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

A young poet in Quebec   So many authors and poets seem baffled and antagonised by my ideas relating to small press publishing, that I thought it would be best to set them down clearly and very briefly. I cannot claim they are mine, or that they are the only way to see the world. They arise from the work of Louis Dudek, in Canada, who created small press publishing for poetry, from the 1940s onwards, and mentored Leonard Cohen. Dudek himself was mentored by Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to create a small press – the result was Delta Canada, which eventually became owned and operated by a group of young British and American academics and poets from Concordia University; writers who were themselves chiefly anti-war, left-wing and in some cases draft dodgers from the US. I was eventually published by this later version of DC Books, in 1999. It remains the most important publication of my personal life. And it reminds me always why publishing is so important - bringing a book...

Yesterday's parliamentary vote made British history - the government's Brexit deal lost the support of a vast majority of the House of Commons, losing by 230. To put this in perspective, this is the BIGGEST LOSS EVER for any government in UK's history. To make matters worse, the Prime Minister Mrs May, refused to resign afterwards, and seems incapable of adjusting her bearings sufficiently to locate a compromise Plan B that could pass, before a No Deal Ultra-Hard Brexit occurs on 29 March - the so-called Cliff Edge. Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House, Mr Bercow, seems driven to enter history as the man who undermined executive authority in the parliament, moving the control of the order of business from the Cabinet to the back benches; such a transition would represent a revolution no less significant than Cromwell's time, in terms of the sudden shift of power in the land. Making this turbulent, exciting, and deeply worrying crisis in British democracy all the more f...

2018 is likely to be considered a year that many people would soon like to forget. It had its fair share of war, murder, famine, refugees being mistreated or ignored, stupid polluting, cruelty and political ineptitude. Historically, the Western powers, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, have not been this weak since the 1930s, or in as much disarray. 2018 saw many notable and world-changing deaths and many not noted, not least the deaths of those lost at sea, or killed while reporting (every death is the end of the world, as Derrida once said) - mention here is due, at least, to those figures who touched my life in some small way (usually only with their works or words): Morgan Tsvangirai, Aretha Franklin and Stan Lee, William Goldman, Pete Shelley and Philip Roth, Margot Kidder and R Lee Ermey, Sir Roger Bannister and Stephen Hawking, Jenny Joseph and Reg E Cathey, Emma Chambers and Billy Graham, Johann Johannsson (whose Sicario score is an ominous masterwork)...

TOXIC MALE GAZES REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT Orson Welles was a magician - not a necromancer - but the joke about resurrecting the dead is in every frame of the Netflix released THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, his best movie, yet. Welles, foremost an artist and a charlatan (he was obsessed with tricks, fakery and illusion throughout his visionary work for stage, radio, and the screen), would have known that nothing is as haunting as the posthumous work. Only the truly great get to come back from the grave. Of course, Welles famously crafted his late-period film-as-process oeuvre and praxis from his inability to get financial backing, and the way his final forays were often left unfinished; after a while, his unmade movies took on more weight and anticipated value than the ones he had completed. Yet even here, the story is faked. Welles always (except in KANE, usually considered his masterpiece) left his work unfinished, more or less - often intentionally, or accidentally. His signature st...

Eyewear likes to celebrate its seasonal book launches at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury, London - one of the legendary and best bookshops in the UK. If you wish to attend our October 24th event, at 7pm - 9pm  please rsvp to: info at eyewearpublishing dot com - admission is free, all welcome, and we offer free wine or water. This book signing/ drinks reception, with brief readings, will feature the following authors: Gary Lachman (Occult expert, writer and Rock n Roll Hall of famer) and Colin Stanley (Wilson expert, novelist and poet) - who wrote the introductory essay for, and annotated the edition of, respectively, the acclaimed Colin Wilson reprint, Eagles & Earwigs Brian Jabas Smith - writer, singer-songwriter, journalist, in from Arizona Rebecca Close - over from Barcelona to accept her £1,500 Melita Hume prize selected by Vahni Capildeo Ken Evans - in from Manchester to launch his riveting debut Alex Wylie - our very own editor read...

THEY LISTEN TO MUSIC Eyewear likes to make lists of pop songs that can be found on Spotify, and share the news with you, our dear readers, every so often. Here is our brief summary of the 12 best songs of the year so far, as we move into the start of summer. I was sad to leave off Drake, Goat Girl, La Luz, Simple Minds, Ezra Furman, St Vincent, Iggy Pop, US Girls, Beach House, etc - all top candidates with great new songs - but this was the winnowed, ultimate list. And as always, this is a personal selection, but I think you will find a fair balance of American and UK tracks, with gender balance maintained, and most contemporary genres included. There is a clear frontrunner, and it is the most significant video/single so far of the year - 1. Childish Gambino - 'This Is America' Impossible to forget the images of the dancing, prancing, weirdly killing figure in the video, which seems to represent the mercurial intemperate low-attention span of American culture - his ...

COULD THIS BE POET X? Poet X is an Instagram poet, and they have over 5.4 million followers. However, flying in the face of the recent "snowfake" world of self-display, Poet X never shows their own face. We do not know their gender, race, age, nationality, or marital status, indeed, all we do know about them, for sure, is that they write brief poems in English, and that they post them to Instagram - the font is usually ornate, and the backgrounds are either blood-red, or goth-black, or full-moon white. Poet X recently published their first book with Rand House in the US, and they were on all the usual best-seller lists from the get-go; indeed, lines of eager humans snaked around corners before dawn, when the bookshops opened early, so huge was the incredible if bleary-eyed poetic demand. Poetry is back, big time! People are speaking of Beatlemania, or Pottermania, or Quadrophenia, to explain the phenomenon. We asked Poet X some questions for our special April 1 featur...