At The Blue Metropolis Festival

I have been invited to attend the 2007 Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal, Quebec - fast becoming Canada's major literary gathering. This year, both Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood will be appearing, as well as rising star Heather O'Neill.

I'll be reading on the Wednesday, alongside John Burnside, Jason Camlot, Carmine Starnino and others; then launching two books, Language Acts (co-edited book of essays with JC, as above) on the Friday, and Winter Tennis on the Sunday (part of the DC Books spring launch).

More info below and a link to the review (out today) of Language Acts in The Montreal Gazette.

http://www.bluemetropolis.org/Festival/Participants/767

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/books/story.html?id=2857dbc2-9b20-4d82-adb6-90336bcdfc31

Poem by Martha Kapos

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Martha Kapos (pictured) this Friday. She recently read for the Oxfam Series, in London, and is the author of one of my favourite contemporary poems published in the UK, which, by a happy coincidence, is below.

Kapos was born in New Haven, Connecticut and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having completed a degree in Classics at Harvard, she came to London to study Painting and the History of Art at the Chelsea School of Art, where she stayed to teach - writing and lecturing on art and poetry until 2001.

A pamphlet from The Many Press, The Boy Under The Water, was her first poetry publication in 1989. She won a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1994 and in 2000 was shortlisted for Poetry Review’s Geoffrey Dearmer ‘New Poet of the Year’ award. She became assistant poetry editor of Poetry London in 2001.

Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Wales, The Manhattan Review, and the TLS. A selection of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2002: An Anthology published by Carcanet. My Nights in Cupid’s Palace (Enitharmon, 2003) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and won the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection.

Finding My Bearings

Such intricate
navigational equipment.
A search of the black sky

for the Pole Star. Soundings
to establish a safe depth.
Sailing in the dark up

the empty estuary, shining hotel
corridors with static
electricity in each doorknob.

Never go down teetum teetum
if you don’t go down with me.
Why are the little roads

to your secret address so faint?
The A to Z of your smile without
getting lost. Its turnings and

mysterious co-ordinates.
Let's look it up
in the index under S:

Something Circus
Something Crescent
Something Close


Acknowledgement to the TLS; reprinted with permission of the poet.

"Men seeking good, doing evil"

Ezra Pound, pictured, the most important impresario of modernism, and one of its five greatest practitioners (others being later Yeats, Eliot, Joyce and Stevens), has now had all his poetry recordings collected, with a useful Introduction, at the link below. No excuse not to listen to what's stayed news.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.html

Review: We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

The year 2007 presents several satisfying options for anniversaries. 25 years since The Smiths were formed (1982) or, more gloomily, 20 since they broke up (1987). The Smiths, in the opinion of Eyewear, are one of the two most significant British bands of the last quarter century or so (the other is Joy Division, whose uncanny dark sublimity is inexplicable in a popular, albeit alternative, music context). Radiohead, Oasis, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys - whatever - they ain't The Beatles, they ain't The Smiths. Strangeways, Here We Come, their fourth and final studio album, charted in the US of A at #55.

So it comes as something of a welcome surprise that, recently, one half of the duo that defined Smithean genius, Johnny Marr, joined an alternative American band, Modest Mouse (pictured) - and then went on to have, with his new group, the US #1 album.

Is this album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, worthy of such heights? Is it a curiosity, coasting on Marr's reputation? Yes and no. Marr is not a household name in America, and so his reputation could not, alone, have propelled the group to such success - and besides, they have done well previously. It just happens to be a great album.

Great, but spiky. I have been listening for several weeks, trying to get in to the heart of a mood, a safe zone, where I can reside in the music and enjoy. Only five songs on the album fully (fathomed) afford such comfort, such melody. They are, may I add, the best songs, and the ones where Marr is most influential: "Dashboard", "Fire It Up", "Florida", "Parting of the Sensory" and "Missed The Boat". There are nine other songs, which are variously either just good, or merely okay. One or two are even grating.

Indeed, the way Modest Mouse can best be described is a cheese, grating. What makes this eclectic, weird, shambolic album so off-putting and yet brilliant, is how they've taken the Pixies' (America's best 80s band) nutcase shouting of Black Francis and combined it, like some genetic splicing was afoot, with The Smiths' more lyric graces - the result, while rarely pleasant or smooth, is a bumpy road down several lanes of tonal memory.

But let's zoom in on the two great songs here - "Parting of the Sensory" - with its carbon robbers ("someday you will die somehow and something's going to steal your carbon") manages to sound like a whisky-and-fiddle piss-up in a mental asylum presided over by The Pogues (Ireland's best 80s band) and a melancholy song by Neil Young, which evokes a tremendous sadness ("all the stubborn beauty") in current American experience ("a lifelong walk to the exact same spot - carbon's anniversary - the parting of the sensory") - more directly, Death. A lament about the inevitability of species extinction, global warming, and god knows what else, it is ugly-beautiful and a benchmark song for these times. "Who the hell made you the boss?" cannot help but make me think of Bush's presiding over a badly listing ship of state ("four year trip to the same spot" might suggest that).

The truly great song here, though, is "Fire It Up" - starting with a charming, mid-tempo inevitability ("if you need some conversation - bring a magazine - to read around our brokedown transportation") - it proceeds to become both very sad, very catchy, and very inspiring - as if Beckett's can't-go-on-must-go-on credo were the latest biofuel, powering this Mouse's engines. It seems to detail the boulder-pushing Camus-absurdist odd jobs of some oddballs, protecting ice cubes from the cold, etc. - crew members on or off a ship so ill-shaped its destination seems off beam and utterly uncompassed - an aberration of stardom. This unhandsome all-hands drunk on deck swagger defines the Zero Meridian at the bone of this finally achieved band.

Language Acts April 27, 2007

Language Acts: Anglo-Quebec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century
Edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift

to be launched at the 9th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival

Friday, April 27, 8–9:30 p.m.
St-Charles Room, Hôtel Delta Centre-ville
777 rue University (Métro Square-Victoria)

A panel discussion will be chaired by the editors and will include Daniel Canty, David McGimpsey, Lianne Moyes, Victoria Stanton and David Solway. A reception will follow.

To view the Contents Page, click here. To view the Index, click here.
For information: 514.844.6073, http://www.vehiculepress.com/

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Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century
publié sous la direction de Jason Camlot et Todd Swift

au 9ième Festival littéraire international de Montréal Metropolis bleu

vendredi le 27 avril, de 20h00 à 21h30
Salle St-Charles, Hôtel Delta Centre-ville
777 rue University (Métro Square-Victoria)

Une table ronde, présidée par les directeurs et composée de Daniel Canty, David McGimpsey,
Lianne Moyes, Victoria Stanton et David Solway, sera suivie par une réception.

To view the Contents Page, click here. To view the Index, click here.
Pour information: 514.844.6073, http://www.vehiculepress.com/

April 25–29
http://www.bluemetropolis.org/

Future Welcome welcomed

Cordite has given the anthology Future Welcome a review.

http://www.cordite.org.au/?p=941

Poem by Steven Heighton

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Steven Heighton (pictured) this Friday the 13th. Heighton is one of the five or so leading writers of his generation in Canada, somewhat equivalent, say, to Tobias Hill in England - that is, he is both a fine poet and prose writer. I've known (of) him for years - he was already editor of Quarry when I was first starting to submit work to little magazines, in my late teens, early twenties. He took one of my first published poems. He's the author of one of the best poems written by a Canadian in the last 25 years - "The Machine Gunner". When I was compiling my selection of the best younger Canadian poets for New American Writing, in 2005, I said in my Introduction to the section that I had not included his work, as he was already well-established. I wanted to make room for truly emerging, and somewhat younger, figures. Already, in 2005, Heighton was a figure of international prominence.

He is the author of the novel Afterlands, published in 2005 in Canada and in 2006 in the USA, where it was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Editions have also appeared in Britain and Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. He has also published The Shadow Boxer—a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers’ Weekly Book of the Year for 2002—which appeared in five countries. His other fiction books are the story collections Flight Paths of the Emperor and On earth as it is, while his poetry collections include The Ecstasy of Skeptics and The Address Book.

His work has appeared in Poetry, The Independent, Malahat Review, The New York Times, Agni, Stand and has been internationally anthologised (Best English Stories, Best of Best English Stories, The Minerva Book of Stories and others) and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. He has received the Lampert Award, The Petra Kenney Prize, the Air Canada Award, and gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards. In 2002-03 he was the writer-in-residence at Concordia University, and in 2004 at the University of Toronto. This year he will be an instructor at the Summer Literary Seminars in St Petersburg, Russia. He lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario.

Constellations

After bedtime the child climbed on her dresser
and peeled phosphorescent stars off the sloped
gable-wall, dimming the night vault of her ceiling
like a haze or the interfering glow
of a great city, small hands anticipating
eons as they raided the playful patterns
her father had mapped for her—black holes now
where the raised thumb-stubs and ears of the Bat
had been, the feet of the Turtle, wakeful
eyes of the Mourning Dove. She stuck those paper
stars on herself. One on each foot, the backs
of her hands, navel, tip of nose and so on,
then turned on the lamp by her bed and stood close
like a child chilled after a winter bath
pressed up to an air duct or a radiator
until those paper stars absorbed more light
than they could hold. Then turned off the lamp,
walked out into the dark hallway and called.

Her father came up. He heard her breathing
as he clomped upstairs preoccupied, wrenched
out of a rented film just now taking grip
on him and the child's mother, his day-end
bottle of beer set carefully on the stairs,
marking the trail back down into that evening
adult world—he could hear her breathing (or
really, more an anxious, breathy giggle) but
couldn’t see her, then in the hallway stopped,
mind spinning to sort the apparition
of fireflies hovering ahead, till he sensed
his daughter and heard in her breathing
the pent, grave concentration of her pose,
mapped onto the star-chart of the darkness,
arms stretched high, head back, one foot slightly raised—
the Dancer, he supposed, and all his love
spun to centre with crushing force, to find her
momentarily fixed, as unchanging
as he and her mother must seem to her,
and the way the stars are; as if the stars are.