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

I have a poem in the 2005 issue of The Los Angeles Review , from Red Hen Press, a good-looking journal which is just out recently. The issue also features the work of poets like Charles Bernstein, David Lehman, Jeffrey McDaniel, Mary Jo Salter and James Ragan . The cover art is by James Doolin, a painting from 1999, "Underpass", pictured here.

I am glad to welcome Janice Fixter (pictured here) to these April-leaning pages this Friday. I have been very much enjoying the poems of hers I've seen lately, in my various roles as an editor, and mild-mannered poetry reader. The poem featured today is one of the ones that especially struck me and is taken from her latest pamphlet. Fixter was born in Kent and has remained in the South East ever since. She writes non-fiction and poetry and her poems have appeared in many respected journals such as Agenda , Smiths Knoll , Tears in the Fence , Iota , Staple , The Times , Envoi , and Smoke . Her poems have also been broadcast on local radio, LBC and Radio 4. Her haiku have been anthologised both in the UK and in the USA. Fixter has had two poetry collections published: Walking Away From the Shadows was published by Poets Anonymous in 1997 and Walking the Hawk (pamphlet) was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2005. She has an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education and a D.Phil....

My grandfather Ian Hume has died at the age of 91. He is pictured above, leaping, Montreal's Olympic Village in the background. He was one of my heroes, an extraordinary man. When I would say I was his grandson, people would nod, as if I had said Atticus Finch was. People who met him called him "Mr. Hume" - men in their 60s like schoolboys at his name - to meet him was to never forget him, for he was good, and he inspired you to be your best, in any walk of life. In a poll for a news magazine, he was once voted one of the "100 best things about Canada" - up there near Niagara Falls. Ian Hume was synonymous in Canada with excellence, on and off the track. He was the chief official for Track & Field at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. He was a key member of Olympic committees that wrote the rules for woman's pentathlon and other events. He was given the Order of Canada for his achievements, and has had a major track meet named after him. More than that, he ...

Happy World Poetry Day! See the link below: http://www.unesco.org/culture/creativity/literature/html_eng/poesie1.shtml I edited a "world poetry" anthology in 2002 with Phil Norton , which was published in New York by Rattapallax. It is called Short Fuse , and is still a very good introduction to what I consider the three main poetries currently developing in the English-speaking world at the start of the 21st century: mainstream lyric, linguistically innovative, and performance/alternative - the second and third of these categories between them include additional experiments with multimedia, hypertext, cinema and other art practices; the Short Fuse collection chose to describe the meeting point of all three of these widely-differing writing practices and kinds of poetry as "fusion poetry" - a term which has not been adopted by most critics or academics - perhaps because the very idea of finding common ground between these radically diverse and at times disparate an...

Spring's sprung rhythm will hopefully gash gold soon. In the meantime, an (edited version of) a press release from one of Canada's most dynamic (and impressive) new small poetry presses: Quartet 2006 / The Passionate Edge Frontenac House is pleased to celebrate its sixth year of poetry publishing with another dazzling quartet of books and poets. Join us for one of the launches of Quartet 2006, an evening of richly spun poetry. It promises to be a great party, with readings, discussion, refreshments, and door prizes. The Launches: Thursday, April 20, 7:00 p.m. at Memorial Park Library, 1221-2nd Street, SW, Calgary, with Pages Books on Kensington as our bookseller. Monday, April 24, 7:00 p.m. at the Edward Day Gallery, 952 Queen St. W., Toronto, with University of Toronto Bookstore as our bookseller The Books A Bad Year for Journalists by Lisa Pasold In Pasold's poetry we hear the dissonant music of a broken and brutal world, its static and its ragged breathlessness. ~ Cecel...

I am very glad to feature the poet, scholar and editor Patrick McGuinness (pictured here) this Friday, St. Patrick's Day (a merely happy coincidence, I assure my readers). McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and in 2001 he won the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine. His poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in the London Review of Books , the Times Literary Supplement , The Independent , PN Review , Poetry Wales , Leviathan , and New Writing 10 . His books include a collection of poetry, The Canals of Mars , from Carcanet, academic works such as Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Symbolism, Decadence and the 'fin de siècle': French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000). He has also given us editions and anthologies, such as Anthologie de la poésie symboliste et décadente ...

A new site for poetry in the UK, which is also a reading series and a magazine and a new poetic movement and.... Openned offers a lot of potential, and it also has a new poem of mine archived, see below: http://www.openned.com/view.php?sid=80&id=28