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

Eyewear is very glad to feature British poet John McCullough (pictured)   this sunny London Friday, as The Selecter plays.  His poetry has appeared in publications including London Magazine , The Guardian , The Rialto , Poetry London and Magma .  He teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Sussex.  His first collection is The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) .  He's one of the best of the young generation. Known Light Now you’re crossing that ocean, I have to confess I’ve rather warmed to this shed where nothing is yours, where your father consulted a sacred Bunsen flame. Chipped oak, a gas tap, scores of powdered specimens – the perfect stage for resurrecting my ‘A’ Level Chemistry. I remember this much: each metal has a secret, unchangeable colour.  A Nichrome wire dipped in compounds, then in fire, bares their truer shades. It’s a bit like those stars, the ones you rehearsed on the pebbles...

The Blue Bus is pleased to present a poetry event, with Fanny Howe and Hank Lazer , on Tuesday 19 th July, from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the fifty-third event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). Fanny Howe’s most recent publications are What Did I Do Wrong? (Flood Editions), The Winter Sun (Graywolf) and most recently Come and See , a collection of new poems. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Award for Poetry in 2009. She is currently teaching at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. Hank Lazer has published 16 books of poetry, including Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009), The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. In 2008, Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-...

Pugilistica a literary celebration of boxing Thursday July 28 th   7pm ~ entrance free     Birkbeck Cinema Theatre, Birkbeck College  43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD poetry book launch - SJ Fowler’s “Fights” cycles I-XV published by Veer books "A dazzling, visceral, proficient, kinetic work.   fights runs its combinations in formal excitement and trenchgut force." Maggie O’Sullivan Lynda Nead , Pevsner Chair Of History Of Art at Birkbeck college presents  ‘Stilling the Punch’ a talk & presentation on boxing imagery Kasia Boddy , author of Boxing:a Cultural History & Senior lecturer at UCL presents  'Save the Public's Soul by Punching Its Face':  Modernist Poetry and Pugilism Tim Atkins  celebrates the legendary heavyweight bout between Jack Johnson v. Arthur Cravan in the Monumental bullring, Barcelona, April 1916 Michael Zand reads "The Klitova-Klinchko Kuntador" Pa...

Eyewear is glad to post below a letter sent in from former Director of the Poetry Society Judith Palmer , in response to yesterday's Battle Royale post. From Judith Palmer Dear Todd, I don’t think we’ve ever met: so you may have jumped to some wrong suppositions when you suggest the Poetry Review Editor and I had ‘diametrically opposed viewpoints for the future direction of the Poetry Society’. The geometrical positioning is far from polar. My policy was always that the Poetry Society should aim to reflect all poetries for all audiences. We employed different strategies to reach different constituencies, and hoped to build bridges between the different areas of our programme. A participant in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, for example, might aspire to be published one day in Poetry Review. A visitor to Trafalgar Square who read our new commissions around the Christmas Tree, might go on to explore membership, and become a more regular reader of contemporary ...

The news today in Poetry UK is of the Forward Prize shortlists, for best collection, best first collection, and best poem.  You can read the full lists here .   Eyewear is particularly pleased to see Geoffrey Hill, R.F. Langley, Nerys Williams, D Nurkse, Jo Shapcott and Alan Jenkins named. It seems a particularly wide-ranging, inclusive year, as far as these things go.

The following post is based on sources that Eyewear, as a journalistic blogger, will not disclose.  It is expressed in the interests of transparency, and without prejudice or malice.  The sad news is, the Poetry Society crisis is getting worse, not better.  As the AGM nears, the Board of Trustees, feeling embattled, is entrenching their position.  They view the "10%" - the over 400 Requisitioners - as opponents, not simply members with a legitimate concern - and are allegedly trying to secure their own proxies and votes, to block any motions of no-confidence from the floor (the membership); there is fear among some Trustees that they may be replaced at the AGM. Meanwhile, some members naturally want to to put motions forward that would compel the Board to disclose what happened at certain secret meetings in spring 2011, when the Director was not included in meetings that led to the position of Editor of Poetry Review being moved from under her directorship, to be...

There is going to be a Poetry Society AGM on July 22, in London.  I am one of the people who is planning to attend (I have proxies).  Emails are flying back and forth.   Dr. Fiona Sampson is upset by the famous "Downfall" Youtube video, satirising the current crisis.  And, increasingly, what seemed a clear rallying cry, from Kate Clanchy , to sign up, and force a vote for an emergency meeting, to compel the Board of Trustees to clarify why all the resignations took place, has become muddied, through no fault of anyone's.  The problem is, the AGM is going to be a head-on collision between those who want to know what happened at meetings, and those who may not want to reveal what happened.  What we know, in the public, is that there is a debate at high level about the Poetry Review editor's contract, and the role of the Director who seems to have been sidelined at various meetings, and various other members of the Board, several of whom resigned.  H...