By Todd Swift
When poets are publishers, other poets forget to notice them as poets. Thus, Todd Swift has remained a hidden diamond. So, to highlight his work, it delights us at Ars Notoria to bring his poem to you this month. It plays at many levels concealing the harshness directed elsewhere from the poem’s apparent impression!
a genie’s ease
The round eye of the burnt genie
who was naked and handsome
went into me, and he probed
what’ll it be? A beautiful one,
I winked, which he sent to me.
And, where will you go?
Walking, just I and she, I replied.
So: what would you have her see?
Which I thought of for a while, as we
began to talk and I wondered what to show.
Make her blind, if you
please, which he did with…
Todd Swift was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1966, and has been writing and publishing poetry for over 35 years. He is now a British citizen and has lived in the UK since 2004. His poems have appeared in hundred of journals, zines, newspapers, as well as anthologies, and in ten full collections and over a dozen pamphlets. He is also a TV writer who worked for Disney, HBO, Fox, Hanna-Barbera and the CBC, among many others. He has a PhD from UEA, and was recently the Pembroke College, Cambridge, Poet-in-residence/Visiting Scholar. He ran the Oxfam poetry series for a decade, edited the poets against the war books in 2003, and was poetry editor for Nthposition. Last year he came in third for the Oxford Professor of Poetry role. He is married to an Irish legal expert, and loves cats, wild swimming, music playlists, film noir, scissors, and snow.
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