Why Brownlee Stayed

Good news. The New Yorker is going to get a truly world-class poet to be its poetry editor. Paul Muldoon will take over the famous magazine in the world's greatest city, confirming his decision to move there as the right one. Muldoon did a good job editing the Best American Poetry anthology a few years ago, has won a Pulitzer, and his last book, Horse Latitudes, was brilliant. He's the Auden of his generation (with perhaps some different habits) in terms of precocious ability, verbal style, intellectual vigour, and expatriated address. Hopefully he will get the magazine to publish more poems and more poetry reviews. Meanwhile, London, apparently laying claim to New York's fabled status as greatest city, cannot point to one major mainstream general interest magazine of international standing that publishes major poetry, other than the TLS (which is not quite the same thing) - and, while New York poetics, poets and poetry continues to be vibrant, celebrating a variety of styles, influences, and formal options, English poetry seems all-too-often stuck between an us-and-them trad-or-avant position, which is very 90s - and publishing of new dynamic poets is somewhat lax. Get with it, and follow Muldoon's lead, I say: poetry can be quicksilver and many-faceted, open to various positions.

Reviewery

I've been reviewing for Books in Canada over the past three or four years. Now, thanks to the magic of the Internet, those persons not based in Canada, or able to secure a subscription, can access many of the reviews online (by others, as well). The typography is a little off - dashes appear as gobbledygook - but otherwise, it is all coherent. For instance, my review of the controversial Paterson and Simic anthology of British poetry that was published a few years back, or that anthology of Irish poetry, Breaking The Skin. There's also something on a recent collection of essays by Al Alvarez. I am most proud of my review of the Welles book by Simon Callow.

A Bridge Too Far

The body of the church - and the body of Christ - were both (symbolically, at least) - broken on the cross. Both survived, and that is the good news. The bad news is that, to preserve a union of 77 million in the Anglican communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury (a poet as well as a prelate) is determined to compromise with hardliners, who wish to demonise gay members of the clergy. What is the point of that? Either the church believes in something, or it doesn't, and, to my mind, the sticking point - that many fundamentalists consider homosexuality a sin according to The Bible - is simply unacceptable. Firstly, there is no coherent argument against homosexuality in the canonical record, and, secondly, and more significantly, the actual example of Christ - to be open to all, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high - would seem to set a standard of tolerance, indeed, forgiveness, that no compassionate Christian would be wise to abandon. Eyewear hopes that either the Episcopal, American Church, defends its broad-minded position, or some other conclusion is reached. But the time for punishing men and women because of what their bodies, not their souls, do, is long past. About 500 years past.

Borderline offensive

Canada's great Seaway

The Economist dated September 15th 2007 is offensive to the democratic principles that Canadians hold dear, and is borderline racist, as well as far to the right of most readers of their own magazine.

The unsigned article, on page 68 of The Americas section, is headlined "A haven for villains" and beneath that, "The political reasons behind Canada's controversial asylum policy."

Controversial to who(m), exactly?, as a linguistic analyst might ask of the above phrase. The CIA? For immediately, we are told that "America has been criticising Canada for lax border controls" - but not America, surely, but, really, the Bush government.

The main concern is that the Canadian border is "porous" and lets criminals and madmen drift across into America, to try and blow it up. However, this alarmist critique masks discomfort with Canada's tolerant, generous, and, indeed, open-minded, immigration policy. As The Economist states, "Attracted by an entitlement to the same legal rights and social benefits as for Canadian citizens, some 25,000 asylum-seekers make their way to Canada every year". Enlightened this may be, but hardly disastrous. British readers might panic at the thought of 25,000 such new citizens each year, but consider - Canada's economy is booming, relative to most other Western nations, driven by their oil supplies, and the amount of land available for habitation is vast, compared to far-smaller European nations. Further, Canada's entire settler-colony history is based on immigration, in succesive, and succesful waves.

Then comes the offending sentence: "All three national political parties pander to the ethnic vote."

Such language, and such terms, are unCanadian. The "ethnic vote" was a racist phrase coined by a disgraced Separatist Quebec leader, in 1995. It was widely condemned by all media at the time.

Canada is a multicultural and pluralist society - a model Britain might some day aspire to, if it ever gets round to forming any interest in its Northern daughter - and so, there is no such thing as an "ethnic Canadian" - all are equally so, and therefore, none is. Or does The Economist think some Canadians more ethnic than others?

Horizontal Position In An Age of Anxiety

Eyewear was flipping through an issue of Horizon the other day - Vol. XIX from May 1949 - and came across a review by one Mr. Patrick Dickinson. The shameful notice by Dickinson of Auden's The Age of Anxiety was not seemingly sympathetic to his kind of writing.

He writes that "a general kind of obscurity suits best the superficially oracular as it also suits best any literary period dominated by homosexual taste which causes the expression of the emotions to be obscure, or symbolic, or dishonest, Such taste prefers a precocious adolescent kind of literature and criticism - it is a taste which has perforce certain gaps in experience, violent prejudices, and whose critical judgements are formed for other than literary reasons."

This example of its own kind of violent prejudice would be startling, if not sadly quite a common position, then (and now) with regards to certain tendencies in Modern British (and American) poetry of the 1940s (and beyond). It's curious that the obvious bias of some evaluative criticism is not more clearly recognised by those doing the critical judging.

Mr. Dickinson, of course, tries to conflate the terms "obscure", "symbolic" and "dishonest" - and can just about get away with this, given that, from Wordsworth on (and surely via F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny) a kind of honesty was earned by a lack of complex, rich, or overtly oracular diction. What is interesting is how this so-called "homosexual taste" - basically, the opposite of the coming Movement's austerity - is still active in American poetry, via, say O'Hara and John Ashbery - and happily so.

In the UK, though no longer publicly expressed in the crude way of this Horizon notice, many similar prejudices of taste occur among some reviewers who desire a robust, clear, and vocally mainstream (less ornate, less oracular) approach in poetry. Several major contemporary British poet-anthologists have lamented the "hysterical" and "florid operatics" of Dylan Thomas, for instance. According to one critical perspective, the kind of rhetorical exuberance that Auden - and also Thomas, in his own way - expressed - was not what poetry was meant to be. I think, and often write, otherwise.

Kane enabled

There's a new blog, A Year In The Dark, all about film from 1941. As Eyewear knows, and you do too, that's one of the very best years for cinema, ever. Worth a look. Not only was Citizen Kane released then, but other major classics, such as Dumbo, Meet John Doe, The Wolf Man and Suspicion.

Poem by Angela Hibbs

Eyewear is delighted to welcome Angela Hibbs this Friday, and not just because, as you can see, she is wearing glasses. Her first collection of poetry, Passport, came out in 2006, from Montreal's DC Books New Writers Series. It's an impressive debut. As major Canadian poet David McGimpsey said, she writes "with tender insight and passionate care."

Hibbs has been published in good magazines: Exile, Matrix, Fireweed, and Antigonish Review. She is a graduate of Concordia University's Creative Writing Master of Arts Degree. Born in Newfoundland, she has lived in most Canadian provinces and now in Quebec. Aware both of Sexton's wry confessional urgency, and De Lillo's ordered, pop-savvy postmodernity, she is one of the best emerging Canadian poets, tossing the salad of the style of what's said. Look out for her next collection.

Steve's Monologue

slip and snivel
spine & knees; scabs
abound like knots
in wood. Sydney nibbled
her scabs. Smooth,
even on feet & elbows.
Smell her skin.
Drying between her toes
after a bath, her milk teeth
standing at attention all along
her laughter. Her teeth,
eyes, eyebrows and hair
white, her body blue black, a negative
of herself.

Quick heart
scurries, her small
feet strike the stairs.

Felled; a pencil tip
stabbed into her palm, right angles & bisections;
her hand fills the frame.
I popped it out, patted her hair
‘til her sniffling stopped. A decimal of lead remained.

The sap of her,
spills, sticky,
wets the yellow hair on her legs.
Young trees bend before breaking.

poem by Angela Hibbs