Eyewear

Poem from 1999 by Todd Swift

2013-06-18T21:05:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I think that being a Protestant

is very dull. Rather like working

as a librarian, at Hull. Or not at all

the same, instead something flatter.

I wasn’t born Catholic, simple as that,

no fault of my mater, or my pater,

though they both tried hard, I’m sure

to make me Christian in their bed

(when making babies without underwear),

and did not wish me at my birth to be

the representative of only half Christ’s

community, on Earth, or less even;

I’ve been this way, United Church, then

Anglican, since I could count angels

in the stain, the glass hung up religiously,

could hardly imagine becoming RC,

yet tempted I remain, by the imagery

and exotic ways of doing things (African,

almost, or Chinese); I don’t dislike Mary,

think she’s very lovely, like the Pope -

but here I quickly get out of my depth -

it’s a dizzying world of Saints and beads,

parts of the Bible I have never read,

and a simply other-shaped kind of hope.

My people - if that’s who they are -

have done terrible things and been stupid -

some of theirs, I’ve heard, mistaken too -

all groping for a history in a world terribly

out of step with any basic common good.

In Sunday School I was made to draw whales

and Joshua, and walls falling, and asses

bearing Joseph and his wife on to that famous

manger. Meanwhile, inside the real place,

where adults sat dutiful and bored, anger

mingled with information about Dead scrolls

and long-winded journeys through Palestine

in bussess; the dust whipped up by those tours

seemed to whirl, then settle, in the pews.

Not words, nor deeds, or even well-baked goods

brought me inner satisfaction, although book sales

held some amazing bargains: James Bonds

for less than a comic; the Ladies hoarded the best

for themselves, so when the doors opened at Nine,

already the valuable stuff was gone, the poor

wandering though left-over left-overs in stalls.

And so it went. Sharing and the Samaritan, ditched,

and all the promises meant to be kept, abbreviated

by suburban standards and the Reformation.

The streets the houses of these Christians stood on

were wide, with lawns, and Dutch Elms that spread

until, one year (in ’76) they all got sick, failed

then were cut down by contractors from the city,

until the avenues were stumped and empty overhead.

More science than allegory, this true fact

still signals a radiating mood about my childhood:

it died where it stood, for all the stone buildings standing tall.

POEM FROM BUDAVOX

2013-06-18T20:56:00.001+01:00

I am currently going through my many collections and pamphlets to select poems for my American Selected, out next year. Here is one of the poems I will include, from 1999's Budavox, my debut collection...

A SOLEMN MEDITATION ON THE FANTASTIC FOUR

Gamma Rays pierced them, they returned heroic

though not without difficulties. When all changes,

much remains, but different, even unfortunately

strange, and powerful, so that men point in streets,

their hats tumbling off, and women drop groceries,

to see Galactus, or his herald, in bubbles of concrete,

atoms in galaxies in Manhattan, thrown for a challenge,

and earth-shattering conclusions left monthly, balanced

by the sheer crazy threats of barely thwarted annihilation

and what being super frames. It’s clobbering time, yet

not all matters can be solved with orange-granite fists,

limbs that stretch like gum, a molten body of a boy,

or a girl whose fields are clear as glass but cannot yield

their molecular force. Because human, we love as well

as when, to war, we put our armor on, and fend for Troy

or Helen; each wall that’s a breakthrough for one army

is another’s black hole, defeat whorling in like vacuum

and nothing left save rubble, weakness and air half-fire,

and the rumor of more ruin on the way, the next landing:

the world a place to be conquered by a Silver Surfer, or

a Submariner, blowing what belongs to Triton, Hudson

roiling at the emergence of an aquamarine attack, noble

in its grand indifference to the mere lunged New Yorkers,

abashed but inured to wanton villains and their grandiosity

now that the Baxter Building is the Ur-magnet for wild evil.

Yet, how can Mr. Fantastic knowingly enter the fragile

space of his own beloved, without a shameful thought,

that what simple anatomy has wrought, his husbandry

may undo, with his newfound abilities, pure expansion?

Obscenity is no part of the vows that bind a man to spouse

but in the broken house that is radiation’s special curse,

who can argue for his long-legged will to stay, just so?

And who may know the proper measure of Ben Grimm’s

agony: mightier than a slaughterhouse of oxen, still stone

on stone, and tangerine, his hands a clear sign of clumsy

cold, no subtle fingers here, a demolition of thumbs, a face

like a wrecking ball, and all the passion of a normal man?

Might he not want to break down, be regular now, and take

the blind girl in his athlete’s arms, again, no pressure to tackle

Victor Von Doom? Consider the Invisible Girl, later Woman,

whose grace is to go unnoticed, who can keep the rain off

with a shrug of atoms, does she want her genius long or short;

maybe after a homely battle, she may turn her back and leave

her powers on, so no marriage can reach, no matter the arms

that struggle to strain and pound at her inviolable places?

For Johnny Storm, no tonnage of car wax or peroxide obscures

his film idol’s grin eats only oxygen and spits lewd fire, his trim

physique a mitochondrion’s macrocosm gone supernova. Sure,

he’s beauty jetting from a flame-thrower, a solar rose, flight

hotly incarnate, a stream of fuel lit and flown across the sky,

lean muscle in a tight blue uniform that accepts the burn.;

but this, and less. He cannot lift his playmates to the sun

as he may go, but must return too soon with lovers to the ground.

They’ve found, all four, and each as fantastic as a bestiary’s apocrypha,

a sullen access to the null and void of life, where Midas fondled yellow.

KURT BROWN HAS DIED

2013-06-17T18:44:00.001+01:00

Sad news - the fine American poet, anthologist and organiser of many events, Kurt Brown, has died, I have just heard.

EYEWEAR POP UP SHOP IN NOTTING HILL WITH CB EDITIONS AND OTHER COOL INDIE PRESSES!

2013-06-15T13:30:00.001+01:00

Pop Up Shop – July 2013

Summertime – and though for poets and independent publishers the living isn’t exactly easy, it’s time to come out onto the street and play.
Specifically: THE SHOP. For the first week of July, 1st to 7th, Eyewear Publishing is joining forces with CB Editions. We will be taking a pop-up shop in Portobello Road, London: number 201, a block along from the Electric Cinema. We’ll be selling books from our own presses and those of some others (Arc, Five Leaves, Flipped Eye among them, and not exclusively poetry), and there’ll be photographic prints by Ken Garland and other things. And balloons. The shop is essentially a shop, and is hardly the most comfortable of reading venues, but there’ll be events in the evenings and pop-up readings by various poets during the daytime.
Those reading will include Laura Del Rivo, whose 1961 novel The Furnished Room was filmed as West 11, who has a story in the new Salt anthology of The Best British Short Stories 2013 and who still runs a stall in the market; Cathi Unsworth, who has published several novels set around Portobello Road and is a contributor to Five Leaves’ recent London Fictions; Andrew Motion; assorted Eyewear and Flipped Eye poets; Christopher Reid; and, oh, others.
Come and join the fun! We’re having a launch party on 1st July from 7pm. Join us for a glass of wine, and to hear a few poems from Mark Ford.
More details of the schedule coming soon!
Monday 1st
Eyewear party with Mark Ford 7pm
Tuesday 2nd
Leah Fritz 2.30pm
Kimberly Campanello 3.30pm
Christopher Reid 4pm
Wednesday 3rd
Tim Dooley 1.30pm
Fiona Curran 3pm
Andrew Motion 3.30pm
Thursday 4th
Anthony Howell 3.30pm
Harry Man 5pm
Laura Del Rivo and Cathi Unsworth 6.30pm
Friday 5th
Tamar Yoseloff 1pm
John Greening 1.30pm

The Poetry Drone

2013-06-15T13:10:00.000+01:00

Eyewear poet David Shook has created a zany, brilliant project up at Kickstarter, to build drones designed to drop poems not bombs, which, apparently, is legal. The poems are designed to land safely and flower if the degrade in fertile soil. Put your money where your pen is! The video is pretty retro-cool too...

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #8: COLLIS

2013-06-15T12:58:00.000+01:00

Redacted

Stuck again we came up with something else

Tried gluing the cardboard ends of worlds

To our heads and backs like

The defensive plates and spikes

Of dinosaurs we weren’t but were becoming

Or drove out west like a movie we remember

Where girls feet rest on the dash

Window prism light listening to electric chatter

And music seems part of the sunny world

That is escaping last air from a thought balloon

The gentle breeze backyard backdrop

Of evergreen trees allows a long strand of

Web the faintest visibility floating like

This will be the last word spoken or

Overheard no this will—Kalamazoo

But then the Internet didn’t care anymore

Though it went on recording every gentle

Key caress and whoever we were outside information

We stood together and with our chemicals

And held death a little closer to our whispering lips

When we text it is barely the memory of bird song

There might be some data or DNA left somewhere

But with no readers who cares what bugs

Are expressing remnants of after images and holes

This whistle’s blown and we are unplugged for good

—Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is an award winning poet and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His poetry books include Anarchive (New Star 2005), The Commons (Talon Books 2008), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), and To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013). He has also written two books of criticism, including Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talon Books 2007), and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). His collection of essays on the Occupy movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics, social movements, and change.

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #7: MCMENEMY

2013-06-15T12:55:00.001+01:00

Knowledge is power so what

Alright. So, when all this stuff was going –

All this information stuff, this knowledge

Stuff – this medium we move through like air

or water, stuff – was pouring in the ear,

in the pocket, of Boss Google, of Boss

Facebook, this was all okay? The fuss

now suggests so, or more suggests an outrage

not at being bought but being bought

At second hand. There’s naught so bad as knowing –

Knowing what you’re worth and what you’re not.

So now we know; so what are we to do

With this new-won knowledge; so now we know

And cannot say next time “we never knew”;

So what – we always knew, didn’t we? So.

Paul McMenemy is editor of Poetry Weekly (www.poetryweekly.co.uk)

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #6: PHILLIPS

2013-06-13T21:12:00.000+01:00

Collateral espionage

I was walking the dog

I was buying some milk

I was saying this

I was making a joke

I was thinking

I’ve been overheard before

Now it seems

I’ve been turned

into knowledge

We have all been turned

into knowledge

There’s someone somewhere

beyond that road junction

which cicatrices the boondocks

in a polished geodesic bubble

on a glacial estate

it’s their job

in a digital enterprise zone

At the sheer face of a terminal

they'll be shuffling codes and commentary

‘I bought some milk’

If only someone had told me

I’d have said some other stuff

“There is much that we want

and need from the West

but there is one thing which I do not want:

carelessness with people.”

‘A spectre is haunting Europe’

If only someone had told me

I might have cited examples

I might have named names

As it is, I think

that all they’ve got on me

is ‘I walked the dog’

Tom Phillips

Tom Phillips is a poet, playwright and journalist based in Bristol, UK. His first full-length poetry collection Recreation Ground was published by Two Rivers Press in 2012 and was described in London Magazine as ‘work of the highest order’. Tom’s poetry has appeared in anthologies such as 100 Poets Against The War and Short Fuse, as well as in various magazines and the pamphlets Reversing into the Cold War and Burning Omaha. His plays include Prella’s Gift, Man Diving and I Went To Albania.

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #5: KORKOVELOU

2013-06-13T12:43:00.003+01:00

Whistleblower

Hero –traitor-soldier –fugitive -

Spy

And anyway what’s in a name

Except, renaming is the first thing

A master does to a slave

And knowing you are one, is the first step

To breaking free.

And you might not really mind

Where you sign yours

But They do.

And if They want to get you, in time they will.

They know your wife’s number

Read your lover’s confession

Know all of your names

While you know none of theirs

And that shirt you wore,

Last time at the ball

They probably chose it ,

When you ‘’followed’’ the store

As you watch, like and wait there

For something to happen

They are busy constructing

The Great Eye culture

Eyes everywhere you go

But no ‘’I’’ s if you want to remain on the show

Unless you’d rather be whisked away

All options bad,

Grabbed and bundled into a plane.

Now, real spies do not speak like this.

Quoting Benjamin Franklin –

Sad, bespectacled eyes –

Surely James Bond would not approve

Even Jason Bourne would shake his head,

Bemused.

Only, it’s not really about fast girls and golden guns.

And you need look no further

For a black-ops than the CIA consulate

Just up the road.

I’ve been down there on my own

I’ve lost and I’ve won.

All it really takes is break both legs as a soldier

‘’freeing people from oppression.’’

Silent and guilty by association

With a knack for surveillance

And the machines to do it

All for one and one for all

Sworn in your name

To never let any of you

Find out and prove it.

And the covert facilities

Of universities

Need no diplomas

Other than in Newspeak.

Un-truth and un-lie,

‘’thoughtfully narcissistic’’,

‘’morally engaged paranoid’’

Atomized, desensitized

Fugitive-soldier-traitor-hero

Spy

Your public enemy

Demon personified

S-n-o-w-d-e-n’ s the name –

I am not afraid.

It’s the choice that I’ve made.

Lena Korkovelou was born 1987 in Athens, Greece. She studied English and American literature and culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, travelled extensively over Europe, then went on to work as a professional translator. She writes in three languages and as of 2012 she is based in London, where she is currently working on translating her first novel into English, and completing her Creative Writing MA at Kingston University.

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #4: HAMILTON

2013-06-12T17:13:00.006+01:00

Truth Teller

Only a crazy person.

An American,

crazy in this particular way,

has had to leave America.

Britain cannot countenance crazy people either,

or France, or Russia, or Israel, or. . .

Power cannot look at crazy,

crazy is a searchlight that beams into power's corners.

You would have to be crazy,

as Martin Luther was

when he nailed his objections to the door,

as Rosa Parks was

when she refused to give up her seat on the bus.

Bradley Manning crazy.

Edward Snowden crazy.

All the holy fools.

Sheila Hamilton graduated with a degree in French and German from the University of East Anglia in 1989. She is a widely published poet. Her first pamphlet, The Monster in the Rose Garden was published by Flarestack in 2001; her second One Match, an exploration of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, was published by Original Plus in 2010. A full-length collection, Corridors of Babel, came out in 2007 from Poetry Salzburg. Sheila lives on the Wirral in the North West or England. She is a reviewer and a mentor as well as a poet.

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #3: BATEMAN

2013-06-12T09:34:00.001+01:00

But Who Will Watch the Watchers' Watchers' Etc.

for Edward Snowden

Weren't we watching

Ourselves being watched?

Then our watches

Stopped. Elsewhere

There were watches

Running on. These,

You caught.

Micah Bateman works in libraries near Iowa City, Iowa, where he teaches poetry for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. He is the recipient of The Poetry Society of America's 2013 Lyric Poetry Award. His first poetry collection is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing. He edits petripress.org.

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #2: SHOOK

2013-06-11T23:11:00.003+01:00

We Real Sharp

THE NSA.

30,000 FROM FORT MEADE.

We real sharp. We

cut scarp. We

chase trail, your

email. We

mass scan. We

hide plan. We

real scared. No

one spared.

David Shook grew up in Mexico City before studying endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. His debut collection of poems, Our Obsidian Tongues, was published by Eyewear Publishing in 2013. He has translated Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist manifesto, indigenous Mexican poetry from the Isthmus Zapotec, and oral poetry by the Burundian Batwa. He served as Translator in Residence at Britain’s Poetry Parnassus at The Southbank, in 2012. There he premiered his covertly shot documentary about Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang. Shook lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet and pastor Syd Shook, where he edits Molossus and Phoneme Media.

POEM FOR SNOWDEN #1: LABABIDI

2013-06-11T17:13:00.000+01:00

Crimes of Conscience

Each time we betray our conscience,

we strangle an angel.

Yet, it’s not at all certain

we’re allotted an infinite supply

of these winged pardons.

Unheeded pricks of conscience

soon become soul-skewering

So that paradise seems a hell

and one must betray luxury,

safety and fear to tell the truth

The only cowardice being silence

the only courage one’s convictions;

and allegiance to a higher state,

the only chance at purifying grace.

Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-American thinker, and Pushcart-nominated poet, whose work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. To date, Lababidi is the author of 4 well-received books, in 4 different genres: Signposts to Elsewhere (aphorisms), Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (essays), Fever Dreams (poems) and most recently, The Artist as Mystic (conversations). His upcoming book, a collection of short poems, Barely There, will be available soon (Wipf and Stock). For more information, please visit his Amazon page: http://amzn.com/e/B0042SRQWG

Lord, Snowden

2013-06-11T15:43:00.004+01:00

Edward Snowden is in all likelihood one of the greatest Americans of all time, in terms of bravery, principled action, and impact. Rather than vilifying him, President Obama - more than ever a Bushlite character - should be pardoning him and making him a national hero. One day there may be a Snowden statue in Washington. Snowden, unless his story proves a false cover, gave up a life of relative luxury as a spy in Hawaii, on a big salary, to potentially die or be imprisoned for life, simply to express - as is his American right - the need for human freedom, and for the US government to stop their Big Brotherish invasion. Or, perhaps you see him as an enemy, aiding those who would attack America? Perhaps he is that complex thing, like Socrates before him - the gadfly destined to be executed by the state, yet indispensable even in his most painful revelations and questioning of democracy. Either way, Eyewear opens up its pages to POETS FOR SNOWDEN. 10 years after 100 POETS AGAINST THE WAR, it is time for POETS FOR SNOWDEN. If you send them in, I will post them. Include name please and bio - don't worry, the NSA already know who you are anyway.

Guest Poem by Lydia Bowden

2013-06-10T10:43:00.001+01:00

Eyewear is very glad to publish online a new poem by our sometime music critic, Lydia Bowden; the poem's youthful amourous theme very much suits the summer as it sort of develops, here, in London, from overcast and muggy to some sun poking through.

Bowden eating

Boyfriends Girlfriends

Aaron turned me into gold

and Tom made me look tall but

double in height was the other Tom.

Nick wrote the best love letters,

was more of a fling than any real thing

like Daniella and I,

I wonder where she went to,

until I fell for Adam, lasting all

of nine hand-holding, no-kissing

months until it all ended with

a run from a crowded room.

The feelings reappeared for Alice,

so I jumped into the bear arms

of Will, well, that’s the end of that

story.

Liam ignited a fire inside of

my tight fitting vest tops

where video games loomed

in a dark room, like a grave,

so across the street to Nick.

You were the first I ever saw,

take me to the floor, but just one

more computer game of autopilot, please?

I told him I was tired before I next picked

Tristan, older in mind set, younger in face let

me ride your car, like any other new teen

experience, experiment with me.

Things got in the way I said,

On I went to Sean I said, ok fine,

You can have a ride in mine

Any time, goodbye.

Different place, another face

comes Peter, I have a running theme

with the older, wine, fine I’ll

take you back to mine.

Another quick goodbye in the

form of a wide eyed Max.

James was someone that was there,

a couple here a couple there

but we both cared, care.

Sometimes we wait for each other,

maybe one day we’ll pucker

up, one final time.

But until that time, I tossed a dime

and fled, into bed with Thasos.

Chaos mit mayos.

But now I wait for Janey.

And I’ll still be

waiting for her twenty years

down the line,

this line that I’m struggling to climb.

It’s a shame that with time,

there is no exception like mine

to play with, so just play

with me one last time.

poem by Lydia Bowden

Through A Prism Darkly

2013-06-09T15:34:00.000+01:00

I was finishing reading John Le Carre's latest literary spy thriller, A Delicate Truth, when the news broke about the US government's secret Prism project, whereby almost all our online activities are received, recorded and analysed, at least potentially, by national security snoops. The last pages of the novel, which I feel is a masterpiece, and worthy of comparison to Greene's The Ministry of Fear and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, find Emily and Toby confronting a very compromised world, where digital activity automatically triggers massive response. I recommend the book highly - and am astonished by some of the lukewarm reviews. Its style, hard to relate to at first, grows on one, with its arch, italicised speech, and the passive-aggressive behaviour of its Establishment characters; after half the book was complete, I recognised it as a satire as well as a thriller, and perhaps the most moving and eloquent indictment of the privatisation of intelligence and warfare written by an Englishman.

Meanwhile, what are we do to with this world of megacompanies, who not only don't pay taxes it seems, but use our use of them and their waterlike ubiquity to turn us all into snitches, on ourselves. I am tempted to leave the online world behind, and leave no trace, but then, must ask a few difficult questions - what do I have to hide, and am I not glad the US/UK is trying to stop the detonation of a nuclear weapon in London or Manhattan? For, despite my love of freedom, I have a fear of extremists as well, and know that, though it pains my little ego to say so, the powers that be aren't after poets and editors (yet), but terrorists. True, they can also use their information to blackmail, and control anyone who they might see as a threat, and we have seen how the police in this country have tried to break activist groups that were not major public threats - but it seems a wider more shocking truth is available: we are all enmeshed and compromised by a sordid series of compromises with Western "democracy" and capitalism, and the way out of the digital moral maze is very hard to locate, even with the latest technology.

The Fall New Low

2013-06-04T20:50:00.003+01:00

Last night I watched a young woman be bound and gagged provocatively, then suffocated to death, after her boyfriend was stabbed to a bloody pulp with long scissors, by a serial killer obsessed with "making his own pornography". No, this wasn't some sick Internet site, nor was it a DVD or movie for adults. It was a BBC 2 TV show, on Monday night, at 9 pm, with strong violence and language from the start.

This after several weeks of hand wringing about banning violent and degrading porn sites, as it may have led to the escalating sadism of a child killer in Britain recently convicted. The Fall, a highly-rated, expertly filmed and acted five part thriller series, starring X-Files hero Gillian Anderson, is by far the most unsettling terrestrial TV I have ever seen, in how it fetishes the abuse and slow murder of young attractive women, in a context that involves scared children, and very horrific images and concepts. It also graphically shows how to stalk and break into women's houses. It is a blueprint for murder, an incitement to hate, despite its skin-deep pretence at feminism.

Simply by being knowing enough to indicate you know a killer is objectifying women does not mean you are being the change you want to see in the world. Better to not depict what is sick. I know you will say it is pure entertainment - but why is graphic bondage and suffocation, with clear depictions of terror on the faces of the victims, in the eyes, and their screams considered entertainment, while we seek (rightly) to want to restrict access to violent and degrading sexuality? The sex crimes in this film - though depicted with some clothing - are obviously sexualised in nature (the killer seeks to overpower women on their beds). This is hate porn dressed up as high-class drama.

Now, I know that one of my favourite films is Peeping Tom - a very dark and equally transgressive exploration of sexual sadism and scopophilia, and I know Hitchcock also did this forty years ago in Frenzy - but both were films you had to pay to see in a cinema. BBC2 is free, and also accessed later online. Why are we putting such sordid images and scenarios into our heads? The world is already filled with sickeningly high levels of terrible violence against innocents.

EYEWEAR WILL BE BACK

2013-05-31T14:18:00.003+01:00

June is coming soon... and so are more poets to be featured, and many reviews. But for now, I am off to the Poetry London summer launch tonight - and then to enjoy some sun for a few days. Be well - and buy British indie poetry!

New poem by Todd Swift

2013-05-24T11:55:00.003+01:00

ON THE JOYS AND SORROWS

They say that blessings pour down on your head

when they do. Blessings, I’ve had a few. I feel

thrilled with being less than dead, which is here-I-am

collaborating with the physical agents on the wild

run of things, slip-sliding away. Days go, sunrise.

This is the document in which I will nailgun your heart

to my heart and together we’ll slide like yippies

all the way into toy town, rioting in joyousness.

This is the loudest testament I can afford to jolt

you with using script. Now twist and shout too –

you’re embroiled in my love, as the poem relies

on your recognition. Canonise me, love, glorify

the shiver of decoration overcoming my soul qua soul,

and all the raw feels that decipher themselves as codes.

Break, dash, dot and squall – fling off your nakedness

and dress like a dashing guard in a prison of Godliness,

perhaps a naval officer with a handlebar, a hat.

The university where I work does not value me, boo-hoo,

as much as the rain, the dew, the petals, the lapwings do.

Ecology is a madhouse of intentions exploring itself

forever for no reason but decaying exploits, the planet

is a nut’s cage we celebrate at our own peril, best to fled.

Fleeing is what I seek, who came to live among yobs

and loons, and the flesh of adorable girls named Eunice,

Theodora and Miss Coq au Vin. I was Jesus back then,

rise as Barabbas, hairy and pledged to guilt as a badge

of stapled disgrace. I grow sex like a prank on my face.

This is a big splash on the poetry scene, it makes a call

for you to confront your imago and go berserk for art,

which is all we have of Arvo Part, and of season Seven.

So go Coastal, boast and strum your mandolins, rejoice!

The corner with the hapless poet is clear, take your place.

Angels and dreamers ignore all that you have done, why

should they appreciate a jotting of their own monologues?

No, you are lustrous ephemera, a hacking cough, phlegm

on the sleeve of a commandant who holds bitter reigns;

judges, critics, deans, inquisitors, and those who run archives

have better lives than do those who bolt past bounds;

merely immortal, you wait, love-delayed, for old fate

to overtake you; the direct train to Waterloo blasting its drive.

Only then, once dead, will you be read – if even then.

Mostly, rise and sing, strip down to your tremulous knees

and knock on the door marked Forget About It.

The sheer delight is to know your detractors also rot

and when they do, they do so without Beauty’s tit

suckling them in the tomb. Grass grows across my lips

which makes me spit. I stick my fist out of the loam and shout

to the guy with the shovel to come running like Hercules.

Together, we shall dance upon the opening that was my loss,

the berth that was my death. Stood up again I am not lonely

now. I have in tow an ill-bred witness to how nothing ends

that begins in verse and hurtles out on its own ceaseless lust.

May 24, Maida Vale, 2013

The Tax Moan

2013-05-21T15:49:00.003+01:00

The growing realisation that the key figures of our Online-Digital Age - Google, Amazon, and Apple - have made hundreds of billions of dollars in profit from us little people - and not bothered to pay more than a tiny fraction of that back in taxes to help our societies reminds all of us, I think, of the unsustainable nature of commercial greed, when unfettered. Beyond all the talk of ethics, and regulation, lies the humanity of the issue - are we or are we not all in the same boat? Apparently, according to top bankers and CEOs, not. I do not know where these people live - in havens? - but if they enjoy the safety of the public roads, the security of the armed forces - then they should pay their income tax like everyone else. As a small businessman trying to make ends meet, I am not in favour of very high taxation for companies at a time of a sagging economy - 20% or so seems about right to me - but surely, .05% or .005%, is criminally absurd. In the meantime, what do we do about these tax avoiders and evaders? How does one boycott Google, and keep informed? Like the craftiest of drug dealers, the worst offenders are those that peddle to us the most addictive brands.

Guest Review: McMillan On Stubbersfield

2013-05-21T14:51:00.000+01:00

Andrew McMillan reviews

The Yellow Table

by Alicia Stubbersfield

It’s a rare pleasure to settle down with a book that cuts the crap, cuts the pretention and is smart enough to wear its learning lightly. With Alicia Stubbersfield’s fourth collection you feel immediately in the presence of someone at the top of their game; someone who understands the true power of poetry lies within the confident layering of poetic image with plain, direct, arresting statement. The first poem in the collection, ‘Stone’ ends with the stanza

Stone- not shell. No faraway tide sound,

no ocean-memory or lost sea creature.

Basalt, smooth as someone’s skin.

The opening of the collection underlining that it is a collection concerned with reality rather than fantasy, the realistic rather than the overly-romantic and the human rather than the blatheringly academic. ‘Stone’ appears in the first of the book’s three sections, ‘More Musicians’; which is followed by ‘Marking’ and ‘Influenced’. Undercurrents of medicine, surgery and mortality run under a lot of the poems, in ‘Lazarus’ (“I know that place, waking/ from anaesthetic, still in a dream”) and ‘Frozen’ (“Under the ice/grief’s small creature still quivers its fins”) and one of the most interesting conversations which emerges from the book is the dialogue between such fear and the spirit of ‘freshness’ and of new starts which appears in poems like: ‘Just changing the car’ (“now I’m sitting here, doing a deal/on my own”) although the resolute independent statement is destabilized slightly by the ending: “Sat Nav/ so I know where I’m going”. Such is the strength of this collection, it isn’t a monophonic tract on death or on new starts, it embraces the human condition of having to deal with both at the same time- and everything is honest- a new direction might be embarked upon but the Sat Nav, a machine not a human, might have to be relied upon for navigation.

On a personal level, I’ve always been fascinated by the parts of poems which reach beyond themselves, reach through Poetry (in the proper noun sense of the word) into an arresting plainness which seems to be as honest as it’s possible to be, the most truthful to a reader. Stubbersfield gives us such moments; in ‘My Ex-Mother-in-Law’ (“Home became the smell of old lard”), in ‘The Prescription’ (“Stanley leaps to meet me, his whole body pleased”) , in ‘March’ (“I still think about March 1998/when I lay on the sofa, waiting,/ while the final chemo raced through my veins”). The power in the last quote gaining its strength from its honesty, from its plainness.

Another thing which interests me in poetry is the power of the negative, the depths that the word “not” opens up when considered against what something is. Stubbersfield uses this technique to great effect, particularly in ‘Sunday Morning’ (“One magpie tearing at roadkill/is not necessarily an omen”) and in ‘November’ (“not looking as it melts back to mud”). The latter quote also showing Stubbersfield’s strength of craft- any other poet might have simply ended with a twee “not looking back” but here it is the snow that is melting back to mud; a much subtler metaphor is achieved. Another example of deft handling of metaphor comes at the very end of ‘Yorkshire’ where the line “males showing off what they can do” in relation to the mating calls of Curlews opens out into a statement on war and love- the biggest subjects of all, handled minutely and delicately by Stubbersfield.

The poem ‘Miles Away’ is illuminating into the craft of Stubbersfield; in a witty poem about the pitfalls of internet dating profiles, the poet recalls a moment when a friend “suggests I write poems about them./ A sequence perhaps” but this idea is firmly rejected with the act of swiftly removing the profile. There will be no cheap tricks in the collection, nothing extended beyond its necessary borders, no sequence on internet dating which would have felt false to the true experience. Whilst on the subject of craft it seems pertinent to consider one of the overall abilities of poetry- that of contraction, of distillation. During the book’s second sequence, based around Stubbersfield’s time as an English teacher at secondary schools, the opening of ‘Marking’:

Piles of exercise books next to my chair,

the oily smell of them, the stickiness

of Year 9 pages

captures everything of the angst, the turmoil (both biological and emotional) and the physical manifestations of adolescence. What some poets would labour over suggesting through the journey of an entire poem, Stubbersfield is able to contract and distil into three accomplished lines. The ‘Marking’ section of the book contains some intensely powerful endings to poems, which are built up to perfectly and would be spoilt by quotation (but read ‘Year 7, Period 1, Wednesday’ and ‘Keeping it Back’ to see what I mean). What strikes you on reading this collection is how so much of contemporary poetry uses the end line of a poem to tie itself neatly off in a bow, to close in on itself; these endings seem to do the opposite, they open the poem out further, pull the reader into the white space below and add depth; in the poem ‘Over’, where Stubbersfield recounts having her contraceptive coil removed, the poem ends with the haunting:

[…] it looks fresh,

he says and I feel obscurely pleased

as though I’d kept it nice on purpose.

Rather than closing off the poem that opens it out into other considerations, other thoughts and feels somehow more satisfying than an ending which mutes itself and sews itself up.

What this review hasn’t mentioned yet is the heart of this book, it’s ability to break it, it’s ability to mend it- it’s ability to move it. ‘The Game’ and the poems dealing with familial alcoholism are profoundly moving as is ‘In Need of Some Updating’ which deals with maternal and paternal loss. Such heartbreak is foiled by the celebratory, such as in ‘Valentines Day’ where Stubbersfield is seen “doing something/different with my heart/holding it in my own cupped hands/watching it swell again”. Once again we get not just one or the other, not just heart swell or heartbreak, we get the very human honesty of having to live with both. The titular poem of the collection, which appears in the third section ‘Influence’, could perhaps be read as a summation of the project and craft of Stubbersfield as a poet. The yellow table which was ‘mother’s defiance of post-war monochrome’ is dismantled at the end of the poem

I unscrew four pale-oak legs, the extending flaps

from each end and place the top along the skip side,

yellow Formica facing outwards, still gaudy, still doing it’s best

stripped of all its extras, the legs and the flaps, the table still retains its characteristics, it is still “gaudy, still doing its best”. This collection is offering us poetry with all pretention, all artifice, anything unnecessary stripped away but the poems still retain the qualities which make great poems; human honesty, human frailty, heart-breaking and heart-mending love, deftly handled metaphors and tightly controlled distillation. “This one’s in the story” writes Stubbersfield at the end of ‘Change the buttons…’: this collection is in the human stories it tells, both the poets’ and those people she encountered, stories which might otherwise have been lost, stories which needed to be told, stories which we needed to hear.

‘Above the Roof Terrace’ closes the collection, it returns partly to the concerns of the collection’s first poem, ‘Stone’, considering mortality and an afterlife whilst beginning to slightly embrace a spirituality which the opening poem of the book rejects. The poet has moved during the book. The poet has moved the reader during the book. . This is the kind of honest, direct and beautiful poetry which should come to “inhabit the emptiness of air” puffed out by poets who wear their learning heavily. They would do well to look to these poems, “soaring”, they would do well to “transform into their human selves”; they would do well to learn from Stubbersfield, that it’s “in the story” that true poetry can be found.

Andrew McMillan was born in South Yorkshire in 1988. His most recent pamphlets are the moon is a supporting player (2011, Red Squirrel Press) and a new pamphlet-length poem protest of the physical will be published by Red Squirrel Press at the end of 2013. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing and will be teaching two Poetry School courses in Manchester during the summer. He is working on a first collection.

Guest Review: Van-Hagen on Jordan

2013-05-21T14:43:00.002+01:00

Steve Van-Hagen reviews

Regeneration

by Meirion Jordan

Meirion Jordan, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection for Regeneration’s preceding volume, Moonrise, is from an intellectually eclectic background – he won the Newdigate Prize while studying for his first degree in Mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford, before moving to UEA to complete a Masters, and then a PhD, in Creative Writing. It is unsurprising, therefore, that he has produced an eclectic, undeniably unusual and rewarding second collection of poetry.

Regeneration (2012) is immediately striking for its material appearance and organisation. As one reviewer (Jacqui Kenton at New Welsh Review – see http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=292) has already observed, Regeneration is ‘tête-bêche, with the White Book and Red Book at each end and upside down.’ These two-collections-in-one which meet in the middle reference two medieval (fourteenth-century) manuscripts, Llyfr Coch Hergest (The Red Book of Hergest) and Llyfr Gwynn Rhydderch (The White Book of Rhydderch), important sources for the tales of the Mabinogion. As Jordan argues in suggestive prefaces to both Books, the collection aims not at retelling the tales of the fourteenth century, but at exploring how they establish a dialogue with our own culture. The collection seeks, therefore, to address the ways in which the (sometimes distant) past continues to erupt problematically and polemically into our present. As Jordan argues in the preface to The Red Book, he does not ‘seek to unravel the difficulties of [the eleven stories of the Mabinogi’s] composition, transmission and literary context’ but rather contends that:

Poetry is concerned most fundamentally with meaning and interpretation, and that implies in turn that this book is in some way turned towards those present in this imprecise, difficult dialogue: you, reading, and myself, shepherding this writing to your senses as best I can … These poems are an attempt to strike up a personal conversation with those worlds, whose vitality remains tangible … just as the tales themselves were an attempt to find conversation with other people and their perplexing, marvellous lives. The Red and White Books themselves have come to rest, in archives, well guarded and away from the mainstream of culture; these poems are nonetheless a reminder that their presence is still felt, and that like all other secondhand or discarded books they were once participatory acts.’ (p.8)

The prefaces are lengthy, and one wonders if they do not risk contradiction; by insisting so explicitly that the text seeks to avoid imprisoning us in meaning, we are inevitably left wondering why we are not allowed just to read the poems and so establish this for ourselves. Nonetheless, The Red Book tells us – invites us to participate in – tales of Arawn, the God of the Underworld (in the poem ‘Arawn, lord of Annwn’); Rhiannon, daughter of Hefaidd Hen, Lord of the Underworld, who was cruelly tricked into thinking that she had killed and eaten her only son Pryderi (in ‘Rhiannon’s gossips’, ‘Rhiannon in old age’ and ‘The birds of Rhiannon’); Branwen (in ‘Branwen’s Starling’), daughter of Llyr / Lear, sister of Bran and half-sister of Efnis(s)ien, who was married to Matholwch, King of Ireland, and tamed a starling to send a message to Bran in Britain to come and fetch her when she was struck by the cook while serving in Matholwch’s kitchens as a punishment for insulting the Irish people; Efnis(s)ien the Unpeaceful, Branwen’s afore-mentioned half brother, who mutilated the Irish horses in retaliation for not being consulted about Branwen’s marriage, causing Bran to offer the cauldron of rebirth to the Irish in compensation (in the poem ‘Efnisien’); Heilyn, the son of the Lord of the Dead, Gwynn ap Nudd (in ‘Heilyn, son of Gwynn’); Manawyddan, Rhiannon’s second husband (in ‘Manawydan in Lloegr’); Olwen, daughter of Yspaddaden the Giant, and Culhwch, her suitor (the son of Celydodon Wledia, and nephew of Arthur), whose completion of the thirty nine impossible tasks necessary to win Olwen will cause the death of Yspaddaden (in ‘Olwen’ and ‘Culhwch’ respectively); Gereint, who refuses to listen to his wife Enid’s warnings because he wrongly thinks she weeps for the loss of another lover (in Gereint ac Enid’); and Blodeuwedd, the flower bride of Llew, who falls in love with the hunter Granw Pebr and plots her husband’s death, for which she is turned into an owl (in ‘Blodeudd’).

As even this brief introduction suggests, much of The Red Book is concerned with sadness, mourning, longing and regret, with the passing of time and the processes of memory and reflection, and yet with the paradoxically life-affirming effects of reading about this subject matter. Appropriately enough for a collection about the recurrence of myths and their continuing ability to speak, even centuries – millennia – after their inception, the penultimate poem of The Red Book, ‘The birds of Rhiannon’, refers to the harbingers of otherworldly bliss who render their dead auditors unaware of the passing of time. ‘For the myth moves in cycles’, we are told at the start of the second stanza,

III.

But you will not. Your lungs

echo the forward motion

of time, shaking the heart’s seconds

beat upon beat. If the small space

that is forever this now,

or this, or this, in the god’s eye

is precious; how more so

in yours. You will not return

unless they call, to take and give.

For the living, however, time does pass. Unlike the beheaded Bran and others who hear the birds of Rhiannon beyond death, outside time, as we hear the myths we make and remake their meanings anew, signalling that we, and the stories, continue to move chronologically forwards. As the final poem of the Book, ‘Blodeuedd’, tells us:

But after the story

the loose ends

must spill, flapping

into the dark:

the legend stands

white as a hornbeam

under the moon,

the fields and shadows

thickening with voices.

The spillage of loose ends continues, ceaselessly; by reading these poems and remaking the legends for ourselves we too take our places as part of this spillage, as part of the clamouring throng of voices.

The White Book deals with the Arthurian legends which may be more familiar for many readers than the legends in The Red Book. Jordan’s Preface this time links the themes of Mallory’s version of the Arthurian legend with those of the Mabinogi from which the material of The Red Book derives. They are linked, Jordan argues, by ‘the same concerns of issue and generation’ (p.7). In The White Book, however, Jordan hits on a personal and (for the reader) challenging means of entering into modern dialogue with his source material. A textual conversation is struck up by means of footnotes between the tales of Arthurian legend of The White Book of Rhydderch and the biographies of Jordan’s own family, the events of the life of Jordan’s recently-deceased grandfather (re)read through Arthurian precedents.

Like its Red twin, therefore, the White Book deals with the elegiac, although here we have the Arthurian story related by each in turn of the surviving actors in Arthur’s drama. Each defines the departed Arthur, thereby defining and positioning themselves in relation to his fall in ways that compel us to think about the possibilities and the limitations of the perspectival. Part I begins with the first dramatic monologue, an elegy / lament for the dead Arthur, from Merlin. Next up is Cei (also known as Kay or Cai), Arthur’s foster brother, who is eager to justify himself: ‘I tell you, I was the first, / and gave my all for Arthur.’ He speaks of Arthur’s childhood and, famously irascible, makes repeated requests for forgiveness. Bedwyr (also known as Bedivere), Arthur’s butler, comes next, eager to speak of Arthur’s ‘years of ... great triumph’, and yet concluding with discussion of the ‘Poor child. Poor Arthur’, who ‘return[s] and yet do[es] not return’.

Another knight, Owain (son of Urien Far and brother of Gwalchmei and Gaheris) is next, who ‘had my part / in Arthur’s ruin.’ Confession is the keynote here:

Arthur

was our lord, and true,

in our quarrels, our timely murders;

we who loved Arthur

were his end and ruin.

The final confession of the monologue is one of betrayal. Owain’s brother, Gwalchmei / Gawain delivers the next monologue.

One of the two most eagerly awaited perspectives for any reader already familiar with the Arthurian narrative, is Gwenhwyfar / Guinevere’s (her name translates as ‘the White One’). She delivers an anguished, tortured tale of adultery:

... Arthur

was the one man

I couldn’t bear to hurt, and whose deep

cold

cauldron of a body

I could not love.

Hence, for any reader already familiar with the narratives of The Red Book, we are reminded of the cauldron of rebirth gifted to the Irish by Bran (which Efnis(s)ien eventually sacrificed his life to break). Arthur’s body therefore becomes the means by which those dead (Arthurian tales?) might be revivified anew.

Further monologues follow, from Drystan (also known as Tristan, the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, who was second only to Lancelot for strength), Dinadan, Esyllt (also known as Isolt, the daughter of the King of Ireland who died of a broken heart because she was too late to save Drystan / Tristan from a poisoned wound), Elen (also known as Elaine, who rivalled Guinevere for Lancelot’s affections), Galaad / Galahad (i.e. the son of Lancelot, who eventually found the grail that his father could not) and Melwas (the other-world King who abducted Guinevere). Only then, in ‘Le chevalier mal fet’ – ‘the knight ill-made’, a pseudonym later adopted by Lancelot – do we finally hear from the latter:

was that knight, the ugly,

the ill-made. It is hard

to admit

that I was there, wearing his skin. Hard

to admit I loved my king

and Guinevere both, and in my love

I ruined Britain, man and realm.

Jordan captures poignantly Lancelot’s conflict, his continuing wish, even as he feels guilt and remorse for what he has done, that there might be an alternative, if only in his dreams, to a life of social constraints in which he and Guinevere can never be together:

Arthur, I will not ask;

nor could you give.

But if there is

some make-believe country –

maybe named Logris –

where two people

who are older

than they dare recall

can live, outside of love

or fellowship, or time,

close only to each other

and the sea:

let them be there,

she turning her head

to a fair wind,

he holding her hand.

Let them go, Arthur,

as cleanly as Adam through Eden.

The final poems – the speakers are Medraut (i.e. Mordred) and, in an epilogue, Morgana – carry the story to its inevitable conclusion, narrating the battle of Camlan(n) and Mordred’s slaying by Arthur as the former nonetheless deals an equally fatal blow to the latter. Finally, Arthur makes his final boat journey to Avalon, tended by Morgana.

Poignant as Jordan’s reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend is, the tale will be familiar enough to many. It is invariably the intriguing, enigmatic relation to the modern double narrative that particularly fascinates. The links between the Arthurian narrative and Jordan’s personal / family tale are not always easy to decipher, arguably necessarily so given the positions he adopts in his prefaces. He claims,

These links between the overlapping worlds of the text – the personal margin and the entangling ground of literary tradition – are vital in the process of interrogation ... and although by refusing to make the precise nature of this contact apparent I have left some of this interrogation to the reader, I suspect that too much precision would risk obscuring the reader’s relation to Arthur in favour of my own. (p.8)

The ‘second’ narrative (co-narrative?) of Jordan’s grandparents is so personal that one often feels as if one’s intrusion upon it is voyeuristic and illicit. The footnotes divide broadly into two kinds, the (reasonably) factual, and the reflective. Linking his deceased grandfather with Arthur straight away by positioning a first footnote after the word ‘Arthur’ in the ‘Prologue: Merlin’, this first footnote reads:

1. My grandfather died on the 18^th of February, 2008, not quite 96 years old. It was not a sudden or an unexpected death; he had been seriously ill for some time before that, and by the end he was entirely bedridden. His brother had dies a few years before – who, with the possible exception of my grandmother – was closer to him than anyone. By the end he had suffered several strokes and his recollection of most things was poor. The only conversation he could make during the last years of his life mostly concerned his early life at Pant, above Merthyr, in what must have been (by my reckoning) the 1920s. (p.13)

The footnotes slowly disclose more information about Douglas Jones’ life and the narrator’s relation to him and his legacy. They seemingly become more ponderous, more cryptic and enigmatic, the tone more discursive; hence, in the final poem, ‘Medraut’, footnote 54 begins, ‘Sometimes the noise deafens us. Our memories become a small flicker against the white noise that is thousands of years of wishful, brilliant, heartbroken people straining to make themselves heard’ (p.76). Footnote 55 begins: ‘Sometimes, though, we are lucky, and the small voice that is the very real world finds us’ (p.79). Finally, as Arthur is conveyed off to Avalon in Morgana’s ‘Epilogue’, the final footnote has the final word on the author’s grandfather also:

56. As I say, my grandfather died on the 18^th of February, 2008; but he was born in April, 1914, on the very edge of the First World War – by which I mean, the root that grows through him to me there meets other roots, which meet other roots beyond – by which I mean too, that he still flourishes forwards, into the newest instant of time. Requiescat in Pace, old boy, you father, grandfather. And be thou with me. (p.84)

Despite this, the text is not nearly so crude as to suggest that Douglas Jones was a latter-day Arthur reborn – or at least not in any literal, clumsy way (at one point, for instance, we learn that Douglas was a conscientious objector). The two co-narratives flicker into greater significance as a result of their intertwining, sometimes illuminating one another in a way that seems overt, sometimes leaving us none the wiser as to their enigmatic relation. What is repeatedly suggested to us, however, is that the roots of the narrative of Douglas Jones’ life were indeed found in Arthur’s. The text’s unusual and inventive revelation of this discloses surely its greatest aim, which is to prompt us to reflect in a wider sense on our own cultural roots and on the ways we enter into continual dialogue with them, endlessly making and remaking the meaning of our own narratives.

Steve Van-Hagen is the editor of James Woodhouse’s The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: A Selection (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2005) and the author of The Poetry of Mary Leapor and The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (both London: Greenwich Exchange, 2011). His pamphlet collection Echoes, Ghosts and Others with Futures Ahead of Them (2012) is available from holdfire press.

Film Review: The Great Gatsby - the eyes have it

2013-05-18T13:37:00.004+01:00

The thing about The Great Gatsby is, everything about it has been said, and exhausted. Only solemn slight Tobey Maguire hadn't read the novel by the time it was being remade by Baz Luhrmann, which is so dumb it is almost okay. I saw it last night in 3D, and I loved it. Parts of it are as grand, silly, wild, and vivid as anything in American cinema, with the panache of Citizen Kane, the colour scheme of Dick Tracy. Most film critics have been very tedious about this movie, because it does not do justice to their idea of the esteem in which the novel should be held. The novel is the greatest prose poem in the American canon, and Fitzgerald was a Keats who lived too long - ruined by critical indifference and his own dipsomania and vulnerability. I love him too. You don't make poems into movies, and if you want to, you have to adapt them to the screen. This movie is an adaptation, and more to the point, an interpretation, of a mind set, a story, a sense of greatness, a sense of America at its height and about to fall. And the director has the perfect right to express his own vision.

What I enjoyed about this version is how literary it actually is - the framing device of Nick/F. Scott as a broken alcoholic writing the novel with the help of a kindly doctor works well, and the appearance of text on the screen - in homage to a PBS series on great American poets from the 1980s - always reminds us of the artifice of the film - this is a great text, being revisited. The 3D heightens the spectacle, and spectacles - and the CGI zooming across the Eggs, the ashen Waste Land, into the big city - is both preposterous and useful. The party scenes are absurd, dizzying and utterly, daftly, excessive. The fashion and sets are fun to look at, and the soundtrack is anachronistic and well chosen, including Lana del Rey and The xx.

What is revealed by the film is how flimsy the plot always was. A poor young man falls in love with a woman above his station, and, like a knight errant, sets out on a hopeless grail quest to win her hand, only to return too late to find she is married to another. He seeks to turn back time, and to make her recant all that she has done and been in the meantime, including having become a mother; his obsessive madness grows, and he becomes increasingly embroiled in gangsterism and financial crime, while appearing on the surface to be a charismatic bon vivant. This leads to vehicular homicide, and a revenge suicide-murder manipulated by his beloved's racist blue blood philandering plutocrat. All this is observed by a would-be writer turned stock broker, who lives next door, and conveniently is related to, or knows, everyone in the novel, more or less. The themes - the American dream gone sour - are illusion, delusion, collusion - and the corruptions of Mammon. As in Kane, greatly influenced by the novel, what the millionaire really wants is homely love; but money and power are used to buy it. And you can't buy it.

The plot, cobbled together from T.S. Eliot, and Arthurian Legend, and Hart Crane's poetry, and Scott's own life, is not the point. Indeed, the point is not the point - the book is an essay in style and manners, over content. The madness and murder at the heart of the story are smoothed out, like a butler ironing a newspaper, by the writerly modishness. What is forgotten is the terrible irony of the story - Daisy is an unworthy lady, and Gatsby is not great - he is a tarnished simulacrum of greatness; Daisy is a fickle hit and run driver, who abandons her man, often, and for bad reasons; and Gatsby has all the wrong values, and all the right moves - he is personality, but he is not a person. Like America itself, he is divided, misguided, and, ever-optimistic, hellbent on wanting an Arcadia that never was.

In short, Leonardo (tanned and beautiful) is ideally pink-suited to play him, and all the garish, vulgar, commercial vim of this version is exactly the point - the directorial version of the narrator as unreliable. We are not meant to get an authentic, admirable Gatsby. There isn't one. There are only versions, perceptions, possibilities. Notably, Baz grew up poor, his father a garage mechanic; and it is a garage mechanic who murders Gatsby, getting it wrong. Baz is speaking here to his father, and to us, in choosing this film. He is saying, you make of it as you will, and Gatsby is not the man you thought he was. He is more, and less. All that matters, in the end, is that you get drunk - on life, on poetry, on sex, on drink - which this film, these characters, do. - TS

Salt Tears

2013-05-16T17:44:00.000+01:00

No one who cares about British poetry would have been happy to read the news, widely facebooked about yesterday, that Salt was announcing a cessation of single-author poetry collection publishing. This is big news, because Salt had been publishing 30+ such volumes a year of late, under the editorship of Roddy Lumsden, a Scottish Bloodaxe poet with claim to being the formally inventive master of these isles; along the way, Salt championed many debuts of brilliant poets, including two major figures, Jon Stone and Luke Kennard. In all, they'd published around 400 such titles. Last year Salt was shortlisted for a Man Booker Prize for prose, which is also big news, and changed their fortunes.

Salt saw that the prose world was more open to their brand of indie brashness than the poetry world, which had rather noticeably not prized the Salt list as much as might have been expected, given its talent-rich offerings. Of course, the immediate reaction was a little ugly - poets angered, feeling let down. Laundry got aired that wasn't lily white. Okay, but hold on. Salt did a lot, and paid a price. I am glad to be a director of a publishing house because now I know a terrible truth that keeps me up at night, like some Lone Gunman from the X-Files.

The truth: poetry books don't sell at all well, unless they win or are shortlisted for a big prize; or are by a famous poet that is often on the BBC. You can tweet, and hype, and pop up, and bang tambourines, but you'll likely sell 200 copies or less of most debut poetry collections. As Keats did. The universe has a few rules, and that is one of them. Poetry sells 200 units if you are unknown. The world is cruel, but given most people have more than 200 friends and family members these days, it is also fickle and lacking money. Salt would still be selling poetry collections and publishing them if YOU were buying them. So, while you can, consider ordering a poetry book today, by a British indie press. Eyewear will do. And cut Salt some slack.

RS Thomas

2013-05-11T16:54:00.000+01:00

The great Welsh poet RS Thomas was born 100 years ago, in March, 2013 - and this weekend, his centenary was celebrated in Bangor.