuelled this crisis. It escalated because - almost uniquely...