Bad Week For Cinema

Eyewear is sad - and a little shocked - to learn of the death of cinema's great Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni - who gave us such great films as L'avventura, Blowup, Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) and Zabriskie Point.

Coming just after Art House Cinema's other major European Existentialist Auteur, Bergman, has died, this is staggeringly bad news for movie lovers. Antonioni's heroes looked out at the world, and into themselves, on journeys that brought them, often, to silent, mortal zones - in the process encountering erotic, dangerous interzones - as the image, and the imagination, hot and vast as a desert - mixed like windblown sands.

Antonioni was one of the finest image-makers, and thus givers, in film history, and Blowup's eerie London park, with its rustling leaves, and apparently abandoned body, is just one of them. More than films, his works were - are - environments - where mood, landscape, desire, and fate - meet (and sometimes absurdly) part ways. Profession: Genius, more like it.

Mimesis

Mimesis 2 is now out - an important second issue for a new, promising, small magazine devoted to the best international poetry from little and well known poets. It's edited by the poet James A.L. Midgley.

I'm in this issue, along with Andrew Sheilds, E. Kristin Anderson and Charlotte Runcie, others, and George Szirtes (an interview). At 55 or so pages, it is slim, well-produced, atttractively put together, and was sent to me rapidly after being published. What's not to like?

Okay, I'd like to see the next few issues develop a masthead that has some contributing editors, maybe tells us where the magzine is published from - and poetry reviews would be good, too.

Still, Mimesis is hereby Eyewear-recommended as a place for poets young and old to send work to.

Masters of Light and Darkness

Ingmar Bergman has died today. The world has lost one of its true masters of 20th century cinematic art - an art that, like painting, may soon become seen as less for all time than for an age, as new digital media technologies alter the beauty and struggle of the original process - a process that involved, more than anything, the deployment of light and shadow across human faces, across landscape, across vast moral and dramatic spaces, but finally, importantly, projected across screens, in dark rooms, with an audience watching. Often considered tantamount to a dream state, gazing at cinema, no other film-maker knit the dreams of film, the dreams of people, into such a rapt suture. Bergman is, of course, forever associated with European existential, psychoanalytic, and Surrealist aspects of film. More succinctly - he was the dark side of the Hollywood dream machine - the side that asked the complex questions about our desires and dark inner experiences. He will be missed, but like few other directors, never forgotten.

Meanwhile, one of the great purveyors of sunlight in 70s cinema, Laszlo Kovacs, also died recently. A cinematographer par excellence, he nearly defines the "look" of American 70s-style movies, with the way his lens kissed sun-dapple, saturating the stock and the landscape with a blinding reminder that one gazed upon something made, something made in the air.

So, a little bit of cinema's light and darkness has left this July.

Ashbery Is Eighty

The most influential and impressive living American poet, John Ashbery, turns 80 today. I missed his - was it 75th? - birthday in Paris a few years back - time is speeding up. Yet still the New York School master is, thankfully, abundantly with us (his latest collection, A Worldly Country, came out this year, in the UK from Carcanet). So: happy birthday, Mr. Ashbery. My poem for you is below.

It may seem churlish to say so, but many (most?) British and Irish poets and critics just don't get this most versatile, fluent and loquacious of American poets - and in the process, miss not just a passenger, but the conductor and whole train of current American poetics and poetry. In Ashbery, WCW's American grain is rubbed smooth with French verse, an appreciation of abstraction in art and talk, and a big city insouciance that is both lyrically pleasing and intellectually perplexing. A few years ago, that most traditional of lyrical craftsmen, Seamus Heaney, told me he didn't think Ashbery wrote "real poetry" - because it was not rooted in experience. Instead, it is dandified, swift-moving, self-regarding, modern, and, of course, able to apprehend artifice as the end branch of the tree of life, not something wholly unnatural to the human condition.

Play is games, and games are artificial - but so are symbols, so are words. Poetry meets the human world by making things up, and ruffling the leaves a little in the process. Ashbery's fluid stroll through the urbanity of the world and its languages is no less grounded in experience than any farmer's. And his poems sing as do those of more remote bards. Of course, it is Ashbery's near-uncanny mastery of his words, his poetry - the signature of bardic power - that in effect frightens those gate-keepers who consider decorum in poetry - its governed articulation - the measure of its command. In this way, he is closer to Dylan Thomas and that brand of Forties eloquence than is often noted.

Ashbery is a great poet - Frost, Pound, Auden, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell - some other great Americans not mentioned here so far, are renewed and redelighted in his company. Along with Frank O'Hara, his way with words is overwhelming, like the sea's crashing roll can be. I think, to survive his oceanic impress one must surf on the crest of his saying, to loll on his elegant swerves, winning the coast at last, unaccosted.

As an amusing addendum, one way of gauging Ashbery's current crisis of reception (theirs not his) in the UK, consider how The Guardian treats his major birthday today - a small (but balanced) note on the back page of their Review section, to be sure - but, the week's poem is by Alice Oswald, that most conspicuously English of contemporary British poets, whose crafted, concise, energetic Hughes-like nature poems, while wonderful, are, in a sense, often a refined counter-claim to the Ashberyian oeuvre (though her long river poem in its flow, is, arguably, a tributary of, if not tribute to, JA).

On the occasion of JA's 80th birthday

For John Ashbery, July 28, 2007

Send for the boys who do not care,
The rude birds that avoid the air,
The girls who shave off all their hair,
Flyers that crash down for a dare –

Send for the scribes who are impure;
Let them serve up sherbet and maize,
Warmest Florida days, a dance craze
Started in Harlem, and nothing in place,

See, there are no shoes to win this race –
Blessed are those who fail to justify
The ways in which they select high
And low manners of making desire sigh,

Flung off to deny, belie, codify, luxuries
Broadly open to all cavorting stylish eyes;
Mania belongs to the song of songs sung
With thrusters burning, all wheels swung

Wide to glide like butter or ice going across
A pan, out to the sea which cannot adjudicate
Between a well-turned ankle and a sharp skate
But glistens like a flustered many-glozed affair

That happens in every apartment where
Lovers cavort without scruple or design,
Or rather, have designed scruples that provide
All the pleasures of the moon, the day, denied

Them in the avenues of arbitrage, sad caverns
Of any deluded parvenu; spread out perfumed
Cockatoo feathers on pillows of the Lord Mayor
And break all his windows that refrain from air!


poem by Todd Swift

Poem by Elizabeth Bachinsky

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Elizabeth Bachinsky (pictured) this Friday.

Bachinsky has recently stormed onto the Canadian poetry scene as one of the significant, exciting new poets to follow - one whose fine sense of form is equalled by a hipster dedication to using the full spectrum of tone, style, and content - often voicing, with Browning's panache, the dramatic monologues of the marginal young (in one another's arms, etc.).

In this way, she extends contemporary Canadian poetry's unequalled exploration of the merger of high and low, form and content, and style and sensibility, that makes 21st century Canadian collections often richly ironic, speculative and positively excessive works - works simply disinterested in pure authenticity or tradition for tradition's sake - works asking questions (about identity, media, culture, and American experience) that poetry books in Britain and Ireland all too often don't even know exist.

(The starting gun for this poetry is the pistol-shot belief that nothing is out of bounds in terms of language or theme - dismissing out-moded ways of thinking about the sublime, about purity in poetry. It's work driven by adrenaline, humour, a command of form, and an eye and ear for the exceptionally contemporary, whether that be on street, screen, or sheet. This New Canadian Line might start with McGimpsey, and The Matrix poets, and runs like an undercurrent through many post-1999 collections, from Budavox on...)

Bachinsky is the author of two books of poetry, Curio: Grotesques and Satires From the Electronic Age (BookThug, 2005) and Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006). She was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and raised in Prince George and Maple Ridge, BC. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States and has been translated for publication in France and China. Bachinsky has been nominated for many awards including The Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and the Governor General's Award for Poetry. She lives in Vancouver where she teaches creative writing, co-curates the Robson Reading Series, and is the poetry editor for Event magazine.


Home of Sudden Service

The last year of high school, I got a job
as a pizza delivery person, drove burning hot
stacks of Hawaiian-with-extra-cheese around
all night in my Volkswagen rabbit. The radio
always playing something like Smoke
On The Water or Crazy On You, and I smoked
so many cigarettes my pointer finger started
turning really yellow. After a while, they let me work
in the kitchen too. Squirting bottles of sweet
tomato sauce onto disks of dough.
I quit that place for the coffee shop with
the medical/dental and got an apartment
with Angel right away, which was about time.
The first month, we made love
in every room. I worked my ass
off in the coffee shop and got myself promoted
to Shift Supervisor after only four months;
Angel got on full-time at the shop.
So I got my Dogwood and I got pregnant.
Didn’t seem to be any reason not to, especially
with the mat-leave, and we weren’t wrong.
Cole’s three-and-a-half now. I have to leave him
with mom on the days I go to work.
I try to get a lot of early shifts so I can spend
nights with Angel and Cole, but it’s hard.
There aren’t that many Supervisors at work,
so I have to work a lot of nights anyway.
It’s a lot of responsibility. On my days off,
I take Cole to visit his dad at work.
Cole loves a truck up on a jack.
Whenever we show up, we wait for Angel
in the office. There’s a sign out front that reads
The Home of Sudden Service, but, sometimes,
it takes him a while to notice us.
When he looks out from under the truck
and sees us, though, he gives
us this shy kind of smile, as if we’re his secret
and heat passes through my body like a wave.
Sometimes I think he’s still getting used
to the idea of us. When he comes home, he’s filthy,
but I love the smell of him, he smells like my father
used to when he came home from work.
I don’t know…is that fucked up? I don’t think so.


Poem by Elizabeth Bachinsky. Originally published in The Fiddlehead in 2004, and is the title poem of the 2006 Nightwood book.

The Wolf Is Five!

The Wolf's subtitle is "The Magazine For New Poetry" - and, in Britain - it is.

I moved to London about four years ago. Poetry and English establishments being what they are, with all those competing class circles and cliques, the welcome was rough and cold at times - still is, in many ways. The Wolf, from my first months in the UK, was open to reading, and eventually publishing, my work.

If this was just about me, it'd be rather limited as an appreciation. But The Wolf has become, since founded in April 2002, by poets Nicolas Cobic and James Byrne, a truly indispensable small press publication for British letters and many writers - because it is marked by integrity, fierce independence, and a willingness to pretty much question every quietly held opinion and suggest new ways forward.

It provides a platform for many emerging, younger poets, who often have few alternative outlets in a publishing landscape that is cramped, conservative and too often pettily divisive for no good reason. Along the way, The Wolf has also published, reviewed, and interviewed, many major and established figures, too, and improved, year by year, its design, look, and feel, to the point where this, its 15th issue (Summer 2007), is distinctively indie in spirit, but stylish in appearance. Among the highlights of this 15th, special issue, are Niall McDevitt on Harry Fainlight (a wonderful meeting of two seriously brilliant, off-beam maverick poets), an interview with Saadi Youssef, and an unsigned, polemical and well-argued essay on the "in-clubs of poetry criticism". The Wolf is right to call for more informed, objective, and critical reviewery in Britain - too often all is puffery signifying nothing. Where is our Poetry and the Age?

I also have a poem in this issue - typically, for me in this magazine, a sonnet about the infamous good-time girl, Ms. Keeler.

Do support this most vital, young and honest of the UK's poetry magazines. Once bitten by The Wolf, one can no longer go back to being a sheep.