Two More Followers

Eyewear wants two more followers before end of January, please - to round up to 275.  Could that mean you?

A New Decade?

As an Eyewear reader has noted, 2010 may be year 2 of the new decade, not year one, depending on whether you consider 09 was the end of the 00s, or '10 was.  Since I consider counting from 1 to ten as a decade I thought 11 was the first year, but it does seem true to consider 1920 part of the Twenties, 1930 part of the 30s, etc... your thoughts?  I suppose the tens started with 2010...

Happy New Year!

Eyewear has made it through another year.  Phew.  So far surviving epidemics, coalitions, sequels, anthologies, social networks, and all manner of stuff, there is much more to be done.  But not yet, not now - today and tomorrow call for sober and less-than-sober reflection, celebration and consolidation - for the time that has been, and the times still to come.  May you all find some good and joy in 2011, and have a great New Year's Eve.

268

Eyewear is now followed by 268 people - a good number of subscribers for any "little magazine" - and hopes to be followed by 270 by the end of December.  Let's keep growing.

2001 Posts: An Eyewear Odyssey

It seems fitting that Eyewear's 2001st post should occur, randomly as it turns out, on the UK's National Poetry Day.

The Winners of the 2010 Eyewear Prize for Poetry

This year's winner of the inaugural Eyewear Prize for Poetry is Greg Santos, for his poem 'Eyewear' (see below).  Second place goes to Alan Baban, for 'I'm In Theatre Five' and third place goes to Angela Readman for 'The Unidentified'.  Poets were asked to submit original work that used the image of vision, eyewear and/or the number five in a poem.  I would like to thank all those who submitted poems, and congratulate the winners.

Eyewear

Eye wake up in a construct.

Ben Mirov, “Eye, Ghost”

Eye have trouble with my vision.

Eye wear contact lenses and eyeglasses.

Eye still can’t see what you see.

Eye have trouble sleeping.

Eye wake up in a sweat.        

Eye eat too many starchy snacks at night.

Eye go from bed to couch.

Then from couch to bed.

This can happen five times a night.

Eye turn on the TV and it laughs at me.

Eye linger on The Discovery Channel for too long.

Eye discover nothing and feel empty inside.

Eye can’t forget to put the recycling out.

Eye crave grilled cheese sandwiches at inopportune times

Like in the shower or when making love.

Eye turn on the fan when it is too hot.

The oscillating sounds like it’s coming from inside my skull.

Eye find this comforting.

Eye can’t forget to take the laundry out of the dryer.

Eye don’t play sports anymore.

Eye need to watch my waist.

Eye am doing my best to make sense.

Eye get the feeling my TV is watching me.

Eye think my guitar misses me

But I am too shy to return its calls.

Eye don’t paint anymore.

Eye think about poetry too much.

There’s a fog in my brain only poetry can clear.

Eye can’t forget to wring my brain and hang it out to dry.

Greg Santos was born and raised in Montreal. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including McSweeney's, The Best American Poetry Blog, Matrix, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Green Bike Anthology (2010), Rogue Stimulus (Mansfield Press, 2010), and Dingers: Contemporary Baseball Writing (DC Books, 2007). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in Manhattan. He currently resides in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife. His first full-length book of poetry is due out in fall 2010 with DC Books. He is the poetry editor of pax americana (http://paxjournal.com) and he blogs at Moondoggy’s Pad (http://moondoggy.blogspot.com).

---

I'm In Theatre Five

Couple plastics gentlemen are pumping a lady’s bosom

Full of new silicon—and to bursting—not a game face

In sight.

Don’t think no one’s noticed by viscera speaking out.

The anaesthetist dials down the white noise for a little

Pop and rock—a little between the stations—between

Streams of flesh and strings of metal vibrating comes

The tiny static—Lopsidedness? Frightening distortion?

The patient sleeps through it all areola-starred.

These aren’t technical terms, by the way.

We aren’t riffling for snaps in briefcases in crocodile

Skin. I could hear that perfectly crystal.

Skin.

poem by Alan Baban, second place winner

---

 The Unidentified

All night I heard howling, the sound of a life

being secreted away. Some beast opened its eye,

sat outside, grinding slips of dawn between its teeth.

Morning came bright as a coin on an eye at my wake;

sun on my glasses a mere flipside to the moon.

I feel night at the thread bare curtain of noon,

a gloved hand tug at the edges of light ,

to test the wear worn seams of the day.

‘Did you hear it?’ I say. My breath hangs pale.

Your blown kiss feigns fever on a dead mans’face.

Breeze is a ghost on your hem as you walk away.

I set off to hunt with a rabbit mocked hound,

sniffing to relieve himself on every tree on my land.

A scarecrow capers as the wind plays my coat;

the wise-cracking crows do not move.

I lay down my shotgun, like a believer his cane,

listen to the secretive grass, keep to ground;

every cloud unravels the entrails of sheep.

There are no official cats here, but farmers

lope home towards windows watchful as skulls

of something shot in a hen house years back.

I follow vague tracks that lead me where I began,

back to the dried petals of mouth prints on the mirror

where you practise French letters with a feral top lip.

You cradle a phone, laugh, then glance my way.

poem by Angela Readman, third place winner

245

Eyewear has now reached the numerically pleasing number of 245 regular "followers" of the blog.  Many more read it each week.  Most poems or articles posted are read by 100s of people daily.  While the traffic is not LA Freeway busy, it is engaged, global, intelligent and active, and I am happy to say that after five years, Eyewear is increasingly a great place for me to post reviews and featured poems.  It'd be swell to have 250 by the end of October.

Eyewear Poetry Prize Shortlist

Thanks again for sending in your poems for the Eyewear Poetry Prize, 2010 - to celebrate the blog's 5th birthday.  Poems were encouraged to include references to the number five or glasses.  I'll be announcing the winners - first, second and third places - in early October and publishing their poems online.  The five shortlisted poets are: Bethan Tichborne, Greg Santos, Angela Readman, Kate Noakes and Alan Baban.

Eyewear Wide Closed

Play fair, and wear sunscreen!  And read poetry books kids!

Eyewear needs a summer break.  Call it gone fishin'.  Or less confusion.  Unless North Korea actually drops its nukes, or Don Paterson declares that Chuck Bernstein is his favourite poet, I will be unlikely to post much here for a while.  Don't panic.  There are enough featured poets, reviews, and other stuff here to browse - Eyewear has a long tail wagging back five years.  And, oh, yeah, Inception is growing on me.  And, is Pulled Apart By Horses a sort of dumb Pixies rip-off, or something altogether better and more complex?  My last weighing in for a while on controversies of the day: editors and the Queen shouldn't go back on their invites and their acceptances - but nobles oblige.  Where was Walcott on the Forward list?  White Egrets is a great book.  Maybe it will fare better at the Eliots.  Have a good summer time!

212!

Eyewear now has 212 followers.  This is great news.  Keep the community of eyewearers growing worldwide!

Eyewear's Top Five Poets Coming Soon

Eyewear has covered any number of poetry stories over the past five years.  In no order, here are the Sixty poets, in longlist, young and old, who, for literary, and extra-literary, reasons, have made the largest impact on the world of English-language poetry these past five years, or promise to do so in the next five, for better and verse, as this blog has seen it; and yes, there are many other fine and invaluable poets not listed - many have been featured here at Eyewear - this is not a definitive, canonical list of "The Best" - but merely of those that have - for whatever reason - seemed to set my part of the blogosphere buzzing the most:

1. Tom Chivers
2. Peter Hughes
3. Michelle Leggot
4. John Steffler
5. CK Stead
6. Clare Pollard
7. Geoffrey Hill
8. Anne Carson
9. Fiona Sampson
10. Ruth Padel
11. Charles Bernstein
12. Paul Muldoon
13. Seamus Heaney
14. Derek Walcott
15. Giles Goodland
16. Peter Porter
17. Don Paterson
18. Carol Ann Duffy
19. David Lehman
20. Roddy Lumsden
21. James Byrne
22. Nathan Hamilton
23. Emily Berry
24. Kevin Higgins
25. Leonard Cohen
26. WS Merwin
27. Ted Kooser
28. Rae Armantrout
29. PK Page
30. John Glenday
31. Jen Hadfield
32. CD Wright
33. AF Moritz
34. Kay Ryan
35. Frederick Seidel
36. Paul Farley
37. Chris Emery
38. John Ashbery
39. Kamau Braithwaite
40. Evan P. Jones
41. Simon Armitage
42. Andrew Motion
43. David McGimpsey
44. Robert Bringhurst
45. Sina Queyras
46. Lisa Robertson
47. Carmine Starnino
48. Christian Bok
49. Edwin Morgan
50. Gwyneth Lewis
51. Christopher Reid
52. Philip Gross
53. Kathryn Maris
54. Jo Shapcott
55. Siobhan Campbell
56. Luke Kennard
57. Jack Underwood
58. John Tranter
59. Jason Camlot
60. Sinead Morrissey

Eyewear will announce the top five end of week.

The Eyewear Prize

In keeping with the theme of 5 - 5 years of Eyewear's four-eyed stance - I would like to announce THE EYEWEAR PRIZE. There will be five prizes - a winner and four runners-up, for best poem. Each poet may submit five poems. POETS MAY BE ANY AGE OR FROM ANY NATION. Poems must be no longer than 50 lines. Poems must not have previously been published or appeared online, in magazines, or in any book or pamphlet. Poems should be in the English language and submitted electronically as word documents. Poems should refer, if possible, to eyewear, and the number five, though this is merely a whimsical restraint that excellent poems on any theme need not fear. Submission is free. I will be the judge, and will wear glasses at all times during the rigorous adjudication process. Email poems to me at toddswift at clara dot co dot uk. The prize will be the sheer thrill and honour of being the winner of THE EYEWEAR PRIZE. All 5 winners will be featured at the site, and grant first internet rights for publication of their winning work online. Deadline for submission: August 5th, 2010. The winners will be announced October 5th, 2010. Each poet may only win once, even if seeing double. Eyewear reserves the right to declare no winners if entries of insufficient quality are entered. Entrance into this literary competition in no way establishes a legal or commercial or comical or indeed chemical bond between Eyewear, its editors, or the writers involved. Viva eyewear!

1750

This is Eyewear's 1,750th post.  Next stop 2,000?  1750 saw The Rambler founded, and Fanny Hill published.

189!

Eyewear has 189 followers. This is getting good. Can we try to get 190 before the end of June please?

Being Numerous

Five years is a long time to be running a blog these days.  Blogs are, let's face it, yesterday's news - long ago replaced by briefer and more rapid forms of intercommunication - tweets and texts.  Blogs are clunky, with long tails - and arduous to update and stock full of worthwhile material.  If an army travels on its stomach, so too does a blog - feed it or it fails.  Why did Eyewear keep slogging away?  Well, it didn't mean to - but grew like Topsy.  When I started Eyewear I was a different person.  It was 2005.  I was not yet 40 (39), my father was still alive, as was my grandfather, uncle Jack, and mentor Robert Allen.  London hadn't been attacked on the underground, nor even been awarded the 2012 Olympics.  I had an MA but was just starting my doctoral research (still being completed).  My best poetry books, Winter Tennis, Seaway, and Mainstream Love Hotel, were unpublished.  I hadn't yet gone to Japan.  Or Oman.  My nephew Alex was unborn.  I had just moved flats.  And many disappointments and losses lay ahead, as well as a few moments of joy and contentment.  I have tried to fuse very disparate elements in this blog - personal statements on death, fear, hope and frustration (but not too many), with political observations, and often silly or just frivolous appreciations of light entertainment (TV, pop music, movies), alongside more rigorous readings or comments on significant literary works; and I have also opened the blog to other voices - many featured guest poets, and reviewers.  This has led to consternation in some circles: is Eyewear a magazine, a diary, or what?  Does it speak with one voice, or do the police in another?  Both, and more, and less.  Blogs are a new form.  The best of them are archived, as this is, by The British Library.  I believe they will eventually wither away in popularity and ubiquity, to be replaced by very different ways of sharing ideas and thoughts everywhere immediately.  Their power though is remarkable.  Instanter, as Olson argued us to be, has become everyday. Will this blog slog on much longer?  Maybe a little while longer, but not, I think, another 5 years.  Maybe until 2012 - that'd be a nice place to end, just after the Olympic ceremonies.  2015 is what the new flashforward saw.  It's the coalition's proposed election date.  I may have moved on by then - but someone, somewhere, will always be wearing glasses.  Looking differently.

I Saw The Figure Five

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of Eyewear.  That's a lot of blogging.  A lot of looking.  Some crying.  And some glee.  Over the birthday month of June, Eyewear will be high-fiving, with a few lists that come in 5s.  Thanks for the support over the years, Eyewearers.  You've made this humble blog one of the most widely read British blogs written by a poet.

185

I am glad to now have 185 "followers".  It would be good to have 190 by June 1, when Eyewear turns 5!

175!

Eyewear is thrilled to note that we now have "175 followers".  It'd be swell to get up to 180 by May.  I am aiming to have 200 for our 5th anniversary in June.  Wishful thinking?

Good Friday

I was born on Good Friday, 44 years ago - and just barely survived, being exceptionally tiny, three months premature, the smallest baby on the ward, and one of the youngest at my size to ever survive in Canada - a "miracle baby" as they were called then - perhaps still are.  It was a fraught time for my parents, and of course, for me - and I am grateful to have struggled through.  Today, at a celebration of the Lord's Passion, I could not help but reflect on my good fortune, to have lived, at all.

Eyewear will be back on April 12. In the meantime, fellow eyewearers, enjoy the various religious holidays with your families, the returning light, and the sense of renewal in the land. May you achieve physical and spiritual health. Or, if that is too much, enjoy some chocolate bunnies. Nothing like a good egg hunt.

What's to look forward to in April at this blog?

A few superb new poet features; reviews by Christopher Horton, Ian Brinton, Abigail Curtis, and others.  And the usual entertainment, current affairs and poetry commentary that readers world-wide have come to know and love. In the meantime, do check out Eyewear's healthy back catalogue of posts.

For those so inclined, please do pursue the comic genius of John Hegley, whose line always comes to mind at this time - "If that's a Good Friday, wouldn't want a bad one".

And, yes, RIP, John Forsythe.  Blake Carrington was a big part of growing up in North America in the 80s.  Peace be with you.

Featured Poet: Teddy Sloe

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Teddy ("Ted") Sloe (pictured) the antipodean poet, this special day before the Good Friday pause. Sloe is one of the leading poet-editors of his generation, a New Zealander by birth, who has lived in various exotic and far-flung places, like French Polynesia, Panama, Wisconsin, and parts of Russia, but now is semi-firmly based in Paris, where he lives with his fiancee, the successful stockbroker Myrna Malone. As such, Sloe considers himself a "Franco-Kiwi". Though he often chunnels over to the vibrant London scene.

Sloe has published six collections, starting with his celebration of all things 80s - Ultravox (1999) from Gold Key Publishing, in Manitoba. This was followed by three more Gold Key books, in rapid succession - European Eatery (2002); Sesame Street Revisited (2004) and perhaps his masterpiece, Summer Snowballs (2007), which explores the harrowing death by tuberculosis of his step-mother, Tamara Sloe, the New Zealand cabaret singer, and the joys of the great outdoors. These were swiftly followed by 2008's Collected Poems, sub-titled Underdown, and 2009's Post-Collected, and UK debut, Avant Sex Hospital, from Short-torch.

Sloe has also been an active anthologist. He has been arguing for a long time that all things spoken aloud and/or digital are important and shape the spirit of poems. His most important anthologies are either eco or politico in scope, range and cleavage: Global Poetry Inc. (1999); 212 Poets Against Global Warming (2003); Hemisphere Ahoy! (2007) and his tirade against the bankers, Kapital Punishments (2009). He is currently co-editing New Modern and Anti-Modern Poets of New Zealand, with his brother, Gary Sloe, and their friend, the experimental poet-butcher Hans von Truck, transplanted to Paris from Vienna.

Sloe is a controversialist, and on various online magazines, networking sites, e-forums, and even by telephone, manages to stir trouble and air his dirty laundry as his psycho-social needs require. He also organises various "Word Smash-Ups" where poets, punks and restless others compete for top honours, in seedy hostels and dilapidated warehouses in low-rent districts. He also runs a reading series for Very Old Poets, in a junk shop in Paris Nord, all money raised to go (eventually) to Doctors Without Beards.

His CDs and DVDs for this cause include 92 Very Old Poets for the Helpless, and Line Up: The Best of the Rest. Relentlessly driven, exuberantly gifted, protean, over-sized, and Orson Wellesesque in ambition, scope and range, Sloe, though he has won no prize or peer-recognition of note, manages to keep himself in the game by Vachel Lindsay-like self-promotion and Barnum and Baileyian activities. Eyewear is glad to welcome this international stylist par excellence maintenant, this fish of April flung gasping on the shore.

This Be The Reverse

Slam the brakes and gyrate the hips.
Lips are for licking, screw
Your plaster to the sticking
And point out where your little

Sister is sitting. They shoot hoarse
Dancers don't they?, you go first -
Quench that long thigh-thirst
And debate the lung's inner burst

That Kraftt-Ebbing diagnosed.
We want underthings unearthed, slips.
Get garters. I announce my fling
With vocables here, on this bed, Hearst

Or Kane, able to punish any stable.
Bend over and expose your swell gams,
Ma'am. The Kiwi shrieks in the foliage,
Fecund exploitation mars this page.

I regret the excavation of the tar
In Alberta, but think Regina king.
Suck and mope on my swagger, Tam.
Mother, brother, father - all spawn dying

Like the low sea-birds mapped in oils.
Kiss my placard and march, baby.
Let us go now and ruin a new world
Sweet with sheep and love and rabies.
I first saw a top shelf coastal girl like a girl.

poem by Ted Sloe