Don't Stand So Close To Me

The New York Times has a good article about geniuses being rejected by Knopf. The initial reaction for any struggling or younger (or expatriated or exiled) writer and poet, on hearing the news that Lolita, On The Road, and works by Sartre, Richler and Plath, were all thrown away by apparently undiscriminating dolts, is that, hey!, I am like them. This moment of inverse glory, basking in a great writer's failures, soon vanishes, however, as one recalls the grosser inequity - they did go on to be published...

I am rejected all the time, often by leading presses and poetry journals. Hurts like hell, but one has to keep going. Fact is, my heart's half-broken by the doors that keep slamming shut over here. It's an odd feeling, because I know I have done so much to promote poetry, it feels like misplaced Karma, having all this indifference visited upon my work.

I confess to sometimes thinking of throwing in the towel. Just quit writing. You know, if I wasn't a poet trying to make headway in the current cold currents of British publishing, I'd be a genuinely happy person. Problem is, I love poetry, and the writing of it. It's the getting it out into the world that's so painful.

Poem by Jacob McArthur Mooney

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Jacob McArthur Mooney (pictured) to its storied pages.

Mooney is a 24-year-old Canadian with something of a meteorically-rising poetry career on his hands - something I'm quite glad of, having been publishing him these last few years, when my editorial eye came across some poems of his.

Mooney, having recently split his time into quadrants (Toronto, Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, Halifax), now lives in a small house with a pear tree in the backyard (as I am informed in his bio note; whether, like Augustine, he is tempted by the pears, he does not say). He was shortlisted for the 2007 CBC Literary Award in Poetry. His first book of poems is due out in March of 2008 from major Canadian press McClelland and Stewart, and is titled The New Layman's Almanac.

He is the poetry editor at ThievesJargon.com.


A Guide to Alternate Histories

Take a step to the left. Take another. There
was this photograph I shrugged off once
while moving, me and the hard local girl who
taught me the words to Basket Case, bent
from the roots into each other like the letter A.
Each time I saw her she’d ask me my birthday,
sometimes even wrote it down. I don’t know, maybe
she wanted to be the first person to ever record
everybody’s. Her best friend shot the picture,

Take a step to the left. Take another. There,
I got it. They both died in a car wreck, hit a ten seat
van in their rental, pieces of vacation thrown around
an acre of New Brunswick like late-night unloading
beside a tight-made bed in the next motel down the list.
Thanks for coming. I asked her what she wanted once
we graduated, she said first whatever, then college. I said
first college, then whatever and no I can’t go with you.
She said whatever. (S)he said my life’s a bore.

They found her in a cornfield, fingers clawed into
the soil, as if she spent her last seconds praying for
return. Her name was Martha but I often misspeak and
call her Martyr. Sometimes I give myself the creeps.
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. The farmer
went and sold his land, moved in with his brother in
Moncton. You’ll pass the place if you’re driving to
Quebec, get out at the first exit you don’t recognize, walk
into the parking lot. Take a step to the left. Take another,

there.

poem by Jacob Arthur Mooney

Pavarotti Is Dead

Mr. Luciano Pavarotti, opera singer, has died, at the age of 71. I was surprised by my reaction. His death has moved me a great deal this morning. As time passes, such iconic public figures embed themselves in our memories, in the weave of our own lives and experiences.

Pavarotti was a great pop star, as significant as any other in the 1990s, reaching, literally, via TV, live performance, and hugely popular recordings, billions of fans and casual listeners won over by his apparently effortless command of operatic bravado. He performed with the two other tenors of his time, as The Three Tenors, The Muppets and U2. His singing of Nessun Dorma became the theme of the World Cup. Sadly, this rendition has become every lowbrow's high-culture touchstone - but that doesn't make it any less magnificent. As far as high passion and superb operatic performance goes, this must be a benchmark.

But Pavarotti was also an artist, and a performer of something close to genius (if not for music, then for spectacle). Long ago, his name eclipsed that of Caruso's. He will be missed.

September's Here Again

Sipping Coke and playing games... words from David Sylvian's exquisite song "September". The burnished month of mellow sunlight, fading like sepia, from summer into autumn, has arrived, full of pencils for school, sharp and yellow, and tinged with sadness, tinged with a remembrance of those July kisses, those August goodbyes. With September comes responsibility, but, like a first date with winter, the serious business of dark night is yet to come, there is still a dalliance on the sun's doorstep, a last tilt at youth.

Poem by Valerie Lynch

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Valerie Lynch (above, reading at the Poetry Cafe) this Friday, especially as she recently turned 80 (on Tuesday of this week - congratulations).

Lynch has been a part of my Poetry School seminar groups for several years now, and I have been much impressed with her determination, and talent. She began writing poetry at 77, after various interesting careers as teacher (Economics), archaeologist (in a City Museum), assistant editor of an encyclopaedia, and finally a psychoanalytical psychotherapist (still practising).

She has quickly developed a sometimes startling, often painfully honest, voice, dealing with themes of palpable interest to her - and all people in due course - ageing, memory, the body, loss, desire, sexuality, love, and time - and how anger and beauty twine around these subjects. I think she has some work well worth reading, and someone in the UK should publish her collection before she turns 100, so a wider audience can benefit from her vision.


Writing the Borderlines

Below your dismissive eye
is the undisturbed, disturbing
country of nearby.
Sit in a siding a layby the grass
at the quarry's edge
and use whatever's around.

Last night's storm
that reared its head over trees
and walked you home
dark green figs in a row
on an orange dish,
the spaces where we don't talk;

even Miss Peat
on the motorway verge
in her picnic chair
wearing a tired hat
and a frightened face
a long way from Walthamstow.


poem by Valerie Lynch

Blogs 10, Publishers 0

Scott Rosenberg has an article in today's Guardian about how blogging is, in some ways, turning ten this year - and how that relatively impressive anniversary has yet to convince blog-haters of the inherent literary, or other, value of the form. He notes, particularly, how once-countercultural-guru-and-white-dressing Tom Wolfe (now apparently just as bland as the Man from Glad) is dismissive of people who write blogs, and the blogs they write.

As Eyewear has been quick to observe, these last few weeks - and more generally since starting this blog a few years ago - the UK, while innovative in so many cultural and technological ways - has been stuck in a neo-Edwardian moment, poetry-wise, in relation to the web, and blogs. Bluntly stated, poetry on the Internet is still a second-class citizen, in British and Irish literary circles.

Why?

There's a one word answer that fans of the American 60s comedy-action series Get Smart will recognise: Control.

The larger, mainstream publishers of poetry in the UK market poetry as a rare, precious and high cultural product. Consider how Faber rarely publishes more than one or two new poets a year, and how rarely, say, Penguin or Faber publish (unlike, say, Carcanet) new anthologies of new poetry and poets. Rather than identifying the thriving, uncontrollable many-styled forms and diction of poetry, as it appears worldwide, on the Internet, British poetry editors, reviewers and awards organisations chiefly prefer to look away - as if the web was a destructive Medusa, and not, instead, a golden fleece. Disgusted, perhaps threatened by, the riches of the current poetic output before them, a clutch of gate-keeping figures about as current as the 1890s hold on to power (in much the way that king in The Little Prince lords it over the flower on his tiny planet, if I recall correctly - or is that two planets?).

As I have urged before, and will again, UK poetry publishers should begin to place more of their poetry online, and encourage their major poets to publish, from time to time, online as well, supporting the growing, but still relatively underground, community of web-based poetry journals. This would benefit the great tradition of British poetry, since, as younger readers are tending to go more and more to digital sources for their information, entertainment and education, it would allow a transition of this tradition, to new readerships, and younger emerging poets. In time, this will happen anyway. It would be simply wise to work with the development of new media, not against it - even if this means admitting that no one publisher, or style, or form, any longer prevails.

Poetry need not be at war with (in Yeatsian fashion) all forms of non-archaic, contemporary life - some elements of the current age are, in fact, promising, even beautiful. Blogs, and the Internet, though democratic, and hence opposed to an aristocratic or fully-elitist outlook, can still sustain and express the loftiest of words, placed in the best possible order - and remain available to many more readers than any but the most gruellingly-marketed collection. Oh, and print books should continue to exist, of course. This isn't a zero sum game.

Good Riddance