Massacre
"This, you can’t help but feel, is what most people want poetry to be. A poem should be like a greeting card—with a point so blindingly obvious that reading it is like getting hit by a lead pipe. The poem should tell a little joke, perhaps shout Ba-da-boom!, and skip off stage. If it can’t make a joke, it should squeeze out a few cheap tears."
(William Logan reviews Ted Kooser, Melissa Green, Elizabeth Spires, Campbell McGrath, Marie Howe, and Jorie Graham. From The New Criterion)
*****************************
posted by C. Dale @ 8:20 PM
18 comments
18 Comments:
My suggestion is that William Logan stop reading poetry since none of it seems to be up to his sniffy standards. And he can just go fuck himself.
Logan's rhetorical approach may be offensive to some; however, his ideas and evidence (textual and contextual) are always dead on. His "sniffy standards" would really help the poetry of those who sit on the mount with their sycophants buffing and polishing their toes. Graham, Kooser, etc need bold critiques the most--even if they won't pay attention to them. Logan is one of the few who will keep the perpetually-fawned-over in check.
I've got to go on Collin's side here. Yes Graham and Kooser need critics, but saying Kooser is simplistic or alluding to Grahams difficulty is a little lazy.
The poetry you read and admire doesn't have to be the kind of poetry you write. There is a lot of great poetry out there that isn't like my poetry. It seems like Logan is trying to say that if it isn't in line with me, then it's no good.
This post has been removed by the author.
^Steven is exactly right.
Perhaps Loan should take some of his double and triple adjectives and use them to prop up his banal work. Those who can, do. Those who can't, criticize.
Logan that is...oh, and see Steven just deleted his comment, which ruins the context for mine. Thanks for that!
Sorry, Collin.
Hmmm--I'm not sure if we all read the same omnibus. Logan is many things, and assumes many personas, but one thing he is not is a lazy critic. The painfully-naive cliche about "those who can" doesn't even deserve a response. It's too bad that poets today are not better critics. Critical inquiry makes better writers. I guess platitudes have replaced this idea, and it shows.
Logan expresses displeasure in the unbearably trite and dull poems by Kooser, not his "simplicity." He praises the last poem in the collection because of its simplicity of language and depth of idea--like Frost's successful poems. And I agree--the collection, except for a few poems, is as insightful about love as are the sticky fumblings of teenagers in a John Hughes' film. The poem about candy wrappers is as vapid as Logan states. He doesn't find fault with simplicity; he finds fault with poor, unattended writing.
Logan praises "difficult" poetry--in fact,somewhat to a fault, he is probably the most outspoken fan of Hill, whom I find impenetrable most times. Logan is also an admirer of Graham's early work. He praised it in print, even though it is Nothing like his poetry. Logan laments that Graham has lost the surprise element in her poetry, that ideas have risen to the height of imposition, that through recognition (intellectualizing) and justified preparations of form and function she has lost what made her early poems so compelling. It is a call to action, hyperbolic and satirical like writings by Stevie Smith, Swift, Pope, Franklin, Twain, Orwell, O'Connor, Moore. He questions the devolving sensibility of the establishment who rest on their prior accomplishments and half-baked poems because they can. We need someone like him. If Logan, a true lover of poetry and one of the most informed and engaged readers we have--even if you disagree with his aesthetic stance--were to quit reading poetry, I would fear for its future.
It's amazing how many people are out of touch with modern poetics. Or just out of touch in general.
Adam (Kirsch??),
You have little to fear about William quitting poetry or quitting reading poetry anytime soon. His love of poetry and Letters is great, and that was beyond evident when I was his student 15 years ago. He is one of the only people I know would still go in and teach even if he won the Lottery.
CDY
It's interesting, the modulations in tone over the course of the review. He dispenses with Kooser quickly and harshly, then offers fairly nuanced critiques of three lesser known poets, then finishes with a well developed mini-essay on Graham. (His point about ambition ruining talent is a good one.) I can't say he's unfair to any of these poets. I don't know of a non-simplistic way of saying that Kooser is simplistic!
It seems to me there is a positive aesthetic hidden there in the middle three reviews. Although I don't exactly agree with Logan's exact preferences, I share with him a kind of "aesthetics of irritation." Even poetry I like irritates me quite often and I like exploring why, exploring the limits of my own taste. This entails a certain negativity, but so be it. A critic has to first be a critical reader.
I meant four poets, not three.
I think most have missed the point about Kooser's little Valentine collection. It's not a serious book of poetry, nor is it meant to break any new ground. It's a remembrance of this little postcard project he started and the many women who found it endearing. Attempting to hold it to any type of "standard" is ridiculous. It was a bit of fun, which is seriously lacking in poetry these days on many levels.
Best ever response to Logan here.
And after you read the review of Logan's book, make sure to read Halliday's response in the comments. I hope we all respect Halliday's erudition and wit in his poetry and criticism.
If you can find a copy of an old book of Logan's called, warningly, Sullen Weedy Lakes (the book that convinced me never to bother reading his verse again), you can spend an hour or two with his prissy, humorless faux-profundity — a poetry that like his criticism has all the flavor and nutritional value of gruel. Back in the mid seventies he passed through the Iowa Workshop like crap through a goose, evidently never meeting a native Iowan. Not that we all have to write for native Iowans, but there's no shame in it. It's certainly preferable to writing for fellow languid lingerers in the shadow "The Waste Land"; their numbers are few, and their exhausted aesthetic—that handful of dust—doesn't serve any living reader well. Whatever Kooser's faults may be, he at least allows joy and humane concern into his poems: you know ... those qualities Logan finds only in greeting cards....
LOL Joseph
I disagree with Logan's taste quite often, and don't see him as a great poet either, but why go ad hominem? The fact he didn't meet a native Iowan is not even an *interesting* biographical fact, if it is even factual in the first place. The low level of discourse of the attacks on Logan make me want to defend him, something I never thought I would do.
<< Home