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

Tammy Armstrong is one of the 20 poets I selected for New American Writing , "The New Canadian Poetry" section, 2005. She's one of the younger poets in Canada most worth following. So, as we move towards Canada Day, Eyewear is very happy to present a most apt poem of hers, below. I recall Canadian Tire and its Monopoly-style money with great fondness. Amaryllis Canadian Tire Near the return and exchange desk the sink drain blare of Cash 11, Manager to Cash 11 , bulb-split amaryllises, petals halogen rusted, garden bulimic stand sturdy in clay cups while the mats at the automatic door grow streamy with boot tracked snow, slush. Ski coats shift sibilation each down-plump body maneuvering the card table careful not to catch a leaf above sparkle-glue bijouteries outsized flanges and piano hinges. Amaryllis - dismissed amid vulcanized rubber boxing day sale perfume - an ostentatious widow price shopping the discount aisle. poem by Tammy Armstrong

Eyewear attended Nixon In China last night at the ENO. Let me say this about that: NIC rivals Kane or Godot as a signal 20th-century work that is both paradigm shift and summit of its type - so, as Kane is both best film and most innovative film, and Godot is most influential absurdist play and also central play since 1950 - so too is John Adam's NIC both the most popular postmodern opera of its period (roughly 1977 to 2001) and the pre-eminent one, inaugurating a new kind of reference to contemporaneity in art. It is also, like the work of Welles , viscerally thrilling for its exuberance of design.

On the cusp of Canada Day, July 1, Eyewear is pleased to note a new review of Leonard Cohen's latest collection, Book of Longing , in the TLS (June 30 2006). It's written by Pico Iyer (see link below), no stranger to Cohen's Northern Comforts. I am currently completing my own review, for NPR , so won't say more here. One aspect worthy of mention - the Iyer article on Cohen is under the heading "Music" - not "Poetry". Canadians may find it irritating to realise that, outside his own country, LC is not considered so much a writer-turned-singer as vice versa - as if his towering intellect had been muffled by his tower of song. http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/iyer.html

The Summertime issue of Poetry Review , the UK's leading journal of poetry, founded in 1909, is now out, and it includes poems by (among others, as the saying goes) John Burnside, W.S. Merwin, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, George Szirtes, Sarah Wardle, C.K. Williams, Tamar Yoseloff , and, indeed, myself. It can be ordered from www.poetrysociety.org.uk - a single issue is £7.95.

Anyone who sees Derrida , the fairly recent documentary "biography" of Jacques Derrida , is in for an essay on the difference (with or without an a) between voyeurism and homage, the clear and the opaque, and the pretentious and the sublime. Layered and edited to take full advantage of how film can mirror, copy, track, trace and inscribe, the image, the voice, the eyes, the gaze, this particular film shows the nearly-impossible: a person thinking. Or appearing to think. Derrida, as the self who is playing his Other, his image onscreen, is strikingly photogenic - a handsome, tanned, white-haired older man who is like a combination of Einstein and Sartre - sartorial yet slightly eccentric. This is a coincidence the film enjoys - he could have been ugly, and his thought might be the same - but the fact the camera "loves" him allows him to question what love, and cameras, are for. The film constantly implies division, and doubling - sometimes "Jacqui" is a d...

The novella is the ideal form of the novel, just as the short lyric poem is the best sort of poetry - for a reason that is self-evident: brevity. Or rather, brevity by way of compression. And not just pounds-per-square-inch. The balance between the demands of the author, and the needs of the reader, seem to find equipoise in the novella - which can be read in one sitting, in one moment and place, just as much as a poem can, or a piece of music may be listened to. While longer works of writing have their different values and charms, one of them, surely, is the function of being able to be "picked up" later. There is no later in a novella - there is the enveloping sense of a dying movement, a now turning into a then, as one flows with the work itself. The novella is the glance at the painting that turns into the look that's held by wanting to see more, but also knows the gallery will be closed in an hour. Its dance with the finite is responsible and sweet at once - the nove...

June 26, 45 years ago today, the great American poet Kenneth Fearing (pictured) died in New York City. See a previous post for more on Fearing.