E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

London may think of itself as the world's most important, powerful city - though New York, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and several cities in China or India might say otherwise - but is surely top three, in terms of significance. So its mayoral elections matter - and they are today.

Some of the choices offered are colourful and absurd - there is a candidate whose platform is all about how marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, and a Polish prince who wants to fight a duel with Nigel Farage - and there are worthy candidates for parties like the Greens who won't win but maybe should - and then again the two front-runners.

Eyewear, the blog reminds you to vote today, and responsibly.  You may have to hold your nose if you go with either of the main candidates - both their parties have lately seemed to play unwelcome race cards - but one of the candidates was born poor and stands for a very diverse platform - and the other is one of the richest men in the city and represents a party of the…

Oliver Dixon reviews
WhitehallJackals
by Chris McCabe and Jeremy Reed


As Mark Ford’s 2012 anthology London: A History in Verseamply demonstrates, poetry depicting or set in London is one of the richest veins in our tradition, from Langland and Chaucer through Keats and Blake to TS Eliot and – in more recent times – David Gascoyne,Rosemary Tonks and Iain Sinclair. As well as the celebratory pomp of Dunbar’s ‘To the City of London’ or Wordsworth’s ‘Composed on Westminster Bridge’, there have always been politically-oriented poems intent on unearthing the more scabrous aspects of metropolitan society and the radical disparities of economic circumstance it throws up – the medieval ‘London Lickpenny’, for example, Samuel Johnson’s Juvenalian satire ‘London’ , Blake’s Song of Experience of the same name or Douglas Oliver’s counter-Thatcherite ‘The Infant and the Pearl’. Whitehall Jackals by Chris McCabe and Jeremy Reed arrives with such an overwritten blurb – this “gritty riposte performs an an…

London has two settings: rubbish weather and Tropical.  Either it is rainy, gloomy and muddle-through intermittent sunny, or it is blazingly humid - which it is now.  We are in the throes of 28 degree weather+.  This is wonderful, but also, given the Sargasso that is the Tube, semi-deadly.  It's been a good time to watch The Rum Diary, a sultry, oddball film that is a strangely moving portrait of three SNAFU'd writer buddies in 1960 Puerto Rico, written by Hunter S., and produced by J. Depp.  It has a brilliant character actor turn from Michael Rispoli, who should play Bob Holman in a biopic.  The film also features a splendid Amber Heard, who is as fine a starlet as one could wish for, in London or the Bahamas.  Readers of Eyewear from Day One will know that when we kicked off in 2005, the subject was about weather, too.

Childs Hill
Six months later out of the womb for eight hours and you're gone. I'm sorry I was late at Gatwick but I couldn't hit eject ... (our Starman days, they're gone, correct?) and stop the jet's petrol-blasting taxi nor advance in the queue for a taxi with sincere words—"Please, my nephew is dead". They don't believe me; after all, they've just read in flight about who fucked who and whether Rooney's bicycle kick came off his shin or "he done laced it!" This isn't London any more but a mobile with a tether to every other sputtering machine. . . The casket was painfully light at Golders Green.
London, May 2012
poem by Umit Singh Dhuga, Classics scholar with a PhD from Columbia.  He is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of The Battersea Review.  Ben Mazer is co-editor.

London Grip is a new online magazine worth checking out.

Last night Sir Paul, the most famous popular musician in the world alongside Bob Dylan (arguably) was married in London to an American heiress, and celebrated at his home in St John's Wood, with Mark Ronson DJing.  Rather incredibly, when the party (which featured among others Twiggy) ran on past 1 am, neighbours called the noise inspectors, who came and (one presumes politely) asked one of The Fab Four to turn it down.  Given that he is a Beatle, and gave the world such joy for decades with his music, it seems utterly petty to complain.  The last song was 'Hey Jude', and the music stopped at 2 am.  So much for Swinging London.

I saw Jerusalem last night at the Apollo Theatre in London, just as it returns to London after its triumphant Broadway reincarnation, where lead Mark Rylance won the Tony for Best Actor, and where it was nominated for Best Play (War Horse won by a nose).  The sense of excitement in the audience was palpable - Keira Knightly was in the row ahead of me, cuddling up to a handsome young man - it was that sort of vibe.  I came to the play without any sense of how good it was meant to be.  I was in fact a bit put off by the subject - a drunken Romany squatter - and thought it might be an angry State of England Play.  Instead, the last ten minutes are the most purely dramatic and moving I have ever experienced in the theatre, and I have seen hundreds of plays since I was a kid, in New York, Toronto, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Butting up against an extremely raw, ugly and authentic sense of a broken Britain of promiscuous, foul-mouthed, drug-addled youth, and angry, violent thuggish adu…

I was in Leytonstone, in London's far East End, out past where the Olympics will be held next year, in 2012 (Eyewear readers may recall that one of my first ever posts, in 2005, was about the announcement that London had won the bid).  I was reading out there today with John Stiles, and with a band, Public Speech (worth checking out for their online hit, 'The Queen's Speech').  Anyway, the Leytonstone tube station features 17 mosaics honoring Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest British film director of all time, who was born there in 1899.  There are some lovely buildings in Leytonstone, but trying to locate the house where Hitch was born was sad, because 517 High Road is now a petrol station (it must have been an area bombed in the war).  Anyway, the mosaics are brilliant, and really should be on every visitor's radar.  Above is the one for 'North by North-West' with the famous crop-duster scene.

Sad news.  Jay Landesman, writer and publisher, has died.  He is survived by, among others, his wife the poet and songwriter Fran, and his son the writer and film reviewer Cosmo.

Tom Phillips reviews City State: New London Poetry Edited by Tom Chivers
City State’s editor Tom Chivers has been very careful with his choice of sub-title. It’s not, as he points out in his introduction, ‘The New London Poetry’, it’s the much more open-ended (and significantly less megalomaniacal) ‘New London Poetry’. As they say on certain advertisements: terms and conditions apply; other new London poetries may be available.
In short, Chivers actively discourages the idea that the twenty-seven contributors to his anthologyrepresent a movement, a group or anything other than a rattle bag of writers who just happen to live in London. His only ambition, he says, is to offer a ‘snap-shot’, something ‘characteristic rather than representative; impressionistic rather than photographic’. True, there’s a slight whiff of pragmatic, pre-emptive apology to those who didn’t make the cut about this, but after the wearying tub-thumping adopted by anthologists who seem hell-bent on booming revolutio…

The famous Blitz on Britain from German aerial bombardment began 70 years today.  Few events in the West's 20th century have remained as vivid, as imprinted on a culture's imagination.  A fortnight before, Allied planes had bombed Berlin, triggering the counter-attack (both sides went on increasingly to explore the idea of a "total war" from the skies, culminating in the fire-bombing of Dresden; then Japan) - one of my great-uncles flew on the RAF bombing raids over Germany; many of my relations died in Coventry, which some claim Churchill let be destroyed to conceal broken codes for strategic purposes.

Perhaps, in the popular imagination, the Blitz is most omnipresent in the following: the documentaries of Jennings, such as Fires Were Started; references in novels (such as when the Narnia children are sent to the countryside); and in the poems of WWII.  Most famous of these Blitz poems must be Dylan Thomas's 'A Refusal To Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child…

June 16th - in London - will require all the chutzpah of an Orson Welles shuttling across town in a rented ambulance - to allow poets and poetry fans to enjoy what will be on offer that night. I count at least three major don't-miss events the same evening: The Poetry London summer issue launch, featuring readings from Emily Berry and others; The Michael Marks small press pamphlet awards at the British Library; and the Eric Gregory winners reading. Put that red light on your vehicle now, and rock on!

The recent and truly horrific attack on young twins in their cot in London - apparently by a fox (subsequently caught and killed) - has raised an outcry, and a perhaps understandable desire to cull the more than 10,000 urban foxes who live in the city. Some animal experts claim foxes don't naturally hunt or attack humans, and this must have been an impossibly rare accident - perhaps caused by the young cub feeling trapped in the room. On the other hand, the parents describe a bold and fearless animal.
The upshot is the mayor of London has discussed perhaps ridding the city of these animals. To lose the urban fox would be a shame. Not only has it inspired several excellent poems, from Ken Smith, and Robert Minhinnick, to others, but the urban fox is in itself a wonderful creature that adds much to the environment.
Not vermin, then. One recalls the outcry against the Canadian Wolf, and Farley Mowat's book, Never Cry Wolf, in response, which "humanised" the beasts, a…

The Poetry Library recently digitalised and put online the summer 2006 issue of the excellent London poetry magazine, Magma.  If you want to see what was being written in Britain five years ago, by some of the best new and established poets, here's one way to start finding out...

Phil Poole and John Rety
by Leah Fritz

Phil Poole and John Rety, both people of significance to contemporary poetry, died within days of each other - on the 1st and 3rd of February, respectively.

John Rety was a founder of the Torriano Meeting House and managed the events there with his partner, Susan Johns, for 23 years. He and Susan also ran Hearing Eye press which published pamphlets and books by both well-known and ought-to-be-well-known poets. John was particularly proud of the anthologies, In the Company of Poets and Well Versed, which he edited, but he took great pride in all the publications of Hearing Eye, whether or not they sold. Among Hearing Eye's publications are pamphlets of John's own work in both poetry and prose, sadly unheralded as the original and substantial works they are.

Politically John was an anarcho-pacifist. His daughter, the artist Emily Johns, following in his footsteps, is co-editor of Peace News. His political beliefs were his own, though. By defini…

Sad news, first brought to my attention by Leah Fritz. Phil Poole and John Rety both recently died, two North London fixtures on the arts and poetry scene. Poole has written a collection of poems that will be published posthumously next week. Rety died very suddenly of a heart attack. He ran the Torriano Meeting House with his partner, Susan Johns, for 23 years, and also the publishing house, Hearing Eye.

Sad news. One of the greatest of contemporary fashion designers, Alexander McQueen, has been found dead at his home in London.

More good stuff from Tom Chivers. This year's London Word Festival features a rejigged Briggflatts, John Hegley, Luke Kennard, Tim Turnbull, and lots more. Worth checking out if in London or the UK - or for that matter near a train station in Europe.

This year's Jewish Book Week looks as good as ever, perhaps even better, with appearances from, among others, George Szirtes, Adam Lebor, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Goldstein and David Lehman.

My 6th full poetry collection - and debut British collection (after living here since 2003) - is being launched at the legendary Calder Bookshop, on The Cut, in London, at 7 pm, Tuesday, September 15th (three weeks from today). The publisher is that intrepid small press, now in its tenth year, tall-lighthouse, run by the great Les Robinson. The title is Mainstream Love Hotel. You are very welcome to attend the launch - admission and wine free.