Poem by Alex Boyd

Eyewear is pleased to welcome Toronto-based poet Alex Boyd to its weekly Friday spot.

Boyd studied at Brock University and graduated with a BA in English. In 2000 he moved to live in Scotland, but now lives and works in Toronto again. While writing, he has worked for Chapters, the City of Toronto, the National Ballet and the federal government.

He is the author of poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has had work published in magazines and newspapers such as Taddle Creek, Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire and on various sites such as The Danforth Review.

In May of 2003 he inherited the well-regarded (and some would say infamous) IV lounge reading series from poet Paul Vermeersch, and as a result is currently booking and hosting the series. Boyd is a member of Greenpeace and PEN Canada.

He is a founder editor of the new online journal, Northern Poetry Review (see Links) which I recommend, even in its infancy.



The Baker Signed Up, 1914

When he stumbles in the trench
his hands cut into mud like dough.
Surrounded by puddles, rats, lice.

Helping carry wounded along wooden
planks because the mud is deep
enough to swallow a man,
he pictures it baked in the sun, hard.

He skips, sometimes, around shell
casings, oven hot and tumbling
from the back of a spent gun.

Under the familiar whistle of
falling bombs that softened
and pounded earth, he slept,
while explosions sliced at the edges
of his dreams: the song of chimes
above the door, the smell of fresh bread,
a Chelsea bun with icing dropped
into a paper bag and handed
over the counter.

poem by Alex Boyd
first published in the pamphlet Brick and Bone, available at www.alexboyd.com

Eye On Abraham Adonduwa

Abraham Adonduwa, pictured here, is a young Nigerian poet and writer, just starting out, who has being communicating with me over the past year.

He has energy, ambition, and an abiding interest in cultivating his craft, and writing poetry in English.

Eyewear notes his new blog, below, and wishes him well on his poetic journey in a fascinating land:

www.saintabadini.blogspot.com

Look Again: Re-Review of Memento

I used to write film reviews for Look in the late 90s and early 00s.

Very occasionally, Eyewear will feature a rearview-mirror glance back at some of the classic, and not-so-classic, films I reviewed then.

Today, a masterwork of looking back, Memento.




Memento
Thriller
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Ann Moss

Rating: Five Specs (out of 5)

Tagline: “Photographic Memory”

MEMENTO is indelibly haunting and agonizingly suspenseful. The plot, despite its never-ending flashbacks, comes down to an elegant high concept, teased to perfection by new director and writer Christopher Nolan.
Leonard is a former insurance adjuster whose wife has been raped and murdered. In the attack, he received a massive head injury. Because of this, he has lost the ability to “make new memories” - everything he can recall is from before the horrific crime.
Imagine a world where you literally forget everything (except your name) every ten minutes. Leonard (played with intensity by Guy Pearce) is constantly waking up from a bad dream into a worse one. Where is he? Why does he have bloody marks on his face? Who is the woman sleeping in the bed beside him? Why is there a gun on top of the Gideon Bible in the sleazy motel room?
The only way he can keep any semblance of identity together is to follow a rigorous self-imposed regimen of short-term remembrance. This means he has tattooed his body from head to foot (backwards so it’ll read right in the mirror) with “facts” like “your wife was raped and murdered” - and the name of the prime suspect “John G.” he is obsessively hunting down to kill. There’s even a space above Leonard’s heart where he plans to tattoo the fact he’s got revenge, so he won’t forget that either.
To keep his day from disintegrating six times an hour, Leonard takes constant Polaroids of the things that matter most, like “my car” and the motel he’s staying at. His best friends — at the moment — seem to be a tough little guy called “Teddy” (Joe Pantoliano) and a skanky waitress named “Natalie” (Carrie-Ann Moss, as dark and sexy as in The Matrix).
On the back of their photos, he’s marked guides to their intentions, indicating whether they are liars or allies. Leonard has learned to trust only the notes he leaves to himself. As he says, with a condition like this, you have to be a good judge of your own handwriting.
Unbearably, we know (just a little) more about what his shady new friends have planned for him, and are forced to watch as Leonard stumbles from moment to moment, guided by the flimsiest of notes, photographs and pen marks on his hand. Sometimes this blind stumble through lost memories is so frustrating it’s funny. An existential x-ray as inevitable as a slow-mo bullet, this is the Film Noir equivalent of Dostoyevsky.
MEMENTO is one of the most thought-provoking and moving examinations of memory, love and betrayal ever put on film. It’s also a sly commentary on the mutability and impermanence of all images, including those committed to celluloid. As such, it’s as much about us, the audience, as it is about what’s flashing across the screen. You’ll leave the cinema suspicious of your loved ones and yourself.
You will never forget to remember things differently from now on.

Fleur Adcock Awarded Queen's Gold Medal

Eyewear is pleased to note that the Queen - having recently turned 80 - has all her poetry wits about her - and yesterday awarded the 2006 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry to Fleur Adcock (pictured here). Congratulations to her on this splendid occasion.

Adcock's poems are well-known, and loved, and some, such as "Against Coupling" ("I write in praise of the solitary act") have become contemporary English classics of wit and insight.

As an aside, Fleur Adcock is one of the more than 70 poets who recently recorded their poems for the forthcoming Oxfam Poetry CD Project which I edited, and which will be launched June 8.

Report below:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1760226,00.html

For more information on Fleur Adcock, see:

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth161

Eye On Kenneth Fearing

From time to time, Eyewear will narrow its gaze and consider a poet of the past whose writing should be attended to in the present.

Today, Kenneth Fearing, pictured here.

Fearing was my favourite poet when I was an adolescent one winter, and I recall reading his cynical proletarian broadcasts on the page (from an anthology of "modern verse" my mother had used in college) with a vital thrill - the sky was a dark blue, and it was very cold outside, and this seemed like the world as it was to me then (sometime at the start of the Reagan-Thatcher 80s it must be said). But then, he seemed to slip from view - mine, readers, critics, anthologists - until quite recently.

I suppose what held against him was his life (somewhat shabby and unattended) and his broadly observant, but political poems, that were not in favour for a time; and his mordant, almost accidental Marxism. To one generation, he was the news; to the next, he was old news; and to ours, he seems to be returning as news that never staled. But, pulp novelist that he was, he must have sensed that style is the key - and I think he's a bit of a master of that.

I think an element of my poetry which is (and more often was) public in its pronouncements, and satirical, emanates like a long-lost radio wave from that time. I think I also loved the slovenly noirishness of his look, his person. At times, it almost seems as if he was single-handedly the only American Communist poet writing anything of interest during the spectacularly interesting period of the 30s through WWII - and certainly the only one doing so while wearing a fedora. Meanwhile, his crime novel The Big Clock was a Hollywood hit, so there was that twist in the tale - a dialectical man then, with hands turning both ways - towards profit, and a critique of capital. There's mystery in that, too, which he could've mined more.

I'll be reviewing the Fearing volume from the APP series mentioned in a previous post (it is number 8) when it arrives in the post.

In the meantime, here's a good biographical sketch:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/fearing/life.htm

Zukofsky Selected Poems

The American Poets Project, from the Library of America, is in the process of creating some of the most attractive poetry books ever made for English-language readers. The latest, #22, is Louis Zukofsky (pictured here), Selected Poems, edited by Charles Bernstein.

The collection has been rethought as a meta-text (or what I call meta-anthology) which excerpts the unexcerptable (the long poem A for instance) thereby recontextualizing how these pieces, these words, click together - a sort of one man canon-reshuffle.

The brief introduction by Bernstein is worth the price of the book alone (especially as most will have A on their shelves already, from the University of California press, all 826 pages of it). He draws attention, especially, to the cultural and linguistic differences in Zukofsky's background (his parents spoke Yiddish) that make him such a clear corrective to Eliot, without tipping the balance. Zukofsky is launched by, even as he writes against the specter of Eliot, in a poem like "Poem Beginning 'The'" - with its numbered lines, such as the Prufrockian number 58 "Do we dare say".

Zukofsky is a poet who could have become a William Carlos Williams but went farther than (even) he did with Paterson. By this I mean, his early short poems are in the Williams vein - yet already they are stranger, and so refreshing, reminding those in the mainstream how divertingly good poems can be when they are not what we expect, but what we could never have anticipated.

For example, the poem from 29 Poems, number 5, "It's a gay li-ife" provides perhaps the most fun lines of that era (and not much today is more thrillingly alive to its own sonic and syntactical making): "There's naw - thing / lak po - ee try".

Here's a link to more on "LZ":

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/zukofsky/

Hello Americans

Simon Callow's second part of his superb biography of the terrific Orson Welles (pictured here) is coming soon, called Hello Americans. I heard Callow this morning on the BBC radio, and it seems promising. The book will focus on the side-projects that diverted the boy wonder from film, such as politics, journalism and comedy.

Sadly, this is only part two and we have to wait for part three, likely for another semi-decade, which will include later projects such as Touch of Evil. This book ends in 1947, so miles to go on the road past Xanadu before Welles sleeps.

The title derives from the broadcasts Welles made about Brazil. See link below:

http://www.wellesnet.com/helloamericans.htm