E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

It is always fun when The Economist reviews poetry. Who is their anonymous reviewer, I wonder? Someone rather dry, serious, even-handed, and a little conservative, perhaps. They were recently a little baffled by Muldoon . Now they seem slightly puzzled by Ashbery . The good thing is, their review of 384-page Notes From The Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, or in the UK, Carcanet) actually engages with the poet's language, rather than entirely recoiling from it, as some British critics do. Here are some of the things they say: "beguilingly casual"; "delicately playful"; "perpetual shifting of tones"; his tone can be "alarmingly inconsequential"; "endlessly digressive". His manner is "free-flowing, conversational" - lines often "untrammeled by any concern about whether or not they scan". And, finally, "Mr. Ashbery likes using similes in his poetry" - that last not so surprising, as most poets do. Reading...

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 sta...

One doesn't have to be Noam Chomsky to recognise that the "West" has a circular logic to it, one that has been cruelly exposed this week, during the G8 summit, and the scandal involving massive kickbacks for armaments. The West - according to Tony Blair in his recent Economist article - is fighting a battle against forces that want to destroy our way of life and oppose our core values of democracy, and freedom. That's why, for example, we're in Iraq, hemorrhaging badly. However, the West isn't based on democracy or freedom. Tony Blair, asked, beside a smirking George Bush , the other day, at the G8, about an ongoing corruption scandal linking money for weapons systems, said he couldn't have allowed the corruption investigation to proceed, as this was a matter of "national security." Though we in the West "elect" governments into power, once they are in power, they prosecute wars, destabilise foreign regimes, and support the global ar...

After September 2001, America experienced its burning Reichstag moment - a trumped-up (or misinterpreted) crisis laid the groundwork (amid the rubble in Manhattan) for the rise of an extremist American Presidency, one that could be described as neo-democratic, or pseudo-fascist, but is basically a new hybrid form of ideology - hyper-capitalism fused to hyper-militarism: do as we say or your're f----d as one Bush lieutenant put it. In 2003, when I and countless other poets were among the first to warn of this, many in the media suggested this was mere scare-mongering. Now, as Bush is poised to attack Iran (see this week's The Economist for their sober version of how this could very well happen) and is offering to cut health care for the weak and aged in America to pay for his continuing insane war aims in Iraq, a turning point has occured, today - a major breaking point you might say. Russia has said enough is enough. The days of the hegemony are over. Unipower is being challen...

Only in England would the literate (if not literary) media still be bamboozled about Paul Muldoon (pictured) or rather, flabbergasted or then again puzzled - by his command of word-play, puns and other linguistic paraphernalia in his writing. How else to explain the contrasting versions of Muldoonland displayed in recent issues of The Economist (October 21st-27th) and The Guardian ? The Guardian's Saturday book section ( The Review ) has rightly selected his latest collection from Faber, Horse Latitudes , as Book of the Week, snatching it from the ghetto of the poetry review demi-page. James Fenton , himself a former Oxford Professor of Poetry, and major English poet, welcomes the book, Muldoon's tenth, as "an event". But over at the (more conservative) Economist , the unidentified reviewer is more economical with their praise of another new Muldoon publication, his Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem . The reviewer of these 15 lectures seems slightly overwhelmed:...