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

The Canadian Griffin Prize for poetry has recently been awarded to two very deserving poets: Robin Blaser won the Canadian prize, and the international prize (both for best book of the year in their respective categories) went to John Ashbery . Both poets are (wonderfully) octogenarians, inspiration to all poets of all ages. Ashbery noted that he'd listened happily to CBC radio as a boy (as did I) which was a lovely aside. It is a measure of the insularity of Britain's main gate-keepers of poetry that Blaser is little known in the UK, if at all, except by a few, and Ashbery continues to be something of a guilty pleasure. Just last year, for instance, the TS Eliot panel passed up the opportunity to shortlist his latest Carcanet collection (the same panel failed to award genius Edwin Morgan the top prize). Well, Ashbery's one of the two or three finest living poets, whose music is hard to shake once heard. Glad Canada's on the ball.

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...

The most influential and impressive living American poet, John Ashbery , turns 80 today. I missed his - was it 75th? - birthday in Paris a few years back - time is speeding up. Yet still the New York School master is, thankfully, abundantly with us (his latest collection, A Worldly Country , came out this year, in the UK from Carcanet). So: happy birthday, Mr. Ashbery. My poem for you is below. It may seem churlish to say so, but many (most?) British and Irish poets and critics just don't get this most versatile, fluent and loquacious of American poets - and in the process, miss not just a passenger, but the conductor and whole train of current American poetics and poetry. In Ashbery, WCW's American grain is rubbed smooth with French verse, an appreciation of abstraction in art and talk, and a big city insouciance that is both lyrically pleasing and intellectually perplexing. A few years ago, that most traditional of lyrical craftsmen, Seamus Heaney , told me he didn't thin...