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

Eyewear is pleased to welcome Toronto-based poet Alex Boyd to its weekly Friday spot. Boyd studied at Brock University and graduated with a BA in English. In 2000 he moved to live in Scotland, but now lives and works in Toronto again. While writing, he has worked for Chapters, the City of Toronto, the National Ballet and the federal government. He is the author of poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has had work published in magazines and newspapers such as Taddle Creek , Books in Canada , The Globe and Mail , Quill and Quire and on various sites such as The Danforth Review . In May of 2003 he inherited the well-regarded (and some would say infamous) IV lounge reading series from poet Paul Vermeersch , and as a result is currently booking and hosting the series. Boyd is a member of Greenpeace and PEN Canada. He is a founder editor of the new online journal, Northern Poetry Review (see Links) which I recommend, even in its infancy. The Baker Signed Up, 1914 When he stumbles in...

Abraham Adonduwa , pictured here, is a young Nigerian poet and writer, just starting out, who has being communicating with me over the past year. He has energy, ambition, and an abiding interest in cultivating his craft, and writing poetry in English. Eyewear notes his new blog, below, and wishes him well on his poetic journey in a fascinating land: www.saintabadini.blogspot.com

I used to write film reviews for Look in the late 90s and early 00s. Very occasionally, Eyewear will feature a rearview-mirror glance back at some of the classic, and not-so-classic, films I reviewed then. Today, a masterwork of looking back, Memento . Memento Thriller Directed by Christopher Nolan Starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Ann Moss Rating: Five Specs (out of 5) Tagline: “Photographic Memory” MEMENTO is indelibly haunting and agonizingly suspenseful. The plot, despite its never-ending flashbacks, comes down to an elegant high concept, teased to perfection by new director and writer Christopher Nolan. Leonard is a former insurance adjuster whose wife has been raped and murdered. In the attack, he received a massive head injury. Because of this, he has lost the ability to “make new memories” - everything he can recall is from before the horrific crime. Imagine a world where you literally forget everything (except your name) every ten minutes. Leonard (played with intensity by Guy ...

Eyewear is pleased to note that the Queen - having recently turned 80 - has all her poetry wits about her - and yesterday awarded the 2006 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry to Fleur Adcock (pictured here). Congratulations to her on this splendid occasion. Adcock's poems are well-known, and loved, and some, such as "Against Coupling" ("I write in praise of the solitary act") have become contemporary English classics of wit and insight. As an aside, Fleur Adcock is one of the more than 70 poets who recently recorded their poems for the forthcoming Oxfam Poetry CD Project which I edited, and which will be launched June 8. Report below: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1760226,00.html For more information on Fleur Adcock, see: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth161

From time to time, Eyewear will narrow its gaze and consider a poet of the past whose writing should be attended to in the present. Today, Kenneth Fearing , pictured here. Fearing was my favourite poet when I was an adolescent one winter, and I recall reading his cynical proletarian broadcasts on the page (from an anthology of "modern verse" my mother had used in college) with a vital thrill - the sky was a dark blue, and it was very cold outside, and this seemed like the world as it was to me then (sometime at the start of the Reagan-Thatcher 80s it must be said). But then, he seemed to slip from view - mine, readers, critics, anthologists - until quite recently. I suppose what held against him was his life (somewhat shabby and unattended) and his broadly observant, but political poems, that were not in favour for a time; and his mordant, almost accidental Marxism. To one generation, he was the news; to the next, he was old news; and to ours, he seems to be returning as new...

The American Poets Project , from the Library of America, is in the process of creating some of the most attractive poetry books ever made for English-language readers. The latest, #22, is Louis Zukofsky (pictured here), Selected Poems , edited by Charles Bernstein . The collection has been rethought as a meta-text (or what I call meta-anthology) which excerpts the unexcerptable (the long poem A for instance) thereby recontextualizing how these pieces, these words, click together - a sort of one man canon-reshuffle. The brief introduction by Bernstein is worth the price of the book alone (especially as most will have A on their shelves already, from the University of California press, all 826 pages of it). He draws attention, especially, to the cultural and linguistic differences in Zukofsky's background (his parents spoke Yiddish) that make him such a clear corrective to Eliot, without tipping the balance. Zukofsky is launched by, even as he writes against the specter of Eliot,...

Simon Callow's second part of his superb biography of the terrific Orson Welles (pictured here) is coming soon, called Hello Americans . I heard Callow this morning on the BBC radio, and it seems promising. The book will focus on the side-projects that diverted the boy wonder from film, such as politics, journalism and comedy. Sadly, this is only part two and we have to wait for part three, likely for another semi-decade, which will include later projects such as Touch of Evil . This book ends in 1947, so miles to go on the road past Xanadu before Welles sleeps. The title derives from the broadcasts Welles made about Brazil. See link below: http://www.wellesnet.com/helloamericans.htm