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

Perhaps England's greatest living lyric genius, comparable, in his strange ways, to Bob Dylan , but far more contemporary, is Morrissey , of The Smiths , who were the greatest band of the 1980s, anywhere. Like millions of my generation, I loved him - and still love his songs. It therefore comes as something of a major disappointment to read that the man allegedly believes England has been "flooded" by immigrants , and that the UK's multicultural dynamism has swept away a whole way of "English" life. Move over, Larkin (another great miserabilist), is there still room in Little England for another grumpy old fart? What is is with the British? All their best male wits are essentially conservatives, at least traditionalists - including the irascible Mr. Fry , who thinks modern poetry is mainly rubbish. Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear of a male British genius wildly open to the new, the exotic and the foreign? Then again, if the songsmith has been misquoted...

I met Kavita Joshi (pictured above) as part of the East-Side Educational Trust mentoring program - she was selected (after winning a competition) to be the London school poet I worked with over the spring and summer of 2005. She has since become an undergraduate student at Leicester. Although still only in her early 20s, she represents one possible future way forward for poetry in the 21st century, as her work combines interest in philosophy, alternative (often grunge) music, wit, enviornmental and urban concerns, religion, with a cultural background that avoids easy recourse to the usual tropes. Her poems have been published at Nthposition , and in Future Welcome , the anthology from DC Books. Eyewear is pleased to showcase her work here this Friday. Spin freely Stop the birds singing. They distract me from voices in my head. They subtract the melody of confusion. The bulbs in the television demand attention. The bulbs won’t dance in such calm. Do not stop my head from spinning. The...

Australia has a new government. This could be good news for the world, since the last one seemed to be in Bush's pocket. Meanwhile, the tall, bald, gaunt, herky-jerky lead singer of Midnight Oil - Peter Garrett (above) - is the new Environment Minister (except for global warming). I have fond memories of Midnight Oil. I was first given a mixed tape of their work in 1986 or '87, I think it was, by some Australian debaters travelling through Montreal on their way from the Worlds that had just happened ( Lindy and friends). The early Midnight Oil sound. Angry, haunting, very left-wing, and propulsive, it was, to me, a fresh way of thinking, and a new way to hear music, and I loved them. Somehow, they were eclipsed, as Simple Minds were, also, by U2 , as the committed stadium band de jour, but, at the start of the 1990s, they were internationally huge. As they once sang, "short memory..."

Eyewear is proud to replicate, below, the latest Jacket magazine announcement (slightly edited), for its new issue. As you know, Jacket is usually thought of as the world's leading English-language online magazine dedicated to poets, poetry and poetics. And, among oher features (it is a very rich and expansive issue) is the one I co-edited with Jason Camlot , on contemporary Anglo-Quebec poets, including, among others, Leonard Cohen and Stephanie Bolster . Read on! ======================================== Announcing Jacket 34 -- Late 2007 -- special stocking-stuffer issue! Editor: John Tranter - Associate Editor: Pam Brown ======================================== F E A T U R E : Contemporary Turkish Poetry A selection of poems and essays drawn from «Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry» edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat, published by Talisman House, New Jersey, and available through Small Press Distribution. With thanks to Talisman House. F E A T U R E : Post-Marginal Posi...

This is the 250th birthday of William Blake . Terry Eagleton , so good at spotting literary bigots, is also good at noticing literary visionaries . His Guardian article is worth reading, though I am not sure why he's selected Craig Raine as the contemporary exemplar of the sort of apolitical poet who wouldn't trouble the current state. As a matter of fact, poets in 2003, and beyond, wrote a number of poems which "troubled" the state of affairs, literary and political. Don Paterson chose the platform of his Introduction to his anthology of new British poetry to criticise the "poets against the war" poetry as mostly badly-written, and useless; and Stephen Fry apparently criticised it, too, as did David Wheatley , among other supporters of belles lettres. And, then, of course, the Nobel went to sometime-poet Harold Pinter , a troublesome enough figure. Did any of this shake Blair, Bush, Brown , or other political figures? Did the nation states of the West tr...

Does Mr. Brown, on the ropes as never before , have fingerprints on the mis-donated cash? Time may tell. In the meantime, he looks increasingly like "Mr. Bean" as one MP has put it in heated debate. Except Mr. Bean speaks better, and has a better haircut.

Philip Pullman , the successful British children's author has claimed it is "absolute rubbish" to say that the new big budget film based on his The Dark Materials trilogy in anyway promotes an anti-religious perspective. He further argues that, if he had wanted to send a message, he would have "written a sermon" instead. Pullman, perhaps, denigrates sermons with this statement, by implying they are merely messages. Instead, as John Donne's sermons (among others) show, the sermon is a genre of writing with its own artfully wrought pleasures. At any rate, Pullman didn't write a sermon, but an allegory - another literary form that also has veiled and multiple meanings. Indeed, one would have to be simpler and more naive than any child, let alone adult, reader, to think that books, even vastly entertaining ones, do not, and cannot, contain coded, ulterior messages. One thinks of all fairy tales, most nursery rhymes, and Jonathan Swift's Travels . I th...