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

Simon Armitage (left) has been everywhere this week-end, in the British media - a genuine blitz. He was the cover story for the Guardian's Weekend magazine - he's founded a new band, at age 44, with an old friend, and they're The Scaremongers . Okay, suitably Gitmo-zeitgeist. And then, on the BBC flagship morning radio show, Today, at around 8.25 (today), he popped up, not to sing a few Scaremonger tunes, but to read a new poem, "The Not Dead" I believe it was titled, all about how veterans of the current wars have been let down by Britannia, and feel like awkward ghosts in ordinary towns. Okay, that may not be Ivor Gurney stuff, but it packed a punch, and is for a very good cause - the soldiers are bearing the brunt of shame better levelled at Blair (and the voters who allowed Iraq to happen) - and receiving few benefits for their patriotism and sense of duty. Armitage is one of the best, and most prolific, of the mainstream poets of his generation, and it is...

Autumn Tennis in Bloomsbury, Anyone? a reading by 6 younger poets and 2 special guests October 1, 7-9 pm Oxfam Bookshop, 12 Bloomsbury Street London WC1B 3QA The reading, in the Poetry Month of October, will feature 6 younger UK-based poets, who met at The Poetry School, and whose poems have begun to make an impact on the British literary scene. Readers are: Emily Berry, Joe Dunthorne, Kaethe Fine, Michael Kavanagh, Alex McRae & Helen Mort With special guests Joanne Limburg and Todd Swift Swift will give an exclusive UK reading from, and signing of, his latest collection, Winter Tennis (DC Books, Canada, 2007) Admission is free with a suggested donation of £5 to Oxfam. To secure your place please phone Alison Jackson on 020 7637 4610 or email

The great Canadian character actor Lois Maxwell has died, 80, in Australia. She made an indelible impression on fourteen Bond films, initiating the series in 1962, as efficent, yearning, slightly-plain Miss Moneypenny (see above), with whom James Bond would harmlessly (?) flirt, from Dr No to 1985's A View To A Kill . Born in Ontario, she won a Golden Globe, and made many film and TV appearances - but she won us over in M's office.

Ditch, is a good place to read about poets who might be said to have wandered off the beaten path a little, or who are simply worth reading about. Okay, I am their featured poet at the moment, I admit it.

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Andrew Bailey this Friday. Bailey (pictured) lives in Chichester and works for the Poetry Archive, among other things. He has also worked for various literature organisations, including the Poetry Society and Poetry International Web, and a number of theatre companies. His poetry has appeared in various magazines including Poetry Review , Stand , Stride , Brittle Star and Vallum. A play (co-written) appeared in the Assembly Rooms in the Edinburgh Fringe 2002. Bailey studied at the universities of Nottingham, where he won the Kirke White Prize for Poetry, and Sheffield, for an MA in Contemporary Poetry. He is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2005. I've enjoyed publishing his work at Nthposition , and think he's a British poet well worth keeping an eye on. consume pinch the petals from the blossom wait and lick the plasma nectar seeping sweet; lift the mushroom on knife and thumb clean from its tilth subject to steam eat whole quick thi...

Philip Rush reviews Beat Reality by Les Merton and The Moontones Les Merton , with a Cornish accent smelling of tin and chapel choirs, recites his poems over a laid-back almost ambient backing provided by The Moontones. I have a soft spot for poems read against music. The largely moribund poetry publishing system in England could be pepped up I think with a little more attention to sound. For years now, many books of new poetry in Spain, for example, have come with accompanying CDs of the poet reading his or her own work. Multimedia in the poetry library? What monster has been let loose? I love The Blue Aeroplanes. Their guitar-playing is out of sight, for a start, but Gerard Langley’s own poems and his recitals of other people’s - MacNeice’s, notably, and Kenneth Patchen’s - are beautifully voiced and strangely re-invented. And I love the way the guy in Piano Magic - Glen Johnson he’s called I think - recites his understated pieces over avant-garde loops and squeaks. And Adrian Bele...

The recent decision by the Anglican church in America to abide by the terms laid out by Rowan Williams , and desist from blessing the union of same sex couples, and also halt the ordination of gay clergy, is shameful. As Eyewear has argued before, there is no point in sustaining a union that continues to compel open-minded Christians to accept fundamentalist, intolerant doctrines - simply for the sake of a "broad church". At some point, fractures in the structure must force a moral break.