In The Dark

Eyewear often writes about popular music - sometimes reviewing "pop music" - and this might strike some readers as less serious writing than that which considers, say, poetry, or even film. They might be right. Little popular music bears the same weight of scrutiny as a first-rate poem, or great film.

Indeed, the names of those composers, lyricists, performers and singer-songwriters who have distinguished themselves as being artists, while arguably large, may truly include only a few creators of genius - Cole Porter, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, The Beatles / George Martin, The Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, The Doors, Patti Smith, Joy Division, The Smiths, Nirvana, Elliott Smith - and the perennial Bob Dylan, for instance.

There are others, but not too many more. Why this is so, no one can say - but it may have something to do with the fact that while intelligent pop music is open to the full resources and strictures that also mark and shape poetry - music and metaphor, thought and feeling, form and content for starters - pop music is not, ultimately, about intelligence. It is about entertainment, and memorability, and also being something very lovely or charming or even sentimental, that moves a listener, to dance, or hum along, but surely, to buy. Art does not simply enchant, though, it can alarm, or warn. Music with words that bears the full pressure of art's demands is more often called opera, or a musical. Wagner or Britten loom.

But there are very good pop musicians, who deserve to be appreciated for the serious, innovative, often thrilling creators they are - not just during their period, but after it. OMD, who have recently begun to tour again, are one such group. Their heyday, in the early 1980s, saw them conquer America with a song in a John Hughes film, Pretty in Pink, and so they share a sort of fate with Simple Minds. They are too often maligned for being "an 80s band" - as if a band was ever not of its time. But OMD created sonic works of great resonance, and, yes, intelligence. Few melodies are more ironic or disturbing, than "Enola Gay". You hum to an atrocity. Architecture & Morality is often considered their finest album - and indeed it is the one they are currently touring anew. It is a great work, but their second album, Organisation, is actually better, though perhaps rougher in places.

Its last song, "Stanlow", a homage to an oil rig, is the most beautiful industrial pop song ever written, and its inclusion of the machinery of the rig is both haunting and musical, without ever losing its heavy identity as a thing apart from what we think of as the diction of song. One of the songs on the album even relates to Ian Curtis, and it is often forgotten how OMD, who played with Joy Division, were of that time and place. Less famous than Joy Division, but in some ways as intriguing, OMD's later work is more upbeat, just as New Order's was, in the late 80s. No harm in that. Pop music can be popular, after all.

http://www.omd.uk.com/html/biography.html

Don't Quit Your Day-Lewis Job

One of the mysteries of poetry is that one can be hard pressed to tell, from among one's many contemporaries, whose poetry will "last" - but after only 35 or 40 years, the mist has lifted, and it is as if the chaff or dross had never existed, so clear is the view to the gold of the wheat fields. Consider Yeats, or Larkin, who both famously anthologized shiploads of dud poets in their Oxford anthologies, presumably because they thought it was "good" poetry.

Ian Hamilton's Against Oblivion is worth reading, concerning the point at which a poet, a body of work, a reputation, is beginning, like New Orleans, to sink, or like the Pisan tower, to lean. The movement can be in the other direction, too - poet-editors and critics are now rediscovering worth in Lynette Roberts, for instance - but more often than not, the direction is conclusive, and it is towards a reputation at rock bottom.

Cecil Day-Lewis (pictured) seems to be at that stage now. The recent review, by the current Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (see link), is fascinating for a number of reasons. But one of the most striking aspects of the piece, is that for all the age's apparent indeterminacy on aesthetic and textual matters, bad writing is bad writing, and usually gets outed, sooner or later. Particularly, poetry - often thought to be rather easy to write by those who don't write it, or who simply dabble - is an extraordinary litmus taste for a good mind. It is simply not possible to fool a poem into existence, hard as one might try. Beneath the surface - indeed, on the surface - each choice the poet makes betrays their intelligence - and their knowledge - of their art. Poetry is so often compared to magic, it might be a corrective to instead compare it to the game of chess, if only to see if that makes metaphoric sense, too. I think it does. Each line is a move in a game where no false move can win.

As Paul Muldoon has shown, a poem is a complex web of allusion; words, images, phrases, echo and rebound, through the words. At the end of the day, the poet's choice of diction and syntax (the words, and their order) combine with whatever formal patterns are employed (metre, rhythm) to project a sense of a personality - what Alvarez - among others - calls "voice". This voice either stales or stays fresh, over time.

Auden, whose under-celebrated centenary this is, cannot wither or stale. As Hamilton wrote, he was oblivion-proof. Day-Lewis, who worked in the shadow of Auden, and aped his style, could not evade oblivion, because he never managed to find a style, a voice of his own. There is a force, a fuse, a fire, in an original poet, that lights them home, and keeps their work alive. Dylan Thomas - so often maligned now - had it. W.S. Graham had it. Some do. But some poets can't lift their writing off the page, and into that space that sustains. Can you?

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2077492,00.html

Are You Equipped?

Eyewear is open to innovative linguistic practice, and small press publishing, in poetry. Equipage is one of the places where these two things meet, with significance, in the UK. See their new catalogue below.

E Q U I P A G E

c/o Rod Mengham, Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL, U.K.


JUST PUBLISHED:

Simon Jarvis, F subscript zero, 8” x 9”, price £4.00
Carol Watts, Brass, Running, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Rod Mengham, Diving Tower, A5, 16pp, price £3.00
Elizabeth Willis, The Great Egg of Night, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
John Kinsella, Love Sonnets, A5, 64pp, price £3.00
Barry MacSweeney, Horses in Boiling Blood, A4,perfect bound, 84pp,price £8.00
Caroline Bergvall, 8 Figs, A5, 48pp, price £3.00
Tony Lopez, Equal Signs, A5, 40pp, price £3.00

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

J.H.Prynne, Biting the Air, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (published by Equipage/Folio) perfect bound, 140pp, including 32pp of drawings, price £7.95 + £1.00 p&p
Peter Minter, Morning, Hyphen, A5, 36pp, price £3.00
Andrew Duncan (editor and translator), Depart, Kaspar: Modern German Poems, A5, 44pp, price £3.00

BACKLIST

Brian Catling, Large Ghost, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Accomplices: Poems for Stephen Rodefer, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Tadeusz Pioro, Infinite Neighbourhood, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Allen Fisher, Ring Shout, A5, 16pp, price £3.00
Marjorie Welish, Begetting Textile, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
William Fuller, Roll, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Drew Milne, The Gates of Gaza, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Barry MacSweeney, Sweet Advocate, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Peter Gizzi, Add This to the House, A5, 40pp, price £3.00
Drew Milne, Familiars, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
J.H.Prynne, Pearls That Were, perfect bound, 28pp, price £4.00
Ian Patterson, Much More Pronounced, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
John Wilkinson, Reverses, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Jennifer Moxley, Wrong Life, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
John Kinsella, The Benefaction, A5, 62pp, price £3.00
Ralph Hawkins, The Coiling Dragon The Scarlet Bird The White Tiger A Blue & Misted Shroud, A5, 44pp, price £3.00
Geoff Ward, Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
David Chaloner, Art for Others, A5, 16pp, price £3.00
Drew Milne, As It Were, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
John Forbes, Humidity, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
R.F. Langley, Jack, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Iain Sinclair, The Ebbing of the Kraft, A5, 40pp. price £3.00
Pierre Alferi, Personal Pong, translated by Kevin Nolan, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
John Wilkinson, Sarn Helen, A5, 32pp, price £3.00
J.H. Prynne, For the Monogram, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
John Kinsella, Graphology, A5, 36pp, price £3.00
John Tranter, Gasoline Kisses, A5, 40pp, price £3.00
Keston Sutherland, Lidia, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Richard Makin, universlipre, A5, 52pp, price £3.00
John James, Schlegel Eats a Bagel, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Simon Perril, Spirit Level, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Keston Sutherland, Prag, A5, 12pp, price £3.00
John Kinsella, The Radnoti Poems, A5, 56pp, price £3.00
Mas Abe, Agile, A5, 12pp, price £3.00
Peter Hughes, Paul Klee’s Diary, A5, 32pp, price £3.00
Barry MacSweeney, Pearl, A4, 28pp, price £4.00
Peter Hughes, Psyche in the Gargano, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Richard Makin, f : w :d, A5, 48pp, price £3.00
Tony Lopez, Negative Equity, A5, 40pp, price £3.00
Out to Lunch, Turnpike Ruler, A5, 32pp, price £3.00
Ulli Freer, Blvd.s, A5, 32pp, price £3.00
Drew Milne, How Peace Came, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
J.H.Prynne, Her Weasels Wild Returning, A5, 12pp, price £3.00
Antonio Bellotti (ed.), Milk of Late(anthology), A5, 60pp, price £3.00
John Wilkinson, Torn off a Strip, A5, 36pp, price £3.00
Peter Riley, Lecture, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
David Chaloner, The Edge, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Michael Haslam, Four Poems, A5, 36pp, price £3.00
Caroline Bergvall, Strange Passage, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Andrew Duncan, Alien Skies, A5, 32pp, price £3.00
Ian Patterson, Tense Fodder, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Drew Milne, Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Rod Mengham, Feuds, A5, 20pp, price £3.00
Alan Halsey, Reasonable Distance, A5, 24pp, price £3.00
Ulli Freer, Sand Poles, A5, 28pp, price £3.00
Out to Lunch, 28 Sliverfish Macronix, A5, 32pp, price £3.00
D.S.Marriott, Lative, A5, 24pp, price £2.00
John Wilkinson, The Nile, A5, 28pp, price £2.00

All publications are post free if ordered direct from the address given above.

Cheques should be made payable to ‘Equipage’.

Poem by Evie Christie

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Evie Christie (pictured) this Friday. She's a young Canadian poet, born in Peterborough, Ontario, who now lives in Toronto. That's all the biography I have. Other than that, all I know is, her debut collection from ECW Press is very promising.

It's raw, brave, explosive stuff - full of old men who work in "porno stores", shotgun shells, and tornadoes - it's mythic and it's real, and low and high - Wild West poetry for a broken heart and a racing mind. Ken Babstock, one of Canada's finest poets under 40, has written of Gutted that "Christie's poems frighten themselves awake". I recommend her. You''ll find more at www.ecwpress.com - the poem here is from Gutted and is reprinted with permission of the author.

Straw

I’ve told you about the sheep’s heart.
I can’t say how many pounds without
The blood, only that it was two fists, mine
Not yours (which are considerably larger).

A man was ablaze on Queen’s Park Blvd., we heard
The sirens and later learned on TV that farming is,
As suspected, not the best career choice these days.
It wasn’t like that when we smelled of straw.

Remember our sun-burnt brothers’ bikes,
Funded with 8 hour bailing days, minus lunch?
Or how the smell of shit and feed announced
Formals and final grades? And your first time

In the barn, razor marks straw-lined you
Neck-to-ass, and big, cool bovine eyes, so much
Like the open shutters of heavy German cameras,
You’d sometimes wonder what they kept of you.

Risky Business

I've been reading Al Alvarez's wonderful new collection of essays - his first in 40 years - called Risky Business. It's just out from Bloomsbury, and, aside from the literary reviews, there are rugged insights into poker, mountain climbing, polar expeditions and oil rig roughnecking. As the blurb says, and rightly, he's Britain's "most unusual man of letters". And, arguably, its bravest - the one with most integrity.

When I interviewed him for Magma a year or so ago, I was struck by his ongoing commitment to an intelligent modernism. His belief in, and support of, Sylvia Plath, pictured, and several other major voices of the mid-century (Lowell, Herbert), endures. More impressively, by republishing his infamous 1980 appraisal of Seamus Heaney (first appearing in the New York Review of Books) 27 years later, and after the Nobel, he sticks to principles that have not, for him staled. Alvarez wrote of Heaney's work, then, that "it challenges no presuppositions, does not upset or scare, is mellifluous, craftsmanly, and often perfect within its chosen limits. In other words, it is beautiful minor poetry, like Philip Larkin's, though replacing his tetchy, bachelor gloom with something sweeter, more sensual, more open to the world - more, in a word, married."

Alvarez may be wrong here (Heaney can upset, and is not always perfect) but who else, of the mainstream critical establishment, then, or now, in the American-British world of letters, could have written that, or would have dared, in such a forum? Who else so intelligently, and stylishly, and with commitment, thought through to consider and place contemporary poets within the Tradition, the canon? No one, really.

Ian Hamilton is another such critic, much missed. The age of the mainstream reviewer - erudite, direct, engaged, explanatory, sensible, scrupulous, unimpressed and unintimidated, and at arm's length from power or what passes for power among poets - is ending, or has passed already. There are younger (chiefly Irish and Canadian) very good critics, like Starnino, or Redmond, who appear relatively fearless, but they have yet to write a definitive survey of their age, their era, as R. Jarrell did. Where is their A Poetry Chronicle, say, or Beyond All This Fiddle?

Alvarez told me he missed the decline of literate reviewing, as academicism overrun the world of letters. Now, we have complex essays and often short puff-piece reviews, but fewer stately, armchair writings on poets, and poems. Poetry is sustained by such writing, and such bravery. Here's to a revival of fortune for the riskiest business.

Look! Up In The Sky!

Speaking of Spiderman Dept. Here's a press release worth noting. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm in it, myself.

Sacred Fools Press is proud to announce the release of its latest anthology, Look! Up In TheSky! An Anthology of Comic Book Poetry (Sacred Fools Press. ISBN# 9780615137643).

The anthology is dedicated to Lisa King, an influential performance poet who passed tragically in 2006. The book features over a hundred contributors from the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain including such poets as Patricia Smith, Jack McCarthy, Mike McGee, Alvin Lau, Daphne Gottlieb, Cecilia Tan, Ratpack Slim, Amanda Kail, J*me Caroline, Ryler Dustin, drawn from the worlds of performance and page poetry alike.

Look! Up In The Sky! is available directly through Sacred Fools Press (215 River Avenue, Providence, RI, 02908, USA) for $12 (+$2 s/h);

or at Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/562064.

Profits from sales of the book will go to The Fenway Community Health Center in Lisa King's name.

Poetry Is Difficult

There is a scene near the end of The Fabulous Baker Boys, when the little and elder brothers, long-time, sophisticated, professional piano players for hotel lounges, end up playing a third-rate telethon, for "Channel 71", to raise money for "basketballs". The TV host calls them the "Barker Boys" and interrupts their act unceremoniously. A fight breaks out. There is only so much small-minded, contemptuous indifference these diligent, talented, but ultimately anonymous men can take. Then heart break.

Working as a poet is a lot like being a Fabulous Baker Boy. Some days (and this is one of them) the modest pleasure of craft and art, the challenge of doing what's best, what's most difficult, is outweighed by the sheer lousy nonsense of the world and its celebrity playboys.

For the record, I have been working as a poet, poetry organizer, and editor / anthologist since 87/88 - about 20 years. My first anthology was published just as I turned 21. I'm 41 now. Every day, every week, every month, is a slog. Recently, I appeared in Montreal, to launch my latest collection, Winter Tennis. The event was well attended; earlier in the week, I had read with John Burnside, Erin Moure, Dennis Lee (big names, talented poets). Something called "Book TV" was in the room for my launch, and the small press publisher's PR assistant managed to call the camera and TV person over, to get me my fifteen seconds. The first thing she did was ask me why my "unusual name" was "Winter". She thought my name was "Winter Tennis" and the title of the book was Todd Swift.

Small indignity, you might say - move on, mate. But it is vastly symptomatic of a profound truth. Poets, editors, poetry activists like myself make great personal and financial sacrifices, for (literally) decades, to be simply ignored or, worse, misnamed, at the end of it all. This wouldn't be so bad, if the media was as grossly clumsy with our prose peers - but, like parents who favour one sibling over another to an outrageous extent, novelists are showered with praise, attention, and - yes, this does matter - support - financial, logistical, cultural and otherwise. This magnitude of difference, in terms of public reception and recognition, between the poet and novelist, is so vast, as to beggar belief. It is made worse by prizes, which accentuate the have and have not poets. The greater public has near-zero tolerance for poets, but can muster a minimal shrug of spasmodic interest in a prize-winner. Ask the public to name poems they really love, then why. They really can't.

I have long argued for, and tried, in my own small ways, to promote, poetry's greater cultural relevance. I still believe poetry is the highest art form, maybe even the finest intellectual, if not spiritual, pursuit, alongside philosophy. I am no longer sure poetry is widely sustainable, unless the mainstream public, the media, and the poetry world itself, try harder to work together. There needs to be a moving away from marketing, from reducing everything to sound-bites. The attempt to sell poetry as a "story" the media can "use" means its truer values have been distorted, and the public no longer understands or cares about the art's richer, subtler worth.

While the public at large is indifferent, I yearn for a welcoming hand, comrades and good fellows, for those who seek to open and share, not close and horde.