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

The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (pictured here) along with other major British literary figures, such as Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling , has been asked to supply their ten essential literary works that all school-children should read and study. Motion, the best Poet Laureate of modern times, has provided a canonical list that pulls no intellectual punches, and aims to reverse the brain-numbing dumbing down of so much British media discourse on culture and writing (see Dancing, Morris). The lists, along with The Guardian article, below: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1698548,00.html Andrew Motion's list is: The Odyssey Homer Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes Hamlet William Shakespeare Paradise Lost John Milton Lyrical Ballads Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë Great Expectations Charles Dickens Portrait of a Lady Henry James Ulysses James Joyce The Waste Land TS Eliot *** It's an impressive, undeniable list. If I...

The concluding part of my essay, see link below: http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com/2006/01/comment-on-poetry-and-politics-part_31.html

Hooray for Geoffrey Hill (pictured above)! His new book is out, and gets a rave review from Nicholas Lezard - see below. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1690132,00.html I have just purchased it, and look forward to reading it this week. One pleasant surprise, my friend, the fine American poet, Eric Ormsby , now based in London, is quoted on the back of the Penguin book: "Hill has been writing his incomparable poetry for over fifty years now ... each new book of his has been a fresh, and sometimes unexpected, triumph. The combination of immaculate poetic skill with intense originality is always rare, and never more so than in our diminished age" - Eric Ormsby, New Criterion

Another day, another trumped up British media scare-story about the death of poetry... Cue Fry's "arse-dribble" claim; cue BBC lit-star Daisy Goodwin's well-meaning lament for the decline of poetry... (as banal a debate as the one about Rimbaud lampooned in Haneke's masterpiece, Cache , where Georges, the TV producer and host for a French culture show cuts and edits deep opinion for shallow times. ) This most recent anti-poetry-virus started yesterday, as reported in The Observer , which claimed Goodwin had expressed fear that poetry's demise was, like global warming, an inevitable disaster - soon poetry would be as obscure and eccentrically-loved as "Morris dancing". Today it was on the BBC's famous Today radio broadcast at breakfast, and the usual emails came in to the show, denouncing poetry as useless twaddle. Why all the anxiety? Because sales figures show only about 800,000 poetry books sold each year in the UK, compared to 45 million for...

Issue 11 of The Ugly Tree poetry 'zine is available from February 1st 2006. This issue features poetry from Todd Swift , John G.Hall , Ian Mullins, Peter Johnson, Usha Kishore, Ken Champion, David Thornbrugh, Ivana Sojat-Kuci, Vincent Berquez, Reshma Madhi, Brendan McMahon, Deborah Maudlin, Paul Tristram, Austin McCarron, Ben Barton, Cathy O, Timothy Fighting Light-Shade-of-Blue, Carol Batton, Geoff Stevens, Arwen Lewis & a review of Smoke magazine. The Ugly Tree \ ISSN 1478 8349 \ £3.00 per issue \ £8.50 annual sub \ ed. Paul Neads Copies can be ordered from Mucusart Publications, 6 Chiffon Way, Trinity Riverside, Gtr Manchester M3 6AB enclosing payment of £3.00 (payable to P. Neads) or by visiting Cornerhouse Bookshop & Whitworth Art Gallery Bookshop in Manchester. For a taster of this issue & those that went before www.mucusart.co.uk/samples.htm

http://www.library.mun.ca/qeii/pil/index.php

Tim Turnbull has won 'The Contenders', a £10,000 Performance Poetry Fellowship, awarded by the Arts Foundation. Turnbull, born in North Yorkshire in 1960, recently published his first full length collection ofpoetry - Stranded in Sub-Atomica - with Donut Press (in the review pile of this humble editor). Readers of this august blog will recall that I singled his work out in my review of the Hallam anthology, last summer. It's good to see a poet who fuses the page and stage get this sort of recognition. In December he performed with fellow Contenders Shortlistees at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. On Thursday 26th January, at Pentagram in London's Notting Hill, he discovered it had won him the £10,000 prize. The Contenders judges were Ian McMillan, poet and presenter of BBC Radio 3's The Verb; Ruth Borthwick, Head of Literature and Talks at London's South Bank Centre; and poet, Philip Wells. Other shortlisted poets were Zena Edwards , KatFrancois , Matt Harv...