State of the awards

Eva Green (pictured) has recently moved to London, for work. Her talented work in Casino Royale has put her on the UK map and last night she won a major BAFTA (the British equivalent of an Oscar, which is a bit like saying a damp afternoon in Brighton is the equivalent of Miami beach) for rising star. Green, who was soundly cheek-pecked by rising new Bond Daniel Craig, is no doubt the most popular newcomer in town.

The best BAFTA film was The Queen. Frears, the director, hoisted his trophy and half-heartedly announced himself "Queen of the world".

Ricky Gervais was a presenter, and seemed nervous and rude (his persona?), insulting several "people who don't speak English" who had won awards - as if talent is bounded by language: hardly the message of another nominee for Best Picture, Babel.

The Last King of Scotland, a film based on the novel by poet and author Giles Foden, won for Best British Film, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Lead Actor (Forrest Whitaker). Bizarrely - and perhaps unforgivably - none of the three groups to come up to express thanks for their wins even mentioned Foden - indeed FW thanked the adapter of the screenplay for his "great characters" - surely a gift, originally, of the man who wrote the book on which their success was based?

Meanwhile, same time, different bat channel, apparently the Grammys happened. Lumbering though they may be, they're the music awards of note. I was glad to see the RHCP win best Rock Album, as Stadium Arcadium is a superb double album, but was sorry that the great Yeah Yeah Yeahs lost out to weird Gnarls Barkley for best Alternative album. More oddly, the great reggae album Youth lost in its category; a shame, since it is a thrillingly mythic and eccentric work.

Of course, The Grammys also saw several Phoenixian moments - the rise of the newborn The Police - let's hope they have another Ghost In The Machine within them - and the celebration of The anti-war Dixie Chicks - the times may be a'changing. In fact, even Bob Dylan won a Grammy. 2007 or 1967?

Turning Point

After September 2001, America experienced its burning Reichstag moment - a trumped-up (or misinterpreted) crisis laid the groundwork (amid the rubble in Manhattan) for the rise of an extremist American Presidency, one that could be described as neo-democratic, or pseudo-fascist, but is basically a new hybrid form of ideology - hyper-capitalism fused to hyper-militarism: do as we say or your're f----d as one Bush lieutenant put it.

In 2003, when I and countless other poets were among the first to warn of this, many in the media suggested this was mere scare-mongering. Now, as Bush is poised to attack Iran (see this week's The Economist for their sober version of how this could very well happen) and is offering to cut health care for the weak and aged in America to pay for his continuing insane war aims in Iraq, a turning point has occured, today - a major breaking point you might say.

Russia has said enough is enough.

The days of the hegemony are over. Unipower is being challenged, and not in cafes in Paris. The world's second-most-powerful nuclear state, and one with gas and oil reserves second only to the Middle East (or Texas), is throwing down its gauntlet.

Vladimir Putin has just said that America is very dangerous, and its use of military power has exceeded its borders and international law, fuelling a new arms race.

Read another way: hands off Iran - this is Russia's new sphere of influence.

We are now officially in a new cold war - some pundits call it a cold peace. Same difference.

Bush and his war criminal cronies are to blame. America is being piloted by people who, in any other circumstances, would be considered insane, or worse, "evil". The time is fraught with hope (Obama, Clinton) and terrible dangers. The 00s are like the 30s. But who in the West is this time speaking out? Not Blair.

It's an ironic moment in history when America can be lectured to by Russia. They should listen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6349287.stm

Poem by kari edwards

The American poet kari edwards (above) died too young, late in 2006. I had been in email contact with her a few months before then, and would have featured her work at some point between then and now. Her writing is necessary reading for anyone who wants to think through the connection between language, poetry, and a cluster of issues relating to gender, identity, aesthetics and politics. kari edwards grew up in Westfield, New York. In college and graduate school she studied art and creativity. She received a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Washington University in Missouri (1982) and became an artist and teacher, teaching for many years at Denver University in the art department. In 1995 she returned to school at Naropa University in Colorado for a Master’s degree in contemplative psychology (1998). After finishing that degree, kari continued on in the Poetics and Writing department for another Master’s of Fine Arts degree in poetics (2000). Throughout her writing career she held various jobs in the mental health profession.

kari edwards (1954-2006) was a poet, artist and gender activist. edwards won one of Small Press Traffic’s book of the year awards (2004), and was a recipient of New Langton Art’s Bay Area Award in literature (2002). edwards is the author of obedience (Factory School, 2005); iduna (O Books, 2003), a day in the life of p. (subpress collective, 2002), a diary of lies -Belladonna #27 (Belladonna Books, 2002), and post/(pink) (Scarlet Press, 2000). edwards’ work can also be found in Scribner’s The Best American Poetry edited by Lyn Hejinian (Scribner, 2004), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House Press, 2004), Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House, Toronto, 2004), Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (Hawoth Press, 2004), Experimental Theology, Public Text 0.2 (Seattle Research Institute, 2003) and many other places. edward’s work has also been published in numerous journals and zines.

Eyewear here features a poem of hers, below, from her unpublished manuscript, "Bharat Jiva". Fran Blau, who has kindly granted permission for the appearance of the work here says that kari had described the manuscript as "a long poem (110 pages). It is a dialogue/document of nine months in India, exploring an intersection of Eastern and Western political and philosophical perspectives in a time of war and globalization."

Something driven by intelligence

I can not begin to know
producing difference by deferring
second third person construction
in the first third person narrative
promising surrender to the dead
acknowledging, I am an unknown participant
something maybe, something blind
consuming scarcity
producing hunger
constructing gender
breathing markers
making someone a thing
scapegoat instance
another perfect occasion
construct of a common sense sentence
out of many different bank accounts
apparently to produce
a final outcome
illumination legible
newspaper flyspeck
on the edge of an abstract noun
sliding affirmation
speaking of poverty
in an industrial word
where the lakes, rivers and oceans
are no longer lakes, rivers and oceans
but mud covered hunger living in bodies

poem by kari edwards

Requiem for a Heavyweight

Rob(ert) Allen, my dear friend, mentor and fellow Montreal writer, was, as I have said elsewhere, one of the great Canadian writers of our time. He was not as well known as Atwood or Carson, but his poetry stands comparison; and his prose is equally brilliant. I am certain that his work will enter the Canadian canon within the next decade, as its full range is reckoned. In terms of wit, erudition, and elegance, he had few peers. His writing belongs on the same shelf as The Third Policeman or Aberation of Starlight, or Gravity's Rainbow.

Today, Canada's national newspaper of note has run an obituary that gives some sense of the man we love and miss still.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070208.OBALLEN08/TPStory/Obituaries

Review: The Shins, Wincing The Night Away

Eyewear is getting old - or maybe it's living outside North America. Having never seen Garden State, an indie Gen Y film from the 00s, I missed the scene where Natalie Portman's character infamously (at least in almost every review I've read of the band) recommends The Shins, saying "they'll change your life". Until today, my life had only been changed by 9/11, the war in Iraq, marriage, leaving Paris for London, and the death of my father and several other family members and loved ones (death didn't just visit Arcade Fire in a press release, it is real and outlines us with light and dark) since 2000 rolled us into a new world order. But the state of my garden has been at least slightly enappled, with Wincing The Night Away, the third album from the band with the name like The Smiths.

The Shins, friends, sound a little like The Smiths, when not sounding like The La's. Or for that matter The Red House Painters (hear "Summer Dress") or the recently digitally-commodified The Beatles. See Apple. They write and sing songs that have the jangling guitars of "Sister, I'm A Poet" and the melancholy-wry vocals of Morrissey. They make music, in short, that is very sweet-pop 80s, and anyone who loved /loves indie pop of that ilk will want to have them in their purview.

The album is clearly some kind of watershed moment for American music in this decade, like The Byrds were when they hit. This is subtle, folk-imbued, thoughtful and swooning stuff, with opaque lyrics and images that hint at darker forces ("towers" and "lines in the sand").

And the album, out just a few weeks Stateside, just started on the charts at #2 - a best for Sub Pop (remember Nirvana?). In other words, this is music now. And it is beautiful to listen to something so well-crafted, exquisite and - let's be honest - English (in the way The Beach Boys were the American Beatles, The Shins are the American The Smiths, only separated in time).

How good is this album? Unless a meteor hits or something, it will probably be on my top ten of 2007. Best of the year? Too soon to tell - a new Arcade Fire is coming; Bloc Party's latest has let me down a little, but may grow on me (it's too portentous).

Let's count the blessings - there are eleven tracks (of course) - only ten full-length. How many are truly great (the hype around this band is total so let's ask such things) - this is the era of a dead Anna Nicole Smith and 12 billion dollars lost-shipped to Iraq and Nazi-Nixon-Bush so it's the 60s again, but digital and worse. So how great is this music, really?

Six songs are very good: "Sleeping Lessons", "Australia", "Red Rabbits", "Turn On Me", "Spilt Needles" and "Girl Sailor". Two are good: "Black Wave" and "A Comet Appears" (though a little like Billy Joel). Two are superb. The first, "Sea Legs" is like the best Bowie song he never wrote. "I am a victim of the impact of these words" as the song goes. Wonderful, shimmering, fusing eros and mood with a great tune. And the second of these is a major masterpiece. A defining song.

"Phantom Limb" is exquisite, perfectly-turned, utterly sweet-sad, honeyed by history's dappled losses and gains, like an autumnal day on a West Coast beach, as helicopters fall from the skies, and she walks away, summer over, and you just graduated. One day, when someone makes a movie about the war, the protests, and young people in America in the 00s it may well be the song they use at some point to break hearts and recall the times, that changed in September.

February Poetry At Nth Position

Candé-Sur-Beuvron, Saturday afternoon
by Emily Dening

The hour
by Victoria Heath

Imago
by D Nurkse

Sylvia's sister
by Janet Vickers

Veronica's veil, The pilgrim route & Hammock
by Sally Carr

Shadow & The library
by Tamar Yoseloff

Playing
by Angela Topping

Ears & April morning
by Valerie Trueblood

A note on Delmore Schwartz
by Mark Dow

Downpipe cat & Monkeys
by Nicholas Messenger

Things Fall Apart

Curriculum is the surest way to immortality, one would think - that and a Nobel. Oddly, two of the great English-language Nobel winners of the last 100 years - one dead, one living - Yeats and Pinter (very much on opposite sides of the political and lyric spectrum) have just been axed from set text lists in the UK. In their place, some invaluable new voices have been added. But, surely, reading isn't such a zero-sum game as that?

Yeats isn't just a poet - without him, Heaney doesn't make any sense, let alone Muldoon. And, while it is good to see Dylan Thomas properly ensconced, his own lightning was forked partially on the basis of the late-flowering fuse of romanticism that Yeats lit, surely. Yeats is - paradoxically - England's greatest 20th century poet (though they'd rather it was Eliot). Just as Wilde is their greatest playwright in 150 years. No doubt slightly hard to bear. These major Irish writers are, of course, first and foremost Irish - but their work transformed English culture, too.

Meanwhile, dropping Forster and Waugh makes no sense to me, since Forster paves the way for Zadie Smith and a whole stream of English post-war fiction (and film) and Waugh is quite simply the greatest English stylist of the 20th century, other than Auden. Have they dropped Auden, better check...

Byron the young can live without, perhaps. His sexual escapades have dated badly, making him more criminal offender and less pop star - but certainly his fame and youth are more relevant in this age of diminished celebrity.

But, really, to drop Yeats? A terrible idiocy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6331869.stm