ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

NOT ONE OF THESE BESPECTACLED MEN WOULD APPROVE OF TRUMP

August was once (still is?) called the Silly Season, because less news happened then. Indeed, Malcolm Bradbury's classic novel of the 70s, The History Man, opens with a page on the subject. Ironic, because more than one war has started in August - no month is ahistorical, apolitical. Even the name August refers to an imperial figure. Our editor went away for a fortnight to relax, and like the rest of the world, has witnessed one of the least pleasant August's in living memory, in terms at any rate, of the news.

No point in rehearsing the obvious: Donald Trump and his administration are the worst since Nixon's, and may well be worse. Nixon himself toyed with using nukes in Asia, and harboured hard-hatted rednecks as allies. But the refusal over the weekend to properly condemn extreme-right actions is breathtakingly un-American and unsettling. America has not been as unwelcoming to non-whites since Reagan - probably since the end of Jim Crow.

A tweet the other day was shocking, and informative - from a conservative poet, who must be right-wing, given his comment, it said - "why should I mourn the death of a left-wing protester?" - trying to be clever with the allusion to the Dylan Thomas poem, presumably. But again, where did this permission come from, if not Trump, to be so heartless, cruel and sharp in public statements?

My God. Any death is to be mourned, but more to the point the young woman killed in the car attack was murdered by a terrorising figure - she was innocent - and brave - and good. The person who could not imagine shedding a tear for such a person must be very supremacist, indeed.

America is riven, as it has been before, during the Nam protests, and before then in the Civil War. Some surrounding Trump crave a truly apoplectic apocalyptic schism between Before Trump and After Trump - they are as celebratory of violence and fascism as the Futurists of 100 years ago. This is a horrible time in America. The whole world is seeing a relative decline in good governance, not very good even at the best of times.

There will likely not be nuclear war before the summer ends. But already there is an awful sense that the worst is coming with regards to the Trump world view.

DUNKIRK MORE SPOCK - review of Nolan's new major film

SPOILER ALERT

SOLDIERS NOT BATHING

Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan (not the 1958 film with John Mills and Richard Attenborough) may well be the summer movie event of 2017, just as Saving Private Ryan was the autumn event of roughly 20 years ago (the same year Nolan's Following debuted). However, whereas the earlier WW2 classic featured a bravura beach invasion of Europe scene unrivalled in contemporary film, and was directed by the leading blockbuster film-maker of our time, Spielberg, this new movie features death on a beach where the soldiery are seeking to escape the beachhead and the seabed, equally, and exit Europe (at least mainland). It was the first Brexit, as it were, and as endless pundits are muttering, and that forsaken politics does shade some of the gung-ho little England flag-waving at the end.

More pointedly, the new film is an attempt to outdo Spielberg, but also Kubrick, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott, potential rivals to Nolan, whose immaculate, precise, and intelligent space, comic book, and fantasy thrillers, share many elements with these other masters of the film arts. Christopher Nolan, famously, divides most fans and critics, though more are on than against his side. I remain agnostic. I think Memento is a great film, and Inception nearly is; and the three Batman films extraordinarily competent, with genuinely eccentric performances; The Prestige is deeply haunting. Interstellar is a failure of considerable interest with moments of greatness. Dunkirk has been positioned as his most serious, large-canvas work to date, a truly prestige vehicle, that should win him many Oscars. It is a bridge too far.

I dislike critics calling ambitious works failures. Hamlet and The Bridge by Crane are often called failures, but they have too much genius not to be successes as well. Dunkirk is like this sort of failure. It is riddled with the style and vision of the achieved auteur - Nolan is that sort of film-maker. However, since the film is mounted and presented as a major human experience, it cannot but fall a bit on the portentousness of its presentation, form, plot and ideas.

The key decision is to remove the "enemy" from view. They are not called Germans in the opening title card, and are faceless throughout. We only see the effects of their torpedoes, bombs, and bullets. We only see their planes. And, at the very end, a few faceless shadows. We are presented instead with a God's eye view of various aspects of the escape - a small civilian vessel captained by Mark Rylance, the best thing in the film; the soldiers on the beach waiting to escape, officer and lower rank; and Spitfire pilots chasing German planes seeking to inflict damage on the ships coming to rescue the over 300,000 stranded Brits. This is a terrible error, because the menace demanding escape is rendered far too philsopsophical and abstract - there is an idea of doom, but far too little sense of the guiding hand of real generals and officers, and fighting men, on the other side, driving the British into the sea.

At times, this faceless nemesis is awesome and strange, as when the choreographed masses of men huddled and bereft on the piers bow and fly as bombs loom, like cruel gods playing with flies. The attempt to establish that war is indifferent, cruel and random is successful, but given the humanity of the British characters, it is a bit rich to pretend the enemy is of another order.

More problematic is the impressively alienating score, by always-talented Hans Zimmer. The film is almost entirely wordless, filmed a bit like a Malickian reverie. It sounds like ragged claws scuttling across silent synthesisers. It is disturbing when not very loud. It makes the beach desolate and eerie, and sad. But it would have been, anyway. It plainly shouts serious trouble, and is a bit like an actor reading poetry, all inflection where nuance would be advised.

I say the film is more Spock than Kirk because wherever emotion is attempted, it is shoe-horned into a time scheme and three-part structure that, though at times a bit surprising and informative, is mostly baffling and unwanted. Logic takes precedence over feeling. This is a math-rock attempt at a Beatles album. We get the 'Penny Lane' stuff at the very end, when a few women are allowed to speak (almost all the nurses are there to hand out tea and bread and jam, then die, with almost nothing to say); and the many Mum and Dad boats come over the horizon, in a genuinely moving moment, only because it was an historically wonderful moment. Nolan misses the beat here, and it falters.

The very ending of the film is a reverse of a Kubrick moment.  Kubrick's most famous moments are about technology advancing to fail, or failing to advance properly - as in the bone to spacecraft, and then the dying insane computer. Nolan's film ends with a Spitfire's final astonishing resilience, coming into land at sunset, a requiem for impressive modern aircraft design and plucky cockpit derring-do, as if humanity can be summed up in that second when wheel touches sand. It felt more like an Apple ad frighteningly exaggerated. Nolan may well think this is an iconic image, and it might work as one for an Olympic opening ceremony or other second-tier propaganda, but it does not convince as deeply ethical or thought-out screen art.

The other faults with the film are astonishing. The great Sir Kenneth Branagh's thankless role may well be lampooned in future SNL skits - the stalwart naval commander who never does anything but stand stiffly and look astonished as bad things happen. He does nothing else, really, not even shout many orders or plan anything, except intone info-dumps, bland and over-written in a mostly worldess picture. At the end he stays to "help the French" - an unintentionally comical claim since he has helped no one yet. Worse is the downbeat and needless subplot of a 17-year-old boy with a wonderful sweater, who leaps onto Rylance's boat, and ends up blind then bled out, not from enemy fire but a shell-shocked seaman, rescued and then immediately, like some sort of Ancient Mariner, cursing his new ship. This is a cruel waste of a likeable character.

More comically-bad is the idea of having one character (The Mole) function like a slapstick silent movie comedian, literally shuttling from one frying pan to sinking frying pan to fiery frying pan, after another. No one was ever less or more lucky to be a key part of the plot. The whole film is like a documentary made by a very smart child with a slide-ruler, who thinks that people mostly die in battle by burning, or drowning, or being shot or blown up, by The Enemy, with no sense of history or context, but who perfectly models, on some remote and vast stage, the precise and accurate models of all the boats, and guns, and planes, as they once were, as if about to enter the realm of Time.

Beautiful, with brilliant editing and cinematography, and a few set pieces of genuine terror and wit (the stretcher bearer scene is a 10-minute-sequence of genius), Dunkirk is, after all, still Very Good: a four out of five star film that wants to be a ten star film. It will have to settle for less, and will likely end up being a superb Boxing Day staple of UK telly, at 4pm, where the ludicuous edge of importance will be worn off like a decal, letting the ageing model assume a passable likeness to the real thing, memorable after all.

THE WINNER OF THE FOURTH FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE IS....

Dominic Leonard
Runner-up, Meg Eden

Dominic Leonard is an undergraduate studying English at Christ Church, Oxford. His poems have appeared in IRIS, the Oxford Review of Books, The Kindling and the Poetry Business Book of New Poets (forthcoming), and in 2017 he won the Poetry Live competition. He is the President of Oxford University Poetry Society for 2017-18. 

a new poet with a future

Judge's Citation (by Oliver Jones)

This fortnight's raft of submissions contained many poems remarkable in their willingness to push their poet's expressive range to the very edge of non-sequitur.  None did so with such superb panache as Dominic Leonard's winning submission, which stretched personification to its logical limit  - as did our runner up, Meg Eden in the highly effective 'Alzheimers, In Which My Grandmother Is A Blueberry Bush'. 

Dominic's gift for accelerating his abstractions up to an impressive tempo is typical of a cluster of emerging British poets - Daisy Lafarge springs to mind, as does Andrew Fentham. His dislocated narration, simultaneously anatomical and cosmic,  gives his poems a freedom and freshness that rewards multiple readings.

Choosing among such strong pieces was no easy feat, but ultimately it was the pleasing prosody of 'No God Is Like A Vapour' - Dominic's paean to the deep sea jellyfish - that set it apart. The words in this poem seem to drift apart on the page, scattered and disarticulated; a mood that's belied by the piece as a whole, which shows exemplary concision and focus. Like a Bartok variation, it turns sharply around its key image without ever allowing the reader to face it full-on, and reaches far beyond its subject matter towards something equally diffuse and ungraspable. A young poet to watch out for, certainly.

No god is like a vapour *
Stygiomedusa Gigantea

no  god  is  like  a  vapour           gods are   as oil   & sponge   as this      here  are  my   droplets  :   here  are   my tendrils   &  their           galactic

 

melting           here    :  i am   a dish   of  brine  &  pink  water          watch :   i will  show  my face  to  death       except   do  not watch          i can  only 

 

  perform           down here          here    under  a  thousand   atmospheres in   dreams   i was  not   licked into this   salt existence        down in      these 

 

 murky  whirlpools       not  licked  into  this almost-life           in   dreams  i am shocking  everything   with   my  hot twitching knowledge          but i   fear

 

corners &   small  rooms  & i      can do  nothing  but   atrophy this   almost-flesh  through  the           water        in  dreams i   am  not  naked   &  afraid        in

 

dreams i   have  been  given    hands  so  that  i  might   hold  myself

 

 

 

 

 

copyright the author 2017

 

* due to blogger limitations this poem may not display its full typographical design on all viewings

THE 4TH FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE SHORTLIST NOW ANNOUNCED!

SOME PEOPLE HAVE POEMS ON THE TIPS OF THEIR TONGUES

THE EYEWEAR FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE is now into its 4th iteration, this time judged by Oliver Jones, and the shortlist is cheekily extended by 2 to 16! Who will win the £140? Stay tuned until tomorrow's announcement... congratulations to all these fine poets, from Australia to America, and in-between...

Alison Palmer for‘Felling Trees’
Cassandra Cleghorn for ‘Drunkle, After Rehab’
Dominic Leonard for ‘No God Is Like A Vapour’...
Eliza Mimski for ‘At Seventy’
Ellen Girardeau Kempler for ‘Inauguration Blues’
Emily Osborne for ‘Four Drawers’
Greer Gurland for ‘Chapter Three’
Kate Ennals for ‘Heidegger's Truth’
Lynne Burnett for ‘It Rains For Him’
M.E. MacFarland for ‘A Halo And Some Doves’
Masa Torbica for ‘Landscapes’
Meg Eden for ‘Alzheimers, In which My Grandmother is a Blueberry Bush’
Phill Provance for ‘Triangle’
Sarah Carey for ‘Accommodations’
Seanin Hughes for ‘Pink Is A Sister Sick’
Wes Lee for ‘They Say We Made It Up’

MULDOON AT ROUGH TRADE EAST FOR 4 JULY!

THE WINNER OF THE THIRD FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE IS RICKY RAY

AN AMERICAN POET OF TALENT

In tough times, Eyewear is continuing to grow and develop this rather special, fast-paced, 14-day turnaround poetry prize.

This time the judge was Ms Rosanna Hildyard, our senior editor at Eyewear, and an Oxford graudate, who has written a new translation of Pere Ubu which we will be publishing shortly. The 4th edition of the contest opens today with our judge being Oliver Jones, a poet, editor, and author of a critical survey of Trump's rhetoric.

The shortlist is

Antony Huen – ‘Ekphrasis’

Brianna Neumann – ‘Heart Murmur’

Chris Hardy – ‘Each Summer’

Danielle Lejeune – ‘Counting Seven Crows’

Ellen Kempler – ‘Elegy At The End Of A Beach Walk’

Greer Gurland – ‘It Is Easy To Forget’

JDA Winslow – ‘text3’

Jose Varghese – ‘Sex In The Time Of Air Raids’

Justin William Evans – ‘Night Prayer 3’

Lenore Hart – ‘Looking Into The Eyes Of A Woman’

Myna Wallin – ‘Blood Lines’

Paola Ferrante – ‘Homing’

Richard Ray – ‘Seven Hundred Sights In A Horse’

Roger Sippl – ‘Broken’

And the winner and runner-up are discussed below. Well done to all!

Winner: Ricky/Richard Ray, ‘Seven Hundred Sights In A Horse’

Runner-up: Danielle Lejeune, ‘Counting Seven Crows’

JUDGE'S COMMENTS:

This fortnight’s shortlisted poems in Eyewear’s ongoing flash-prize were chosen for their spirit and sense of daring. These are the poems, out of those submitted, that felt playful – that were attempting something novel in the form of poetry. Whether it is Antony Huen’s fragmentation of the ancient technique of ekphrasis, for a view seen through the lens of a smartphone, or JDA Williams’ loving, lavish ode to a pot roast sandwich in ‘Night Prayer 3’, each of these authors has found an entirely original voice. It’s reassuring to see a lack of cliché. It’s exciting to read poems which are skilful, sarcastic and innovative. They do not pander to literary fashions or accepted values; they are all truly expressive.
 

My winner, ‘Seven Hundred Sights In A Horse’ by Ricky Ray, and runner-up, ‘Counting Seven Crows’ by Danielle Lejeune, both invoke the mythic power of the number seven. Both authors use poetry as an almost supernaturally powerful form of language – a chant, curse, or charm.

The winning poem, ‘Seven Hundred Sights In A Horse’, could be one of Bob Dylan’s folk songs – to the tune of ‘Seven Curses’ or ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’. It is a true American legend, blackly funny, with the laconic narration of a TV Western. The words are well-worn – ‘mangy’, ‘chemo’, ‘out of town’ – but the poem’s deceptively simple, steady rhythm (much more deft than is apparent) and crafted consonance give it a magic of its own.

 

The Seven Hundred Sights in a Horse

A wild horse ran through town.

It was always running.

Gospel was: something had

to be wrong with you to see it.

Everyone had seen it.

Those who said they didn't

saw it in their dreams,

started to stutter when they spoke.

Some saw only an eye,

usually when they were blind

to the bad side of a relationship.

Some saw its mane, a mangy sight,

while they took the bus

home from chemo.

Its tongue meant you should

spit the liquor back into the bottle.

The local bum saw its skeleton

as he burned from the hollows

of his eyes. He took up

the guitar again and bone by song

it disappeared. Its tail told secrets.

Those who heard the swish

knew what it meant

but could never put it into words.

They said it was like a higher

form of balance. A little girl

put out half an apple every evening.

The neighbor's dog ate it

and she took it as a sign

that she and the horse were friends.

Her mother died young

and she's the only one

who ever saw the horse’s heart.

(Or the only one who confessed.)

She married the man

she suspected had seen it too.

He kissed her when she asked.

She and the guitarist became

the resident horse interpreters.

They often disagreed: on its name,

its sex, what color it was,

why it had come to town,

whether it whinnied

when the church bells rang,

what a person ought

to do with what they saw.

Two things they always agreed on:

you only rode it out of town

and by out of town

they meant out of life,

and if you saw its hoof

you better duck.

 

copyright 2017 the author.

 

Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. His recent work can be found in The American Scholar (blog), Matador Review, Fugue, Concis, One and Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. His awards include the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize and Katexic's Cormac McCarthy Prize. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, three cats and a dog; their bed, like any good home of the heart, is frequently overcrowded.

 

 

NO MORE

One is reminded of King Lear, broken on the heath, by the immensity of human loss and suffering. London, and the UK, is reaching a summer breaking point.  As temperatures soar to 31 Celsius, murder, hate and death keeps erupting in weekly events, each unbearable for both victims, and any bystanders with a heart or soul.

Last night, a terror attack on law-abiding, decent, and needless to say, blameless, Muslim British people attending a Mosque, injured many. This is awful, and this blog is not going to state the obvious here. But we did not want this event to pass without comment.

This blog considers the British Muslim population of the UK to be an incredible, enriching, and valuable part of the whole intermixed splendour that is UK culture and society. Far from being a fifth-column, Muslims in the UK are - as we saw after the Grenfell Tower Fire - as compassionate or more compassionate than any other community - and their doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, workers, drivers, artists, musicians, writers, actors, newscasters, and so on - add extraordinarily to this nation. None of this should have to be said - but some hate-filled people clearly think that you have to be white and Christian to be English or British, and any one who does not fit into a very narrow image of Britishness is a threat.

It is so terrible to see what is happening in our streets, we are unravelling. But people of faith, people who care for each other, keep appearing to remind us, that we are human, and deserve to be treated fairly, and with kindness. The other day at a Westminster summer fayre, while bands and choirs sang, a broad and relaxed audience of all faiths, and races, laughed, danced and ate together. It was a paradisal vision of brother and sisterhood.  We are possibly a much better humanity that we sometimes recognise. Time for better angels to stay the course.