Marienbad Trip

Eyewear has seen the DVD version of the Gus Van Sant film Last Days and thinks it grand.

As the poster shows (Michael Pitt pictured), this is a thinly-veiled homage to the last, lost week-end of junkie-genius Kurt Cobain's life, before he took the "Hemingway out" with a shotgun.

What could have been deeply annoying and merely arty - a rambling, incoherent, mainly silent non-narrative vision of one man's helpless descent into drug-induced anarchy and then death - instead achieves an aching, utterly beautiful epiphany: we see into the core of creativity, and its broken heart.

Forget acting - the shambling, hazy, slow-footed grunge musicians who seemingly stumble through the cavernous Washington State mansion/ hunting lodge one sunny early summer day - all looking for a way to fix or fix on to Cobain-like "Blake" - become the real thing. The Tarkovsky-dull paint-drying texture, at times cut like Last Year At Marienbad, impacts like a hit. The few key moments are opiate-sweet and twice as dark (and sometimes blackly comedic) - such as Blake's attempt to make Kraft Dinner, or the visiting Mormons.

However, the central moment, when the vacant, seemingly forsaken shell of a musician picks up his guitar, near the end of the film, and begins to compose, and sing, a yelping ballad from hell, the hair rises on the back of one's neck - this is the dark side of the creator - in the midst of near-total loss and despair something beautiful terribly occurs - the canary sings sweetest, in the poisoned mine.

I may be biased, having been a Nirvana fan, and a child of the Grunge era, from the start. But this is a great movie.

Lucky Soap

J.R. Carpenter's impressive site is below, and both links mention Future Welcome:

http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/

http://luckysoap.com/publications.html

Who Is Eddie Linden?

The T.S. Review was invited to a private function at the Poetry Cafe last night in London (Friday) - a celebration of the 70th year of Eddie Linden, and the launch of Eddie's Own Aquarius, wityh introductory remarks by the brilliant poet Alan Jenkins.

The gratis wine flowed thanks to the Christianity of the Irish embassy, and when it was announced they had sponsored it, cries of miracle! miracle! erupted from the packed, mainly Irish audience.

Eddie is the real minor miracle. I finally met the icon last night - he's now a dapper, wizened man, with over-large spectacles - who bears a slight resemblance to Louis Dudek. His most famous poem was written in the early 70s, "City of Razors" - but he yelled it out last night with the same rebel force as once animated his every move. His real fame stems from having - against immense odds (he was often broke) - put out a vast number of issues of the significant little magazine Aquarius - including ones dedicated to George Barker, W.S. Graham, Canadian and Australian poetry.

Eddie's Own Aquarius features new poems (!) written for Eddie by Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, and many others, so you can get a sense of his cultural impact from that. It's a good looking, if expensive item (£20), but bound to be a collector's treasure some time down the road. It was compiled and edited by Constance Short and Tony Carroll, of Dundalk, who were in London for the occasion. The original idea for the book came from Michael Donaghy, the gifted Irish-American poet who died recently in London.

City of Oranges: Arabs And Jews In Jaffa

I was invited to attend Adam LeBor's launch of his eagerly-awaited new book, City Of Oranges: Arabs And Jews In Jaffa, last evening at Daunt Books in Marylebone, one of the most beautiful shops (with its arcade) in London. The photograph above, by Judy Hamer, shows Jaffa in the near distance.

LeBor was born in London and studied at Leeds University and also at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He worked for several national British newspapers before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1991. Since then he has travelled extensively in eastern and central Europe, covering the Yugoslav wars for the Independent and The Times. Currently Central Europe Correspondent for The Times he also contributes to Literary Review, the Jerusalem Report and Condé Nast Traveller. His books have been published in ten languages.

I co-wrote a screenplay with LeBor in the late 90s, Necessary Evil, which aroused a great deal of film industry interest but was ultimately shelved, due to its controversial re-telling of the Nazi gold story and the new rise of fascism on the Internet, just at the moment when 9/11 made such ideas of terror in the homeland, and revenge, more than fictionally disturbing. Spielberg's Munich now looks to explore territory we had begun to map out.

His new book, according to his agency is: "The first account of the Arab-Israeli conflict to be told through the personal stories of families who live there, that faces up to the grim realities of bombings and checkpoints but keeps the human side firmly in view. Through the stories of six families – three Jewish and three Arab – Adam LeBor goes behind the news and the rhetoric of entrenched positions to tell the tragic, occasionally comic, but always deeply human story of Israel in the last eighty years.In the words of people who lived through those times, or are retelling the stories of their parents and grandparents, we understand that the founding of the state of Israel could be simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews, and a moment of disaster – the naqba – for the 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948, most of them never to return. And we see the main port of the Eastern Mediterranean sprout a modern European suburb of Tel Aviv, with white Bauhaus architecture, of which Jaffa today has become a suburb. But, though full of tension and violence, this is not a story without hope."

The book has now been reviewed in The Guardian Saturday Review and selected as "Book of the Week":

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1690070,00.html

Was Churchill A Poet?

Good question.

Depends what you think of rhetoric, power, and language...

In the meantime, while the poetry wars rage, please see part three of my essay on politics and poetry, below:

http://wanabehuman.blogspot.com/2006/01/comment-on-poetry-and-politics-part_17.html

Carol Ann Duffy Wins T.S Eliot Prize 2005

Carol Ann Duffy, one of the preeminent British poets of her generation, has won the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize tonight, in London, for the best book of poetry published in 2005 in Britain or Ireland (out of a field of 90 collections) - for her book of love poems, Rapture.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4618104.stm

T.S. Eliot Prize Readings

Eyewear (i.e. I) attended last night's readings, at The Bloomsbury Theatre, featuring the ten poets short-listed for the 2005 annual T.S. Eliot Prize - to be decided this very day - more on that decision later this week.

They read in the following order:

Sinead Morrissey; Pascale Petit; John Stammers; Carol Ann Duffy (absent, read by Elaine Feinstein); Alice Oswald; Break; Polly Clark; Gerard Woodward; Sheenagh Pugh; Helen Farish; and David Harsent.

It is an impressive list, and they all read well, except for Duffy, who was conspicuous by her absence. But Ms. Feinstein did a fine job of covering for her.

This competition is too close to call.

I will make a few remarks on the poets. I feel that any of these poets could win this year, without much damage being done to the sterling reputation of this competition. I don't envy the judges at all.

John Stammers is the kind of poet T.S. Eliot himself would have enjoyed, during his early period, as the use of metaphsyical wit, literary allusion (often to the French, or French-inspired New York School), and urban dandyism is close to his Prufrock persona (updated for the new century, of course).

Pascale Petit is exploring the intersection between the personal and the universal in ways new to English poetry, and is fusing her powerful, disturbing imagery with elements drawn from art, and European surrealism - she has built on the precedent of Plath, and made this dark territory of internal suffering brought outwards, her own.

David Harsent has been one of the few sane, intelligent poetic voices in the U.K. to examine the toxicities of war and violence, and its impact on society and the lone person, during the Iraq crisis, and so has established considerable moral and aesthetic weight for his current work.

Sinead Morrissey has written three or so poems in her new collection, which, for their music, intelligence, feeling and virtuoso use of form, push the writing of verse forward a decade or so.

Polly Clark's sense of style, humour and fresh new perspective on love, and animals, establishes her as one of the best of the younger generation of poets now writing in the U.K.

Carol Ann Duffy's new long series of love poems takes the entire canon of English love poetry and turns it on its head, daringly testing found ideas and cliche, and providing her own sense of beauty. "Tea" is an exceptionally moving poem.

Alice Oswald has adopted the tone, high seriousness and mythical agon of a Ted Hughes, and re-expressed it importantly in terms of 21st century language - at once looser, and more austere - and never as assured, given the complexities of how meaning and language are now known to interlock.

Pugh, Woodward and Farish have each written very succesful lyric poems that explore memory, love, loss, and the human need to establish order in a disordered world, through well-deployed images and often inventive lines and phrases.