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

I have been leaving annual reports here since the first year of posts in 2005. I can't recall a stranger, more strong-tasting year, than this though. The current joke is "Fuck 2016". Indeed. I won't detain you with too many of my own personal experiences, achievements, blessings, in a year of madness and mass idiocy, and the rise of genuine evil - the year of Aleppo, the murder of Jo Cox , Brexit and Trump - the year we lost (my God!) Geoffrey Hill, Richard Adams, Carrie Fisher, the Greatest - Ali, George Martin, L. Cohen, Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman , Debbie Reynolds , and countless other beloved actors, comedians, icons, and friends. On top of this general sadness, general as the snow in Joyce , we lost Chris Moore , a young writer in his 30s, just as he signed his Eyewear book deal. His debut became posthumous. Awful. Then, more recently, a dear friend's wonderfully-vibrant 18-year-old daughter died in a car accident - days before Christmas.  Hell...

ARTIST OR FINANCIER? Recently, the Canadian government increased by 400% its funding for the arts, while arts funding in Australia and the UK continues to be slashed; this has led to a massive wave of joy and exuberant hope among the Canadian artists I know - musicians, composers, dancers, painters, poets, writers.... hope that in America we assume will not bear fruit in 2017, as Trump slashes cultural funding ever more. Justin Trudeau gets culture, and I am proud he is our PM in Canada. However, there is a different intensity of vision, which I have, and share no doubt with other practitioners of the creative arts and industries. It is this, simply this: Cultural and Creative production, activities, processes, projects are not just one other thing to do, not a hobby, a side-line, an option, but, actually - THE HIGHEST ENDEAVOUR OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. Scientific and medical research is incredibly vital; religious meditation and conjecture equally so. But only the arts can fu...

MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE IS OUR WINNER THIS YEAR! GREAT NEWS! READ ALL ABOUT IT HERE

Mark Ford - world-renowned poet (Faber), editor ( Ashbery ), critic, and professor (UCL), has been reading a stellar group of poets, and will be sending his judge's report to us next week.... get ready for the announcement of the winner NEXT WEEK. Here is a list of the brilliant shortlist OF TEN BRILLIANT UK/IRISH POETS 35 YEARS OR UNDER:   Niall  Bourke is from Kilkenny, in Ireland, but now lives in London. He teaches English Literature at St Michael’s College in Bermondsey and in 2015 he finished an MA in creative writing and teaching at Goldsmiths University of London. He writes both poetry and prose and has been published in a number of journals and magazines in the UK and Ireland, including;  The Galway Review,  Southbank Poetry, Magma, Three Drops From A Cauldron, Prole, Holdfast Magazine and  Ink Sweat and Tears. In 2015 h e was longlisted for The Short Story competition and has been twice shortlisted for the Ove...

Ironically, "Make America Great Again" will mark the end of American Exceptionalism.   NED HARTLEY, AMERICAN WRITER AND MUSICIAN President Obama gave a press conference at the White House on Monday, November 14, before leaving for a series of state visits overseas. His intelligence and grasp of the minute details of governance only highlighted the fact that Donald Trump is going to look like a complete buffoon at his first news conference. Maybe he'll get impeached for mental incompetence.   Growing up in the years following World War II, one of the persistent questions that was always just below the surface was, "How could good people allow the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust to happen?" Well, now we know. There's not a lot you can do to stop it. Not everyone is enlightened, and sometimes the mob underbelly wins. I hate to sound defeatist, but all I can come up with is that Germany survived it. It took a generation or two, but Germany'...

LOUIS DUDEK WAS COHEN'S EARLY MENTOR, AND MY FRIEND There was never a time when I did not know about Leonard Cohen .  I was born in 1966, and he had been famous (in Canada) as one of our best poets even before then; by 1967, he was world-famous, arguably Canada's most-beloved figure ever on the world stage, and he kept on being so, up until his death yesterday. My mother was a huge fan, and his music and poetry (less so his prose) was always in my childhood. Since I was born in Montreal (as was he), and shared his passion for debating and writing (less so, strumming guitars), he was never far from my thought - indeed, as a teenager trying to write poetry, and wondering if such a role was feasible for a Montrealer, Cohen showed the way (along with Irving Layton , and Louis Dudek , his mentors, later both mine as well). Mostly, like most Canadian poets, my affections were of the love-hate kind. He was the absentee father, who rarely did or said anything to promote younger ...

THE STORM-TRUMPERS CHEER THEIR MONSTROUS WIN The old adage that history repeats, the second time as farce, almost rhymes with this nasty nightmarish moment, the election of President Trump by a whitelash landslide, except the American Caligula now in our midst - the most dangerous and dishonest person to be democratically elected to such a powerful leadership role since WW2 - is no farcical figure.   Comedians might wryly note that Donald J Trump is very presidential - he has the moral compass of Nixo n, the sexual ethics of Bill Clinton , the intelligence of George W Bush , the cultural sophistication of Reagan , the political experience of Eisenhower , and the family-decency of Kennedy - but this approach lacks depth or clarity.  There has actually never been a president like Trump before. There may never be a presidency, again, after him.   There are two ways to treat this most horrible of events - and one is with cautious optimism; however, s...