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

For many of the past 20 years, I have been an unpaid poetry activist (organiser, editor, anthologist), working to develop an alternative community of internationally-linked poets. Alternative to what? At any rate, the "revolution" has failed to materialise. Most poets, young and old, are so embedded in the mainstream marketing-based structures of publishing they do not either recognise any alternatives, or do not feel the need for one. The others, those restless atomised few, are either too aggressively individualised, or damaged, to form productive alliances. Herding cats, indeed. Let us stop for a moment and ask ourselves, as a thought experiment, what the poet might wish for, might dream of - I avoid saying "in their career" - because the English tend to want to promote the idea of the modest, amateur poet (masking, sometimes, self-promoting careerism behind the scenes). Well, a poet might want, in this order: to write a good poem; to get the poem published in a ...

CNQ ( Canadian Notes and Queries ) ran a balanced, if at times robustly critical, review of Open Field this summer last (2007), written by James Pollock . He noted the energy of the editor, and also the surprising, and somewhat disappointing fact that Americans seem almost entirely disinterested in Canadian poets (as this was the first poetry anthology of Canadians published in America for 40 years or more). Pollock singled out a half dozen poets who he felt deserved their place in the book, including, I am pleased to say, myself. He writes: "I also enjoyed the poems of Todd Swift very much, most of them skillful and moving lyrics in the stoical English tradition of Auden and Larkin .... I am especially attracted to his witty homage to Wallace Stevens . .... How could one not be charmed by such a display of metaphorical inventiveness, particularly if one shares Swift's love for Wallace Stevens (and who doesn't?). Of all the best poets in Open Field , Swift is the one ...

Martin Amis is a famous British novelist - maybe the most famous - and he thinks of himself as something of an Orwell , too - an essayist lucidly battling dogma and cant where he sees it. He is also a university lecturer, and his hourly rate has just been published, as £3000. That's just under 100 times more than most any other lecturer makes (it tends to be around £37). Obviously, the department was buying a brand, as well as a creative writing teacher - and the number of applicants went up by 50% when his position was announced. However, creative writing departments in the UK are dangerously close to making the same cheapening and trivialising mistakes the poetry community has already made of late - that is, in the process of seeking to popularise what they do, they have begun to use the marketing and PR techniques of the advertising and political spheres. It is often said, sotto voce, that British Poetry needs a " Saatchi " - that is, a rich, spin doctor, to "sel...

The Guardian has an interview , today, with the 88-year-old poetic genius, Edwin Morgan , Scotland's greatest living poet, who should have won the TS Eliot Prize for this year. His loss will, in time, be seen as both emblematic of the current climate in certain British poetry circles, and quite sad - but also deeply silly. Not only was he clearly the deserving winner, anyone with class would have decided it was a just and fitting bit of icing to a great cake of a career. Sadly, lesser minds, and more importantly, spirits, are currently bossing things about - without an ounce of Morgan's wit, open-minded playfulness, or international curiosity. In listing his influences, Sarah Crown the interviewer, notes that some names are less popular now - and then mentions Hart Crane . Only in the UK, where many in the new gang of poetry top dogs thinks anything even slightly modern, rhetorical, or American, is rubbish, would Hart Crane be so thought of - elsewhere, Crane is still beloved...

The international money markets, and the world capitalist system, were thrown into turmoil this week, and it now seems an eccentric lone young French man, like someone out of an existential novel, had much to do with the problem . His $7 billion losses may have done more financial damage than any terrorist - or anarchist - could have dreamed of. This raises questions, some of which may not put the banking system in a good light - and one of the questions is, surely, what connection to reality does some of this "trading" bear? If it is possible for one person to concoct a virtual, imagined alter-ego, or series of identities, and therefore conduct business in this post-modern, post-identity fashion, has the economy become a cyborg, or cyber-untrustworthy? I imagine a poetics of money - or economics of poetry - can be derived from this - he was, after all, into derivatives. What is the difference between imagining one is a billionaire, and being one? No difference - all the diff...

Eyewear thinks Sina Queyras (pictured above) is one of the most refreshing, innovative and provocative poets to appear in North American writing over the last few years, and is glad to welcome her here, today. She edited the key book, Open Field: Thirty Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea, 2005), which is one of the first anthologies published in America in the last few decades to consider the new poetry now coming from Canada. She is is the author of Slip (ECW, 2001) and Teeth Marks (Nightwood, 2004). Her third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound , won the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Expressway is due out from Coach House in spring 2009. She is currently writer in residence at the University of Calgary where she is working on several projects including Autobiography of Childhood , a novel. 11. This happened before. Then we ran. And the cable hooked us to a big Dish. We signed up for more. Golden arches nosed up out of concrete and we were delighted. Everyone bou...

Poet-critic Adam Kirsch has an interesting, if arguably somewhat simplistic, essay on the relationship between Heidegger and contemporary mainstream English-language poetry, in the January 2008 issue of Poetry . One of the essay's problems is that Kirsch tries to suggest that the early High Moderns ( Yeats, Eliot, Stevens , for example) were "world" oriented, trying to impose a vision of mastery, remaking the order of things, while the "earth" poets, like "post-Catholic" Heaney (and I think the post may be a little overdetermined here) modestly, and ethically listen to things, and show the ordinary in an extraordinary light, unforcing nature's hand, but being midwife to its exposure and celebration. The problem with this is that the so-called "metaphysical" approach of poets like Heaney, with its strong, neo-classical emphasis on an austere diction, and an ethos of silence and epiphanic apprehension, is deeply moral in precisely the or...