[Thomas Newton]

Poetry Review of The New Yorker
(Issue of 2004-07-12 & 19)

There are two poems in this issue: “The Fatal Shore” by William Logan and “In Krakow” by Czeslaw Milosz.

William “The Most Hated Man in American Poetry” Logan has written his poem in twenty lines of vers libre, in the best American poetic tradition going back through Allen Ginsberg to Williams to Whitman. Unfortunately by the second line of the poem his poetic genius has transported us back to ancient Greece and the Trojan War. So much for the Williams search for a “new measure” trying to define a new poetry which sounds American rather than European. Between the incoherent flip flopping from the present fatal seashore to the fatal shore of the Trojan War, and the use of ancient Greek terms like Achilles and Myrmidons; Logan has produced a poem that only A. E. Stallings could appreciate. On a broader level, the man on the street and the Wall Street Journal would say, “How can he claim to be a poet? This stuff doesn’t even rhyme!"

Czeslaw “Nobel Prize” Milosz’s poem translated into vers libre by Robert “Poet Laureate” Hass--what else needs to be said? Even The New Yorker couldn’t go wrong with that combination could they? After all what does The New Yorker know about poems?
--Thomas Newton, Poetry Reviews from a Conservative Perspective

[This message has been edited by Thomas Newton2 (edited August 09, 2004).]