Wilbur Force

Richard Wilbur turned 89 at the start of this week, March 1. He's one of the finest American poets, and it's good to know he is still at it. Happy birthday!

Poetry Is...

Sina Queyras - a significant Canadian poet, anthologist and blogger - is a guest over at the Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet. She recently asked a bunch of poets to complete the sentence Poetry is - with these results. My favourite is McGimpsey's.

Action Comics 1

The sale the other day of Action Comics #1 for a million dollars is both bound to raise a smile and a question. First, the nostalgia - my Dad once reputedly owned this comic, and sold it used for a nickel on St. Catherine Street, Montreal, when he was a little boy. Subsequently his mother threw out many other classic comics of the era, as he grew up. That's why these comics are so rare nowadays - spring cleaning and dog-eared over reading. That's the fun part. While I loved comics, and still do - and therefore am glad they are valued and collected - I wonder how many poetry books from 1938 are being bought and sold for a million in cold hard cash. Not many. I wonder, Eyewear fans - what book would you buy, if you could afford it, for such a mighty sum?

Byrne's, Baby, Byrne's

Eyewear is pleased to spread the news about the 2010 Over The Edge New Writer of The Year competition sponsored by Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop & Michael D. Higgins TD. In 2010 Over The Edge is continuing its exciting annual creative writing competition. The competition is open to both poets and fiction writers. The total prize money is €1,000. The best fiction entry will win €300. The best poetry entry will win €300. One of these will then be chosen as the overall winner and will receive an additional €400, giving the overall winner total prize money of €700 and the title Over The Edge New Writer of The Year 2010. The 2010 Over The Edge New Writer of The Year will be a Featured Reader at a reading to be scheduled in Galway City Library in Winter 2010/11. Salmon Poetry will read without prejudice a manuscript submitted to them by the winner in the poetry category.

Obituaries: Fritz On Poole and Rety

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 definition, a true anarchist makes up his or her own mind about everything. An atheist, John abided religiously by his own strong sense of right and wrong.

Born in 1930 in Hungary, John's childhood and adolescence were dominated by the murderous antisemitism of the Nazi holocaust. Separated from his Jewish parents at an early age, he learned to survive by his wits. Although he sometimes took issue with the government's policies, John passionately loved the United Kingdom, in which he found freedom, his adored small family, friendship and the world of poetry.

He also became a grandmaster in chess!

Last year, Phil Poole edited Torriano Nights, a festschrift for John Rety, which was published by Acumen and Phil's own Woodpecker Press. In it I wrote, 'John Rety and I have a lot in common: We both have roots in Eastern Europe, we are about the same age and we spent the sixties and seventies of the (sigh!) last century opposing the Vietnam War, albeit in different countries. So it's no wonder that I sometimes feel we are related by blood, and who knows - perhaps we are.' That's how close I have felt to him and Susan and Emily during the almost two decades I've known them.

Phil Poole and I, on the other hand, were on the periphery of each other's lives until recently.
Born in Birmingham in 1944, Phil moved to London in the 1960s and married Urja Burkhardt, a German artist, in 1988. They maintained residences in both Munich and London. A master woodcarver, Phil restored the woodwork surrounding the clocks designed by Pugin in the Houses of Parliament. He also produced some delightful, often amusing, sculptures, parts of which moved in surprising ways. One of these sculptures is on permanent display at the Torriano Meeting House, where Phil, as a poet, was an habituée. There he often read works-in-progress and occasionally performed as the invited poet.

Gradually Phil became more closely tied to the Torriano Meeting House. When Camden Council discontinued its grant in 2005, he wrote a spirited defence for the Camden New Journal. In his quiet, unassuming way, Phil organised a committee to save the Meeting House despite the council's intransigence, and the poets who frequented it came through in many ways to raise the rent money demanded.

A few months ago, Phil performed at the Meeting House and read some new poems inspired by the tests and treatments anent the cancer he had been diagnosed with. As one who had also gone through some of those the rites, I was especially intrigued by his humorous take on the awful processes.

The content of those poems caught my attention, but his skill as a poet held me. I sent him an e-mail to tell him how fine I thought his work was, and he promptly began e-mailing me more and more poems on various subjects: love, travel, history, politics and, of course, woodworking. I became convinced that a book should come out of this and suggested that he or Urja contact John Rety about publishing one through Hearing Eye. Phil was perhaps too self-effacing about them to do so, and Urja said she didn't know John very well - so I got in touch with him, and he and Susan agreed immediately. By that time we knew that Phil didn't have long to live, and so the race was on to get one out as quickly as possible.

Phil died the day after the decision was made, but Urja at least had time to tell him about it. I sent Susan the poems I had collected and she began editing the book. She and John asked me to write an introduction. John, Susan and I discussed my draft on the phone, and talked about how to organise the text of the book.

The next day John Rety died suddenly of a heart attack.

Emily Johns came to London to take her mother back with her to Hastings where she could mourn and convalesce from the terrible shock. Susan and John had been together constantly for most of their adult lives.

The typescript of Phil's poems had already been given to Martin Parker to print, and Susan asked me to put them in some sort of order. Somewhere within her Susan found the courage to go on with this project. She approved of everything before it went to press.

The book, Phil Poole's Poetry: A Collection, will be presented at his funeral on Friday, the 19th of February, at 3.30 pm, at Golder's Green Crematorium. From 5pm there will be a reception and poetry event at the Torriano Meeting House, 99 Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town.

Orbis

This in from Carole Baldock, poet and Orbis editor. Orbis is an important UK-based magazine with international scope, and an openness to various poets and poetries. It also reviews well, and widely, and has lively contests each issue. It's an essential little magazine. So, consider the message below:

"Suggestions and submissions welcome for our next issue, the big 150. Plus 40 years of Orbis - and my 30th issue as Editor. And consider the latest issue -

Orbis 149, Autumn/Winter 2009

Featured Poets
Winners of the Virginia Warbey Prize

1st Prize: Jamie Walsh (Preface)

2nd Prize: Shelley McAlister (Sacred Heart)

3rd Prize: Jane McKie (Vija Celmins’ Surfaces)

Poems from Carol Carpenter, Stuart Jay Silverman, Robert Stein, Louise Warren; Prose: Vanessa Gebbie and John Lowry; Translation Jonathan Greenhause: Prefiero by Marcos Barcellos; Obituaries: Mike Shields on James Kirkup and Pauline Rowe on Michael Murphy & Matt Simpson. Reviews Editor: Nessa O’Mahony. "

TP On MLH

Tom Phillips, over at his blog, has a review of Mainstream Love Hotel.

Phil Poole and John Rety Have Died

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.

All The Whiskey In Heaven

Good news. Charles Bernstein has a Selected Poems out in March, from Farrar Strauss Giroux, titled All The Whiskey In Heaven. One of the funniest and most inventive poets in the English language under one cover - what's not to like? Pre-ordering will never feel better. By the way, with a book from FSG, is the ultimate rebel and un-mainstream poet about to get a book deal with kissing cousin Faber and Faber?

Swift Sightings

What's a blog for, if not to sometimes toot one's own horn - and all the better when the links also lead to much other excellent writing. My poems appear at the recently online Blackbox Manifold 4, in good company, with work also there by (among others) Charles Bernstein, Sean O'Brien, John Tranter and Medbh McGuckian; several of the poets share an exploration of high rhetoric and poetic excess, which is good to see. And, a new poem is happily up at Hand + Star.

A Scattering collects prize

Good news. Christopher Reid's A Scattering, which recently won the Costa poetry prize, has now won the overall Costa, vanquishing prose and non-fiction, and joining the ranks of the Heaney and Hughes collections that also won the equivalent award. Reid is a major British poet, and is a deserving winner.

Guest Review: Smith On France

Barbara Smith reviews
Occupation
by Angela France

Occupation is one of those words with many applications. In the case of Angela France’s new collection, from Ragged Raven Poetry, it can stand for the different named occupations explored in poems through various voices: the bookbinder, the mortician, the florist and the office worker. But it can also stand for those whose life’s work is a calling, a pursuit: the violinist, the witch and the shapeshifter’s wife. The other meaning that is explored less overtly, is that of the occupied – the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed – in poems which explore the idea of the invisible woman, the older woman; the life’s repository of knowledge, and even beauty, that older people have and which our culture chooses to ignore. This strand is subtler, but nevertheless extant for the reader to divine, through the use of vibrant language and sonic devices that make poems ring across their meaning.

Indeed it is this rich use of language which keeps the poems grounded, even when the subject is making a fair leap, as in ‘Rejecting Gravity.’ This Crouching Tiger style poem reveals the imagistic possibilities of the positive in a new twist, whilst rejecting the labels cast upon women: “My first thoughtless soar ended / in daylight on a car park roof; left / me shaken, possibilities fizzing / under my skin.” Here the sonics point towards good prospects in self-discovery, but it is the “pot shots from hunters / clay pigeons shooters, boys with air guns,” that make the subject cautiously move to cover themselves. We are forced to ask if we have to hide both ourselves and our talents; especially when the last stanza reinforces this; the “ballast” of “other weighted women” points towards the idea of having to remain invisible in some way, in order not to be made feel Other; outside society’s perceived norm. The last lines “We know / what we could do” beg us to supply the rest of an imagined if: if only we were let.

Throughout the collection, France consistently sides with the disenfranchised and the lower registers of hearing, those we might not hear in the cacophony of life’s river. A quiet unspoken love is investigated in ‘The Light Beneath,’ where a relationship between a “dour” man and his wife is weighed through the acts of small kindnesses from him to her, rather than his verbal expression. These small acts are what make marriage more than bearable: “how he got up first for thirty years / to make the coffee, how he’s always folded / his warm legs around her feet on winter nights.” Separately, the curse of the writer – that almost unhinged state that writers sometimes occupy – is explored in ‘Victor Knows the Danger of Words.’ Anyone who writes and has felt their words take wing only to land like the first flight fledgling, would identify with this line: “he feels his heart jump / into a verb, waits for it to straight line.” Sometimes all a writer can do is to hope they channel the words correctly.

As Michael Longley has wryly remarked on writing poetry: “If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.” France’s poems in Occupation seem understated at first read, almost quiet, but the real strength of the collection lies in her ability to create imagined realities where the reader isn’t told what, where or how to read. The ambiguities of the English language and its deployment, whether in everyday speech or in the heightened locus of meaning in poetry mean that the reader must always pay close attention to the multiplicity of meaning layered in her poems. Paying attention to the wider meanings of occupation has reaped many poetic rewards for France, both literal, in the competition sense, but also in the wider sense of a heightened lingual tool-kit, which is personal and exciting.

In her own words from ‘Learning to Play the Violin by Holding a Bow’, one must “Move always from your centre to master / the owl’s dark swoop if you would release / the lark ascending.” This is an apt musical metaphor that speaks to the idea of poetry in all of us. Enjoy this collection as a series of pearls chosen specifically for their right place of belonging in the strand of ‘Occupation’.

Barbara Smith is a frequent contributor to Eyewear, and a poet, creative writing teacher, and leading Irish literary blogger.

PK Page has died

Sad news. Canada's greatest living English-language poet, PK Page, died last week, January 14th. She has yet to receive a proper obituary notice in the British press.

Gross Nets Prize

Eyewear salutes Philip Gross, for winning the latest TS Eliot Prize (worth £15,000) for poetry, for his collection The Water Table, from Bloodaxe - the publisher whose Jen Hadfield also won last year. The Eliots is becoming exciting, since dark horses and underdogs are seemingly now as likely to win as poets with names like Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. This instability of critical consensus is a good thing for UK poetry, and it is refreshing for a fine serious and dedicated poet like Gross to win.

You Are Here: Poetry As Theatre

Colette Bryce, Daljit Nagra and Jo Shapcott, write emotional, complex, funny and engaging poems. Publishers, readers and prize judges alike love them. You Are Here is a new poetry show which brings the poets together on stage for a beautifully designed performance which asks Who are you? Where are you and where are you going? Poems pose the questions and whisper the answers.

You Are Here is produced by Jaybird, the live literature production, promotion and management enterprise run by Julia Bird. (Julia also works part time for the Poetry School and recently published her own first collection of poetry).

She says ‘I have worked as a poetry promoter for years, but I also have a love of theatrical sparkle and spectacle. When I produce live literature shows like You Are Here (and Tilting the Mirror with Jean Sprackland and Greta Stoddart previously) I am trying to find a way to introduce the pleasures and provocations of contemporary poetry to a theatre or arts centre audience. This I do by adding the expectations that a theatre audience might have (a show with direction, a set, lighting and music that takes place in a theatre rather than a literature festival tent) to the most interesting and gorgeous poetry I can find. The You Are Here rehearsal period has just finished - we dodged the snow, luckily. The poets and the director have worked fantastically hard to create an hour long show which is full of music, meditation, humour and beauty ... all you could want from poetry, really!’

The show is on tour, the first night in Norwich is on 20th January; the last night in London is on 26th April. Performances also take place in Bath, Cambridge, Chipping Norton, Hull, Lancaster, Liverpool, Newcastle, Stockton and Torrington. Dates & details are at http://www.blogger.com/.
Follow the show's progress on Facebook and Twitter ...
Facebook group: You Are Here - a poetry show http://www.blogger.com/

Hand + Star

Tom Chivers - poet and unstoppable force for poetic good in the UK - has started up a new magazine - literary and for the digital age, called Hand + Star. It is already looking to be one of the places readers wanting to keep up with the increasingly exciting New Decade of British Poetry will turn.

Guest Review: Phillips on Robinson

Tom Phillips on Spirits of the Stair by Peter Robinson

Having published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, translated Italian poets Vittorio Sereni and Luciano Erba, amongst others, and written a quartet of critical works, Peter Robinson’s Spirits of the Stair brings together more than 700 of his aphorisms: short, often sharp observations, remarks, ruminations, musings, notebook jottings, insights, witticisms and jokes. This isn’t the first time he’s travelled into this territory. As well as two sets of prose-poems, the 2004 collection Untitled Deeds (Salt) included a sequence of 354 aphorisms – all of which are included here – and further samples have subsequently appeared in both The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists (2007).

For some of his readers, it seems, this apparently sudden diversion into sound bite-size prose has been something of a surprise. Robinson’s poetry, after all, has long been associated with mapping complex shifts in ‘emotional weather’ and exploring transitory margins through a subtly attuned and innovative lyricism. On the face of it, it’s not the kind of work which readily suggests the immediate punch of aphorism. And yet, even in his debut collection Overdrawn Account (1980), poems resolve on lines with an air of aphorism about them – “Home is the view I appropriate”; “It is not enough just to live” – and the consistently scrupulous attention to language detail and speech-act throughout his career is well-suited to the form. Besides which, as Robinson discusses in the Afterword to this current volume, these “less-is-more morsels” or at least the sudden surge in their formulation emerged from a particular set of circumstances. In the lead-up to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he says, “I had perhaps reached a point in life where the self-censorship of a painfully-learned intellectual prudence collapsed under the pressure of the contradictions in my own and the world’s evident predicaments.” Teaching abroad, an interest in the prose-poems of Pierre Reverdy and the Japanese forms of haiku and tanka, not to mention a vicarage childhood, are also acknowledged influences.

Whatever the contributory factors, the result is a wide-ranging miscellany which, in engaging with topics from death, war and religion to money, love and friendship, has both the immediacy of just-grasped thought and the balance of more considered reflection.

Not surprisingly, the business of writing poetry and the poetry business form a significant and ongoing theme, whether that be thoughts on the paradoxes of composition (“In poetry the best way to fly is to be well grounded.”), what poetry does (“Good poems resolve emotions; bad ones provoke them.”) or the frustrations of the ‘literary game’:

“Dealing with some publishers, it’s only too easy to feel like a smuggler engaged in transporting contraband of no evident value across an iron curtain.”

These, though, frequently overlap with and lead into other themes, ideas that bear on other situations beyond the written page or its reception. There’s the bubble reputation (“Fame: it’s inevitably a case of mistaken identity.”), language (“What I like about the future is that it’s made of words.”), work (“Ambition is what people of limited talent use for motivation.”), identity and social relations (“My blind spots about myself, invisible to me as they by definition are, may be, nevertheless, what others’ behaviour in my vicinity allows me momentarily to glimpse.”).

The scope extends much further, too, as does the tone, with self-deprecatory jokes, exasperated one-liners and acerbic, forensic rage all mingling in a kind of literary salle des pas perdus while the more conventional platitudes of received wisdom whizz by on the mainline outside. Not for nothing has Robinson attracted comparison with as diverse a selection of aphorists as Samuel Johnson, Barthes and Baudrillard, and while reading Spirits of the Stair through as a sequence and tracing the ups and downs of its progress, its changing atmospheric pressures, offer their own reward, it’s the crisp precision and inviting open-endedness of individual entries which make this book so much more than a prose addendum to an already significant body of work.

Tom Phillips is a poet, playwright and journalist living and working in Bristol.

Older Magic

Rumours or news that Geoffrey Hill might become Oxford Professor of Poetry have Eyewear thrilled. Hill represents a more serious tradition than that espoused by the current laureate; and one loftier, more sublime and rhetorically nuanced. Hill is the finest living poet writing in the Miltonic line. He would bring much to the post.

A Scattering

Hats off to poet Christoper Reid for his recently-announced win of a Costa prize for best poetry collection of the year. A Scattering is a powerful elegiac book, comparable to the work of Hardy and Douglas Dunn, who also wrote of the remembered loss of their wives. It is good- in a year that has seen a newer generation seemingly seize the reigns in the UK poetry firmament- to see an elder statesman of poetry, whose work came into prominence in the 70s and 80s as a so-called Martian- get a look in.

Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine

Eyewear congratulates Professor Don Paterson, Scotland's leading male poet, on his youthful win of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He must be one of the youngest winners - it's an honour often reserved for elder poets.

The poet put forward must have the laureate's blessing, and Scotland's leading female poet, Carol Ann Duffy, clearly felt an affinity. Besides the Scottish, Picador and generational links, Duffy and Paterson were key mainstream poets of the 90s and 00s who saw off the threat of Heaney and Muldoon and created a new populist vernacular style.

Paterson, who doesn't - judging by his editorial and critical writings - much like the poetry of Dylan Thomas, Prynne, or amateur and anti-war poets, is as admired in the UK as he is controversial. Is he the new king of the cats or prince in waiting? Surely, his North American reputation is set to grow. I predict he will win the Nobel Prize for literature before 2020.