Poem by Cath Vidler

Eyewear marches on, like time, or a newsreel from an Orson Welles film. Each Friday it features a poet worth reading, based somewhere in the English-speaking world. So it is that I am very glad to welcome to these storied flat-screen pages, this particular Friday, the one and only Cath Vidler.

Vidler (pictured above) is an Australian poet I think particularly intriguing for her wit and innovative practice. She is also editor of online journal Snorkel (www.snorkel.org.au). Vidler founded Snorkel in 2004 after returning to Sydney from New Zealand, where she spent three years immersing herself in the literary culture of Wellington. Snorkel aims to bring together the creative writings of Australians and New Zealanders, while also featuring contributions from the wider international community.

Her poems have appeared in Sport, Turbine, Trout, Tinfish, Cordite, Alba, Otoliths and, most recently, Nthposition.


10 Domestic Alternatives

1. The succulents are entirely underwater or completely dried out.
2. Quiche Lorraine is very friendly, or very not.
3. Telephonic exchange is followed by whitespace, or commas.
4. The toothpaste aisle gleams with possibilities. The toothpaste aisle is in decay.
5. The wine glasses are blushing with excitement, or paling into insignificance.
6. The dress shop is located on the corner of progress, or perhaps slipping into something more comfortable.
7. This afternoon recites like a prayer. This afternoon has clamped its lips.
8. Did the deli owner really relieve the loneliness, or simply slice it thin?
9. The roundabout is ringing with reason. The roundabout is a vicious circle.
10. The private sphere is found all around the world. The private sphere has become lost in the bubble-bath.

poem by Cath Vidler

Palgrave Omissions

Sarah Broom now gives the world her study, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry.

Eyewear welcomes her broad church attention to both mainstream and experimental (as well as performance-oriented) poetries and poetics, and the inclusion of Don Paterson, Denise Riley, Simon Armitage and Jackie Kay for serious study is all good news.

However, to say "future books of this kind will no doubt include the likes of" or "there are many I would have loved to include but could not" followed by names like: Pascale Petit, Paul Farley, Alice Oswald, Caroline Bergvall, John Burnside, Derek Mahon, J.H. Prynne, Tom Paulin W.N. Herbert, Lavinia Greenlaw, etc, is to be slightly too limited in scope; and George Szirtes, Roddy Lumsden, Polly Clark, David Harsent, Michael Donaghy and Sinead Morrissey are not even regrettably excluded.

According to the author: "this book has been written, for the most part, in New Zealand". Indeed, this would have been a fine manuscript in 1999, but the 21st century has seen major shifts of emphasis, and new directions, that are simply not tracked or traced here, at all.

Perhaps the book's largest blindspot is the absence of any mention, even in the extensive bibliography, of the "poets against the war" movement of 2003-2004, which, after all, involved thousands of poets, use of the Internet, created much debate about the role of poetry in relation to politics, and resulted in at least three key anthologies, from publishers like Faber and Salt.

Broom's Introduction offers a sentence or two about the Internet, as follows: "The internet in particular, which has since its beginnings been crucial to the experimental poetry scene, offers the possibility of truly international exchange and awareness, something which is currently being actualized by online magazines like Jacket and Contemporary Poetry Review, as well as many online discussion lists."

Broom misses an opportunity to mention any of the several very good long-running British or Irish online magazines, and instead mentions two, from Australia and America - and then mentions that CPR often has "700" visitors a day. Nthposition's e-book was downloaded over 150,000 times (as reported in The Times) and has had as many as 10,000 visitors a day, but is not mentioned.

The book does offer excellent insights in to poets I admire, and it at least sets out to explore issues and themes that deserve an airing. The work on Muldoon is very good.

Three specs out of five.

Review: Blasted (in German)

The Barbican was last night bursting with writers, film-makers and actors (such as the couple Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal) drawn to the intriguing spectacle that is Blasted, as interpreted by Germany's most infamous, if not preeminent, theatre company Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, under the direction of wunderkind Thomas Ostermeier.

Eyewear was not hugely impressed by one of Ostermeier's productions shown in Budapest several years ago - a typical instance of Ordeal Theatre - blaring industrial noise, a shaven-headed man in a wheelchair shoving rotting sausage into the faces of the bourgeois audience, and a real writhing snake, all set in a pit; sometimes it seems that in Europe to be a respected auteur one just has to do angry, sexual, loud and nihilistic.

Which leads to Sarah Kane.

Kane is the Cobain Slash Plath of contemporary British Slash European drama. Famous by 23 for Blasted, which was pilloried in the philistine UK press as being essentially the most vile piece of work ever performed live outside of Soho, she was tragically dead before 30, in 1999, victim of suicide and dark thoughts that were never, let us be honest, short of self-regard or Storm and Stress.

Lighten Up was not in the Kane lexicon. Kane's small oeuvre(basically five plays) is now part of 90s Kulchur - but better loved outside of Blighty, where David Hume's brand of empiricist scepticism consigns such moody metaphysical intensity to the fringes of acceptable British discourse, if not the flames. Once again, the curse of UK Decorum (so little in evidence in music or conceptual art) seems to want a lid on theatre, on written language - likely because, since Shakespeare at least, it has always threatened to upset the apple cart. Britain is not particularly drawn to Expressionism or OTT expressions of feeling in its art. And Blasted is surely OTT - one part "Bring Out The Gimp" S&M from Pulp Fiction (of Kane's era, did she see it?) and two parts Ratko: the play, as written, includes (all this in full view, so to speak) masturbation, anal rape at gun point, sexual blinding, and the eating of a dead, rotting baby - as well as the graphic verbal description of many war crimes against women, men and children.

One thinks of Frank Wedekind's work here as a sort of precursor, or, of course, King Lear. The audience going to Zerbombt (Blasted translated into German) observes a rich irony, then - the most famous, gifted, savage, strange and disturbed (perhaps we need to bring back the word genius for such an assembly of qualities in one person) English-language playwright of the contemporary world, somewhat neglected in her homeland, is revisited and returned to the English by, of all people, The Germans. It is an irony redoubled when one considers the play's central themes - war, sexual perversity, love and football - are ones that the English feel they do much better than their brethren on the Continent.

The Berlin company acts as if they don't know this, or don't care. What is thus presented is a chilling recreation of a 5-star Leeds hotel room in the mid-00s (Iraq is on the flat screen telly), and three characters (Ian, Cate and Soldier) who, despite the fact they should have strong UK accents, look and feel basically British. Kane was uncanny in anticipating the obsessions of her age - like Kafka one third of her fame rests on her foresight, one third on her relevance, and the last third on her writing. - after all, Blasted is about extreme war and terrorism barging in to the everyday sphere of sexual politics (sordid little rapes in hotels, the average English sex crime that Orwell would no doubt have mourned the decline of) - and it is also very much about the media. The Soldier asks Ian if he is a journalist before raping him, of course.

The play can't help but suffer in comparison with the world that has caught up, slightly, with Kane's brand of Uber-Angst. Death and sexual torture are now featured in mainstream cinema hits, like Saw the vile trilogy. And Abu Ghraib , etc. - that loathsome litany of Rumsfeldian crimes (so faintly punished recently) - have upped the ante. Genocide and sexual perversity in Leeds is still an astonishing vision of a collapsed world - both in terms of reportage and complicity, but just. Nonetheless, the company has managed to put on a visually and aurally spell-binding show, that uses the full advantages of live theatre production (which Welles, the arch-Expressionist knew so well in New York 70 years ago) such as light, sound, and elaborate stage design.

The two best and most effective moments are when Ian and Cate sport and lurch on the slowly rotating bedroom set, as increasingly ominous shadows and positions emerge, suggesting a kind of sad and local evil lurks in Ian's pornographic heart; the intensity was reminiscent of the ritualistic choreography of the cage-release-twirling-baton-Bach-and-cop-murder scene in Silence of the Lambs. The second highlight was the exploded view of the hotel room, which was rather too Iraq perhaps, but certainly powerful. Perhaps because Germans are thought to shout so much in real life, it was something of a shock to have the Soldier's weird and psychotic soliloquy faintly whispered. It might suggest menace in Berlin, but at the Barbican, it seemed merely low-key.

The final image, of post-human reconciliation between the surviving girl and the semi-dead man, is, in its dignity among indignities, memorable, moving, if not, intentionally, redemptive. But the last two words are so English and so apt as to be marks of genius - after all the death and humiliation - a simple, a profound, a polite - Thank You.

Four specs out of Five.


http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=4277&pg=207

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wedekind

Good Riddance

Now For Some Good News...

Phew...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6127216.stm

From Jimmie Walker Swamp

from Thirty-Eight Sonnets from Jimmie Walker Swamp

1

The declined summer seemed to call for white wine,
then the sun sank and I was lost in time. Night takes
half my hours, lately, and the reading light burns

the page until I am insensible. What seemed light
is dark, the dark a riot of burning. The ferris wheel
in town blares its incandescence; the stage show

can be heard for two kilometres. I can't know
much of the world beyond. Land stretches to the limits
of morning, much as, when I was a child,

the map went to the edge, then kept going, to the wild,
unlettered future, as shadowed as the past. Half
my life has been knowing the dark earth of here,

and not the promised secrets of the universe. I have it
all here in my head. I don't know what it's worth.

poem by Robert Allen (pictured above)

first published in Standing Wave (Signal Editions, 2005)

http://www.vehiculepress.com/robert_allen.html

Robert Allen Has Died

One of Canada's greatest contemporary writers, Quebec-based, Bristol-born Robert Allen, has died suddenly of cancer, peacefully, at Jimmie Walker Swamp (his home in the Eastern Townships) with many who loved him at his side.

Rob Allen (pictured) was many things - cult novelist with a linguistic turn that was Joycean in its word-play, but Nabokovian in its themes (Napoleon's Retreat); lyric poet with many collections (such as Wintergarden and Ricky Ricardo Suites) who wrote both of nature and zany pop culture icons with equal brilliance; and, throughout his career, a poetic natural scientist, who, encouraged by his teacher A.R. Ammons at Cornell, in the '60s, began possibly his greatest work, The Encantadas - a long poem inspired by Darwin and Melville, two of his heroes.

This last poem, which I think is one of the finest ever produced in Canada, and certainly in the last 40 years, was recently republished in a beautiful new edition by Conundrum press.

Rob Allen was also the expert and busy editor of Matrix, Quebec's longest-running English literary journal, The Moosehead series, and an editor of the DC Books New Writing Series. At readings, in collaboration, and as a teacher, he inspired and touched many other writers.

Rob was a very good friend of mine. He was my creative writing professor when I attended Concordia for my BA, in the late '80s. He was a room-mate of mine in the late '90s. He edited my first collection, Budavox, for DC Books. He accepted my first poem for publication when I was 18. He was a true mentor.

This loss is terrible and sad. Rob will be much missed. Readers not yet born will one day delight in his protean learning allied to such exuberant wit.