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

Eyewear is very glad to welcome American poet Don Share  (pictured) this exceptionally warm Friday in London, and to feature a new poem by him.   Share grew up in Memphis, Tennessee.  He is Senior Editor of Poetry in Chicago. He was previously Curator of the Poetry Room at Harvard University, and Poetry Editor of Harvard Review and Partisan Review .   Squandermania   is his most recent book of poems, three poems from which were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His earlier book,   Union , was a finalist for the Boston Globe/PEN New England Winship Award for outstanding book. His other books include   Seneca in English   and   I Have Lots of Heart , translations of Miguel Hernandez which received the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize. His critical edition of the poems of Basil Bunting is forthcoming from Faber and Faber. Looking Over My Shoulder I went to Heaven once, sadly leaving my push-mower and orange snow shovel behin...

Kevin Higgins , the Galway-based poet and satirist, has written a review of my 2009 collection, Mainstream Love Hotel , from Tall-lighthouse (No. 23), for The Wolf, James Byrne 's uniquely important little magazine - perhaps the most adventurous and critically febrile of all the British poetry magazines - skirting as it does the main and marginal streams, and bridging the Atlantic effortlessly.  This issue features poems by Evan P. Jones, Richard Parker, Anne Carson, James Brookes , and an interview with Alfred Corn , among other highlights.  Higgins knows me well enough to note the curious way my work explores both theology and sexology: "One sometimes gets the impression that his [Swift's] politer lyrics are a kind of trick on the reader which gives him the element of surprise when he decides to unveil the spoiled priest in a brothel (or some other such enemy of politeness and hope) he has waiting around the corner from us."  This is true, I think, and is exactly w...

As many of my friends will know, I became a Catholic on Tuesday, the 22 of June, converting from Anglicanism.  I had been an Anglican since the age of eighteen.  I have long been an admirer of Catholic thinkers, poets, and saints, not least Graham Greene , my favourite prose writer of the 20th century.   Lowell is one of my favourite poets, as is FT Prince .  My vision of the Church is a broad and open one, and while I am aware of its many actual and perceived faults - many the result of the humanity at the heart of any organisation of global-historical reach - I am also aware of the rich, various and deeply-felt spiritual life that many Catholics live.  I hope to be a part of the Church's ongoing struggle for relevance and renewal in a time of high science and secularism - also a time of environmental and capitalist crisis, when no other world organisation speaks so powerfully against war, pollution, or capitalism's faults. Yes, I know that some of the offic...

The poet Nick Asbury has sent along this poem as a response to Eyewear 's BP posts.  In 2008, he published a pamphlet called Corpoetics , made up of poems created by rearranging the words from corporate websites.  This is an addition to that project.  The link at the end he considers effectively part of the text. Beyond petroleum After the platforms, the ships, the refineries, After the solutions, the fuel and facilities, After the products, the light and the heat, After the pride and the corporate need, After today and what we do now, God and the world. God and the world. http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9028275&contentId=7051490

The new Coalition government in Britain is a Thatcherite project by another name, as can now be seen - with its main goal to make the State wither away - the total opposite of the Marxist aim of having Capitalism dissolve.  As such, it is a purely market-driven (and ideological) construct, no matter how liberal or fair it claims to be.  There is something thrilling and caustic, being in the hands of such clearly driven engineers.  But also dangerous.  Many people will be hurt by this, and some corporations not enough.  To attempt to replace government spending with export as a large chunk of the economy in three years is wildly ambitious.  Canada did it in the 90s.  And turned sharply right ever after.  33 years after The Sex Pistols (as poet  Tony Lewis-Jones has reminded me) we all have something to shout about again.

Eyewear is pleased to have a new poem by the recent winner of the Cardiff International poetry competition, Giles Goodland , today. Architect I made a false star. Each problem is aesthetic, the war has not yet started yet, so sky, furrow your clouds my sand leaks on the shoes. Remaking a film my head would pulse with the start of light the plot involve great solitude and a man walking into a text, the text transform, pages strange the face we recognise under a lamp is that of a doll that has shaken its eyes out face is an object, the mirror steams you can harm a night by softing under a car, the road engages architectures we wake past in order to reach the switch that name escapes them, expressions pour into the television’s jar a figure quakes inside the statue he will talk at length about clocks or stop and realise what you mean, bleed your hands into a basin hardhats of many colours are carrying scaffolding poles to unsky, the motiveless airport grounds days, there are p...

The fact that a top US General at war would think inviting a Rolling Stone reporter to hang out with him for two weeks was a good idea is something out of Mad Magazine or a Kubrick movie - in short - it's sort of Sixties/ Seventies retro, and inherently funny, in a Vietnam/ Nixon era sort of way.  As one aid to Obama asked: what was he thinking?  To which the reply surely must be: what, me worry?