Eyewear is pleased to publish a new poem by a former student on the MA in CW at Kingston University, Hudson Hornick. Hornick is an American writer - a talented young man. This was sent to me by him lately, and seemed like a good start to the day.
Dogs pulling leashes
When the light reaches that point of day,
when it casts gold windows on your wall,
and the lushness of a place that is green in a way
that can only be green in a place which rains a lot,
but is no longer raining,
there is a runner who, beside me
now past, has been coming to the park for a while
also to run.
His face cannot understand why
it is so hard for him,
or where the effort turns rote,
while a purple-stocked vine and its green green leaf
grow out and reach.
Eyewear is very glad to welcome British poet Martyn Crucefix(pictured) to its pages this crisp March Friday in London, the Ides of March. Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published four collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as “unlikely to be bettered for very many years” (Magma). His new collection, Hurt, has just been published by Enitharmon.
Eyewear welcomes a poem from James Byrne this morning, as America refuses to rule out a military option in Libya, and rebel forces are beaten back. Byrne is one of the best of the younger generation of British poets, and is also an editor of anthologies, literary studies, and the vital Wolf magazine; he divides his time between New York and London. His latest collection was Blood/Sugar (reviewed here recently) from Arc.
Eyewear is very glad to welcome poet Yerra Sugarman (pictured) to its pages this cold sunny Friday in London. Sugarman is the author of two poetry collections, both published by The Sheep Meadow Press: Forms of Gone (2002) and The Bag of Broken Glass (2008).
She is the recipient of many distinctions, such as a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, two prizes from the Poetry Society of America, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Creative Writers, a Chicago Literary Award for Poetry, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award.Her poems, translations, and critical articles have appeared in such publications as The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, Literary Imagination, ACM Another Chicago Magazine, Pleiades, Lyric, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, How2, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, as well as in the French journals Siècle 21 and Europe.She lives in New York City, and currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University.
How Dare I Say, Then
I hull you from the hide of night.
You soak up starlight,
shiny cellos—
two sisters dimming the moon
with oaken hips.
Please, come
sip black tea with me.
Come to
branches of speech.
Between the dill and the parsley,
let your soles ring
like recess bells.
Lift your skirts up.
Step across the dark
mutilated sky.
Stay clear
of the ash
on the eaves on your way here,
roses pinned to your collars.
And though I have no proof
that there is compassion for you—
what’s living breathes in
this atmosphere of slaughter and grief—
the past’s not far,
lit like lemons.
I discovered it among the astonished
fishes of your names,
my hands clasping the damaged
parcel of this world.
How dare I say, then—
your agony snapping in the wind—
my bones are my prison bars,
or, like a breeze off the sea—leaf-shaped—
I’ve coveted dying.
Know I don’t like rain.
I’m afraid to grieve.
Sadness has made me
gentle.
poem by Yerra Sugarman; reprinted with permission of the author
Eyewear is very glad to welcome the Hong Kong poet Mary-Jane Newton (pictured) to its pages this gray London Friday. Newton was born in Goa in 1983, and spent the first years of her life in India. She subsequently grew up in Germany and England. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies in Asia. Of Symbols Misused (Proverse Hong Kong), her first collection of poetry, is forthcoming shortly. She is an editor at Oxford University Press.
Poem No 165
Wants to remain unknown, unwritten. Wants to cry hoarsely that this
is not the death it has deserved.
Would rather inject its host with poison
and turn pale and waxen, than assume shape, become ‘meaningful’, be forced
into a pattern strange and peregrine.
Would rather age and rot an unborn
virgin, be forgotten like an age-old monument.
Would rather drown in other
stories, tales and poems, or be hanged with rattling emotion.
Would rather
seek a private battle with its host, than be told, captured with words. Being
captured with words means to search for the cross on the map, and searching for
the cross on the map means to take the first step on a course inevitable. Broken,
blackened stumps of feet would scratch the paper, and a thrumming sound
would pump from every cranny, every letter. Marauding feet would rush.
The journey would unfold in a thousand winding courses. In every turn and
every syllable, change would brood like the dark twin of death.
Would rather
crumble into fragments, black and ominous and blurred by memory, rather shift
into a dream of greed and violence, or grow into a different being altogether.
Wants to pivot, tighten, growl in suicidal rage: ‘Go on then, stunt, distort and warp
Eyewear is glad to feature a poem from Sue Guiney's new collection of poems, Her Life Collected. It will be reviewed here in the near future.
Born and raised in New York, Guiney has lived in London for twenty years where she writes and teaches fiction, poetry and plays. Her work has appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her first novel, Tangled Roots, was published in May ‘08. Her second, A Clash of Innocents, was chosen to be the first publication of the new imprint Ward Wood Publishing and was published in September, 2010.
Guiney is Artistic Director of the theatre arts charity which she founded in 2005 called CurvingRoad.
Vanishing Point
Like an old Hitchcock movie,
like an exercise in art history,
the line of long floorboards draws her eye.
At the end of the dining room, a window
is filled with trees. The restaurant is empty
and she is alone –
old enough not to be afraid,
old enough to know what to fear.
She’s already on dessert, a bottle of wine half drunk,
when two couples arrive. The women are pregnant;
they order sparkling water.
Their husbands are confident. They drink whiskey.
Looking at them makes her sad.
Their laughter is magnetic.
There was a time when she knew so much,
before the trickle of years drained out confidence
Eyewear is very glad to welcome American poet Brian Turner (pictured) to its pages this Friday - aptly enough, perhaps, as revolution continues to stir in the Middle East, the source of much of his most powerful material. Turner is the author of two collections of poetry: Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) and Phantom Noise (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). For the second of these, he was shortlisted for Britain's most prestigious poetry prize, The T.S. Eliot Prize.
Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000).
His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals. He's been awarded a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He teaches at Sierra NevadaCollege.
Turner, compared by some to Keith Douglas, is the most significant and effective soldier-poet of the first decade of the 21st century writing in English, and therefore his work takes on an almost talismanic power, which the quality of the writing supports. Given that the biggest story of the last ten years is 9/11-Iraq-Afghanistan-Egypt, and American responses to those iconic nouns, Turner should be read by anyone interested in the world as it is, and the world of poetic imagination, and reckoning. His poem, "The Hurt Locker" was later the title to an Oscar-winning film.
Professor Suman Guptawrites in his important new study of Iraq invasion literature, Imagining Iraq, on Turner's Here, Bullet (published in America in 2005). He says the poems articulate "an exquisite sensitivity to being a foreigner" in Iraq post-war. Gupta notes how the book explores the metaphoric and linguistic implications of translation and its failure, and the violence which results. He observes how Turner seemingly withholds judgement, the better to impact the reader. It is, Gupta argues, a "poetry of alienation arising from the occupation experience". Turner will be reading for the Oxfam Poetry Series, London, in July 2011. Can't wait.
The Mutanabbi Street Bombing
March 5, 2007
In the moment after the explosion, an old man
staggers in the cloud of dust and debris, hands
pressed hard against bleeding ears
as if to block out the noise of the world
at 11:40 a.m., the broken sounds of the wounded
rising around him, chawled and roughened by pain.
Buildings catch fire. Cafes.
Stationery shops. The Renaissance Bookstore.
A huge column of smoke, a black anvil head
pluming upward, fueled by the Kitah al-Aghani,
al-Isfahani’s Book of Songs, the elegies of Khansa,
the exile poetry of Youssef and al-Azzawi,
religious tracts, manifestos, translations
of Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Neruda—
these book leaves curl in the fire’s
blue-tipped heat, and the long centuries
handed down from one person to another, verse
by verse, rise over Baghdad.
*
As the weeks pass by, sunsets
deepen in color over the Pacific. Couples
lie in the spring fields of California,
drinking wine, making love in the lavender
dusk. There is a sweet, apple-roasted
smell of tobacco where they sleep.
They dream. Then wake to the dawn’s
early field of lupine—to discover themselves
dusted in ash, the poems of Sulma
and Sayyab in their hair, Sa’di on their eyebrows,
Hafiz and Rumi on their lips.
In memory of Mohammed Hayawi
----
VA Hospital Confessional
Each night is different. Each night the same.
Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t.
When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,
gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?
When I don’t, he douses himself
in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.
A dog barks in the night’s illuminated green landscape
and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.
Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.
My lover has learned to face away.
She closes her eyes when I fuck her. I imagine
she’s far away and we don’t use the word love.
When she sleeps, helicopters
come in low over the date palms.
Men are bound on their knees, shivering
in the animal stall, long before dawn.
I whisper into their ears, saying,
Howlwin? Howlwin? —Meaning, —Mortars?Mortars?
Howl wind, motherfucker? Howl wind?
The milk cow stares with its huge brown eyes.
The milk cow wants to know
how I can do this to another human being.
I check the haystack in the corner
for a weapons cache. I check the sewage sump.
I tell no one, but sometimes late at night
I uncover rifles and bullets within me.
Other nights I drive through Baghdad.
Firebaugh. Bakersfield. Kettleman City.
Some nights I’m up in the hatch, shooting
a controlled pair into someone’s radiator.
Some nights I hear a woman screaming.
Others I shoot the crashing car.
When the boy brings us a platter of fruit,
I mistake cantaloupe for a human skull.
Sometimes the gunman fires into the house.
Sometimes the gunman fires at me.
Every night it’s different.
Every night the same.
Some nights I pull the trigger.
Some nights I burn him alive.
poems by Brian Turner; reprinted with permission of the poet
Eyewear is pleased to welcome Chinese poet Winnie Chau (pictured) to these pages this Friday, on the cusp of her 27th birthday this Sunday (she was born in 1984). Chau comes from Hong Kong. She graduated with an MA degree in Creative Writing from Kingston University, where I was glad to be her tutor. She has been writing for different English arts and lifestyle magazines in Hong Kong. She is also a theatre and dance critic. I find her work rather brilliant and delightful, and look forward to her debut collection, when it comes.
The Finger-biting Girl
f
is the ph-
one-
me she flares a fervent fondness f-
or, a faint favouritism.
but finking, no thinking,
about thinking about her
filosophical, no philosophical,
fantasies are even more f-
rilling:
“once upon a time
there was a suicidal girl
whose most abominable habit
aside from committing suicides
was biting
her finger
whenever she wanted to die
a little death
just a little
she bit
the thought
of not being here
tomorrow maybe
the next second probably
tempted her
to put the knuckle
of her forefinger
between her teeth
but she didn’t
bleed
she sulked
at the loss (no,
the not-losing)
she hated
the f-word
fate
one day
she woke up
beside a man
she saw him
chewing
her finger
that moment
she stopped
biting”
she finks it’s f-
un entering
others’ stories
uninvited.
she can’t
help!
she bites her finger again.
poem reprinted from The Delinquent periodical (UK) with permission of the poet, Winnie Chau
Eyewear is pleased to feature Egyptian poet and aphorist, Yahia Lababidi's new poem today, at a time when Egypt in (still) undergoing so much upheaval and uncertainty. He was born 1973; his latest book, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing is a critically-acclaimed collection of literary and cultural essays. His first book, Signposts to Elsewhere, was selected for Books of the Year, 2008, by The Independent.
What Is To Give Light
What is to give light must endure
burning, a man once said
Another man became the matchstick
that set a nation aflame
But fire, and its appetite, cannot be
calculated, like freedom
Injustice and desperation make men
combustible, like dry wood
When words lose their meaning
and an entire people their voice -
so they can neither laugh nor scream-
death and life begin to taste the same
From Tunis, to Egypt, to Lebanon to Yemen
the light from a burning man proved catching
And those with nothing to lose, or offer, but bodies
fanned the embers of their hopes into a blazing dream.
Eyewear is very glad to welcome a namesake to these pages this blustery London Friday, the British performance poet Todd Von Joel, pictured. Von Joel's background is noteworthy: by nineteen he had been expelled from school, thrown out of home and spent time in prison. An angry young man, Von Joel was lost - heavily involved in the underground London graffiti scene, where drink, drugs and violence were a way of life. His reputation as a graffiti writer rivalled his rep as an MC of talent. Prominent on the London party circuit, he performed at numerous events and for a short time ran a south London-based pirate radio station.
Things have changed. In his late 20s now, Von Joel has graduated with a First Class BA Hons degree in Creative Writing & Drama from Kingston University; this is where I met him, as a lecturer - he was in a creative writing class of mine. Since graduating, he has been signed by Jam Agency and is now pursuing both his acting and writing career in a professional capacity. Von Joel fights competitively as a kick boxer, currently unbeaten. He is also a keen footballer who plays regularly for his Sunday team.
This young man seems destined for some kind of greatness. Both rough and elegant, streetwise and sensitive, smart and tough, kind and strong, his charisma and decency shone through in the classes I taught him in. Strikingly handsome, tall, and articulate, his performances were moving for their honesty, dazzling for their humour. I am not sure the world of poetry is ready to receive such gifts warmly, but it may be that Von Joel builds his own future roles by redefining where he, and poetry, needs to go. I see him as a star entertainer, an inspirational figure. If he stays true to his dreams of rejuvenation and ambitious clarity, he will make a difference in his 30s. He's one to watch. These three poems showcase the poet's hip-hop sensibility, confessional honesty, sense of humour, and energy.
Lager Lout About
About L.L
About has been writing 13 years.
About started bombing About in 97’
About S.W.11
About all city.
About is the lion at the drinks,
About is good looking,
About is hilarious,
About is definitely the loudest,
About is in with all the boys,
About flirts with the barmaid,
About buys the first round,
About nods his head to the beat,
About has a mate called Stella,
About will probably meet Charlie later,
About hates Sambucca but will still drink it,
About does not have a drink problem.
About dislikes people before he likes them,
About judges immediately, within 3 seconds,
About would probably hate you.
About smuggles his drink out,
About sometimes gets thrown out,
About says‘bruv’ allot,
About pisses allot,
About has a bottle up his sleeve,
About eats chips,
About argues with the cab driver.
About is up for another beer,
About is never sick.
About gets home and shouts at Spinny,
About smashes up his flat,
About snores on the sofa.
About can’t get it up.
About will be sorry in the morning.
We were expelled,
We were kicked out,
We went to Feltham,
We still wake up on the blue mattress.
We are very paranoid,
We are back on the Prozac,
We are ashamed.
About has a drink problem.
---
The Optimistic Pessimist
Escaping from the shhh I’m seeing,
Ab- normal human being,
Fire breathing Tyrannosaurus,
I am the Walrus.
Manipulate that fight tonight,
Find ways to excite,
The nasty streak in me,
Tee oh double dee...
Name means ‘sly like Fox’,
The Jack in your box,
Laughing at you from my corner,
The Stella spitter.
Rowdy like a charged bull seeing red,
Alive not dead - brown bread,
On souls I tread,
With a greedy vocabulary that is kept well fed.
Alcoholism enhances the transmission I use,
To educate a nation of youths,
From broken homes,
Watching happy slap clips on stolen mobile phones.
It’s time for the bells to ring,
A septic bee sting,
Running through your system,
Like adrenalin after heroin.
Sparkling like Christmas,
I’m a vicious virus,
Displaying subtle beauty like a trodden on flower in the gutter,
I never stutter or eat butter.
So don’t perpetrate,
Your bait,
You don’t know my mental state,
Turn around and shut the gate – you’re far too late.
The society we live in has invisible levels,
Like beats, bass and trebles,
As social workers medal in family business,
I don’t need this, find a quick fix.
Now my brains in bits,
The product of abortionists,
With twisted coat hangers,
D. I.Y family planners.
Fat women, thin women, ugly women, pretty women,
One in three women be transmitting,
Down to the clinic, examining, uncomfortable, embarrassing
Another lesson, I’m living learning.
But teenage pregnancies explode like embassies,
Can you smell the faeces?
Over obesities,
’Big Mac please.’
I’m consistently fit,
Hyper and energetic,
Like the lyrics of my tongue I flick,
Juicing clits with candles lit.
Stages of my life merge like seasons without reasons,
But I don’t know who I am yet,
Do you?
The Escitalopram in my system,
Sedates the depression,
Still it’s my disposition,
To complete my life’s mission,
An optimistic vision, Full of pessimism.
---
Company
When I got ripped out, forceps, C sec; on my own.
When him then Mickey left, I was left; on my own.
When I found love, lost love, first time; on my own.
When I’d tried everything by fourteen; on my own.
When I went from a boy to About to a man; on my own.
When I got expelled, kicked out, moved in; on my own.
When I lost the plot that time, permanent marker smile; on my own.
When you all ducked out, I was still swinging; on my own.
When I went down, rode bird, came back galvanised; on my own.
When I found that thing in Bimbo’s thing, I was all broken; on my own.
When I wanted more, bigger better things; on my own.
When I done the Access, big step back then forwards; on my own.
When her scheme flopped, not sectioned, fuck you; on my own.
When I started Kingston, class full of people; on my own.
When I cleaned the blood off, moved out quickly, lucky boy: on my own.
When I wake up, turn kiss Spinny; on my own.
When I went Gran’s funeral, own pew, own thoughts; on my own.
When I pray, say sorry, think back what I’ve done - belly ache; on my own.
When I’m winning in the ring, 3 out of 3, knocked him out first round; on my own.
When the black dog bites, 3 month cycle, ready for you; on my own.
When I stop drinking, I’ll stop drinking; on my own.
When I pass, done well, graduation; on my own.
When I make it, if I ever make it, really wanna make it; on my own.
When he dies, big drink, no remorse, steady lip; on my own.
When I see the bright light, dark tunnel, march on, not scared; on my own.
Three poems by Todd von Joel; reprinted online with permission of the author, with whom copyright remains.
