William Logan: Our Savage Art

William Logan is a terrifying critic in that his pleasure—that foundation from which both poetry and criticism begins— is fused inseparably with principle, and these principles govern not only Logan’s taste in poetry, but also his purpose in judging poetry. Reading through Our Savage Art, the reader is often reminded by Logan that time, above contemporary critics, is the great judge of poetry, and that with the exception of two golden ages in English poetry, only one or two poets from each century will be considered great—and often they’ll be poets no one could have predicted, such as a certain agoraphobic spinster from Amherst, Massachusetts. This being the case, Logan looks at the contemporary poetry scene and sees a host of poets writing, only one or two of whom will be remembered.

That being said, whether the reader’s taste aligns with Logan’s or not—whether the reader has even read the poet under review—Logan can be funny as hell in a nasty way. Reading his reviews are like staring at an accident as you pass on the highway. He finds the soft spots in a book where the poet is revealed as flawed—or, sometimes, simply human—and expands the weakness into a caricature the less critical reader can easily recognize. In some ways, he resembles early Randall Jarrell in that his writing is as entertaining as it is informative, although at times the tone of his criticism seems more mean-spirited. But, Logan is perhaps more honest about the contemporary situation of poetry than Jarrell was at his time, when he was championing friends like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, though he began to sour on Williams after the second book of Paterson.

Still, though some readers may be offended by Logan’s brutal candor, his essays on Hart Crane—which include Logan’s original review (“Hart Crane Overboard”), his response to readership outrage (“On Reviewing Hart Crane”), and a final post-script where he responds to specific complaints from Marjorie Perloff—systematically evidence that Logan almost always has a valid point. The disjoint comes from whether or not the reader agrees with the principles behind Logan’s critique. For instance, Sherod Santos writes suburban verse dealing with sadness and regret—after a dozen examples of them, Logan claims, “...you want to put your hand into a lawnmower blade.” This made me laugh aloud, but you see the discrepancy—while it may be difficult to deny that Santos writes a lot of suburban verse, I tend to enjoy that sort of thing. If it’s well-written, I can plow through loads of it. Such is taste. I’ve never read Sherod Santos, but ironically, Logan’s review made me want to. I also laughed when Logan wrote that Gary Snyder’s prose looked like a volcano “erupted in Mrs. Purple Prose’s 11th grade English Class,” and when he remarked that, “The only way Ammons could have improved Ommateum would have been to burn it.” Ouch. I could go on—and on—but you get the point. Logan’s reviews are entertaining, in part because few allow what he writes past their social censors, especially in a world as small as poetry, where everyone knows everyone.

Logan’s sparingly positive reviews of poets still writing (he praises most modernists) or recently deceased include Anthony Hecht, Don Paterson, and Geoffrey Hill. Geoffrey Hill in particular, to whom Logan devotes a significant amount of writing in Our Savage Art, reveals some of the prejudices in Logan’s taste. He favors difficulty and obscurity, or at least he favors what these traits have to offer poetry. Conversely, poets who are not difficult are typically lambasted. Of course punching bag Billy Collins receives the worst of it, but Ted Kooser doesn’t fare well either, and Mark Strand only makes out a little better. Logan also guns for the jokester inheritors of funny man Kenneth Koch, specifically James Tate, Dean Young, and Tony Hoagland. Behind the harsh reviews of these figures is one underlying principle—a well-crafted joke is not worth a serious reader’s time.

Some of the work Logan does is indispensible to readers, for instance, the chapter “Frost at Midnight”, in which Logan systematically debunks The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen. The amount of errors and mistakes Logan points out in the edition, some of them beyond ridiculous, makes one thankful there are critics to hold editors and poets accountable. Logan estimates there are well over 10,000 mistakes in the edition, something most readers would never know—texts such as The Notebooks of Robert Frost are supposed to exist so people don’t have to pour over barely legible source texts.

Our Savage Art is an insightful and honest book of criticism, as entertaining as it is erudite. It covers a variety of well-known authors currently writing, and it revisits established poets such as Ashbery, Bishop, and Lowell. It should be noted that Logan doesn’t cover many under-the-radar poets, or really much discuss post avant-garde texts or performance poetry at all, but I imagine the omission is the primary criticism—he doesn’t consider them worth writing about. Ah well. There’s no complete accounting for taste, and no reader should agree with everything a critic writes. But Logan is one worth listening to. Again, more often than not, it’s difficult to disagree with what he’s saying—instead, the question becomes whether or not you agree with the principles from which Logan’s acumen stems.