I just found a rather harsh review of Dick Davis's new poetry collection on the New Criterion website. The review is part of an omnibus review by William Logan, who's regarded by many as a kind of literary assassin.

Here's the review. What do readers who've read the book think?
* * *


Dick Davis was part of a group of proper English formal poets, ardent admirers of Yvor Winters, that made almost no impact on British poetry in the seventies and eighties. Like many New Formalists in America, their verse was a little too careful, a little too ordinary, and a little too dull. Sometimes as formal poets age they unbend (all too often they become fossilized instead) and use their trained ears to write in classical simplicity.


The sun comes up, and soon
The night’s thin fall of snow
Fades from the grass as if
It could not wait to go.


But look, a lank line lingers
Beyond the lawn’s one tree,
Safe in its shadow still,
Held momentarily.

The first stanza might have been written by Frost, it’s so cleanly expressive; but the second must have been by Frost’s deaf yardman, with its clogged alliteration and the awkward rhyme on a secondary accent. It’s amusing to find an exponent of the classical virtues guilty, elsewhere, of a dangling participle as bad as some freshman’s (“Lifting her arms to soap her hair/ Her pretty breasts respond”).
The poems in Belonging[4] have the soulless and manufactured air of kitchen appliances (they’re like a refrigerator talking to a microwave). They don’t have room for the personality of craft and their meter comes from a handbook, the righteous handbook of Winters. (In a good poet the meter is rarely confining—it seems liberating instead.) The poems are so professional and suburban, they don’t allow anything to ruffle their complacencies—if they were married they’d be monogamous, and dues-paying members of the Kiwanis Club. You long for a little rowdiness to trouble their surfaces, but all you get is a watered-down cocktail of Frost and Richard Wilbur.
Wilbur is a hero to young formal poets and has been generous praising them, but he was a more baroque and metaphysical and intellectual poet than poets now dare to be—too many laws (the kind poets unconsciously observe, the laws of taste) have been passed against such elaboration and decoration. Wilbur was a Bernini once, who could say things in meter that free verse would never allow (Davis is stuck saying the things free verse rejects). It would be stimulating to have a few Berninis again.
At times you suspect Davis is a closet skeptic, but you’d have to threaten his family to get him to admit it. He pursues his craft in a dogged way, writing monotonous monorhymes, or lines regular as a metronome and twice as determined (“A child let loose on Nelson’s Victory/ I fantasized his last quixotic quest,/ Trafalgar’s carnage—where he coolly dressed/ As gaudily as if he wished to be … ”), or passages like Kipling in a malarial fit:

And the sudden breeze of sunrise, like a nervous lover’s hands
Hardly touching, but still touching, as my body understands,
Like a whisper that insists on life’s importunate demands

Tugging me to love and pleasure, to what passes as we sleep,
To the roses’ quick unfolding, to the moments that won’t keep,
To the ruin of a childhood, and the tears that parents weep.
Such sentiments are best left to the experts, the greeting-card writers.

Amid the humdrum and predictable verse, however, are a few epigrams as astringent as anything by J. V. Cunningham.


The pretty young bring to the coarsely old
Réchauffé dishes, but the sauce is cold.
That has a pleasantly bitter taste; but the next, on teaching poetry workshops, is even better:

A house was rented for the visitor
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTWho came to lecture here for one spring quarter:

In house and class his only duties were
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTTo feed the hummingbirds with sugared water.

Those lines have a delayed sting and you have to be patient enough to wait for it. A poet who can write epigrams shimmering with such wit, ragged with such despair, has no business writing anything else. Cunningham, a Wintersian himself, gave most of his last forty years to epigrams and wrote half a dozen that are among the delights of the last century. Davis could do worse with his next few decades.

I think it would curdle the blood of anyone to learn Logan had reviewed their book of verse.

I sometimes think Logan must work like Housman did on his reviews--keeping notebooks of perfectly honed poisonous witticisms, in hopes of finding an opportunity for using them.

Of course, this is also what makes Logan entertaining, but I cannot imagine making a decision to purchase or not to purchase a book based on his recommendations, or opprobrium. The purpose of these reviews is generally to showcase Logan's own cutting wit. And there is some pleasure in seeing it unleashed on, say, a Jorie Graham.

Per usual, none of the poets in this omnibus review gets off unscathed, of course. To read this in context:

Falls the Shadow

Interestingly, while Logan slaps Davis' wrist for being too strict in his measure, this is what he has to say in the same piece about an Alan Dugan poem:

"doughy, overwrought pentameter (with feet added here and there, like a home improvement project gone wrong)"

When he says elsewhere of another poet that it would be churlish to mention that it is the larvae of moths, and not the moths themselves, that leave holes in fabric--I think, yes, that IS churlish.

I suppose it must be some sort of back-handed compliment to have one's book singled out for his notice at all.

When Hecht was our Visiting Lariat, I made a scathing comment about Logan at Discerning Eye. He cornered me after my reading at London's Royal Festival Hall, saying "I'm the guy you referred to on the Internet as 'That idiot, William Logan.'" I told him how angry I was at his churlish dismissal of Tony's new book and of Wilbur's Mayflies, and he challenged me to refute him in discursive prose, which I do not write. Instead I wrote him this flyting and challenged him to respond in like stanza:

To a Critic

“The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.”
--W.B. Yeats

The grand seigneurs are few
who write well in old age,
who rise and stand erect
on Pindar’s vacant stage.
I have known only two,
Dick Wilbur and Tony Hecht.

Another in recent years
took Thomas Hardy’s hand
and labored up the slope
where Delphi’s columns stand
and Mount Parnassus rears:
the Aussie, Alec Hope.

Hope’s “Western Elegies,”
Wilbur’s “A thing well made”
and Hecht’s “Musical chair”—
go seek them in that glade
under Mnemosyne’s
nine daughters’ loving care,

the Muses who select
among the dumb and young
few who will learn so much,
write wisely or so long
as Hope, Wilbur, and Hecht—
masterful men whom such
as you will never touch.

So now Dick has the glory of being treated just as shabbily as Hecht and Wilbur, the latter of whom responded to my poem in like stanza:

"In future should some jerk
From Gainesville denigrate
The merits of my work,
I shall not hesitate:
I'll just say "Sic 'em, Tim,"
And thus get rid of him.

To answer your question, Paul, I have Belonging in manuscript, and I think it includes some of Dick's most affecting poems. It is encouraging to me to see a guy five years my senior extending his range and doing his best work at a time of life when too many poets have burned out. So much of Dick's best early work is bitter and informed by his long experience of exile, that it is a pleasure to see him mellowing and "Belonging" with the approach of age.

Good poets aren't hurt by bad reviews.
William Logan is a god.

I am so freshly incensed at Logan (my Yale classmate whom I never met til February, strangely enough), that I have written a sestet for Dick Davis, which solves two problems in the poem: First, it eliminates Hope from the sphere of Logan's obloquy (he hasn't dissed Hope in print, to my knowledge, but given his unfailing disdain, he probably despises Hope's later work.) Second, it inserts the senior, controversial figure of my own generation:

To a Critic

“The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.”
--W.B. Yeats

The grand seigneurs are few
who write well in old age,
who rise and stand erect
on Pindar’s vacant stage.
I have known only two,
Dick Wilbur and Tony Hecht.

Another in recent years
took Thomas Hardy’s hand
and labored up the slope
where Delphi’s columns stand
and Mount Parnassus rears:
the Aussie, Alec Hope.

Now Davis climbs that Way.
He is only fifty-six,
but him, too, you have trashed.
How does a vandal fix
or trade for meager pay
the canvas he has slashed?

A “Lonely friend, Louise,”
Wilbur’s “A thing well made”
and Hecht’s “Musical chair”—
go seek them in that glade
under Mnemosyne’s
nine daughters’ loving care,

the Muses who select
among the dumb and young
few who will learn so much,
write wisely or so long
as Davis, Wilbur, and Hecht—
masterful men whom such
as you will never touch.

What's criticism for? Some critics see themselves as keepers of the gates to immortality and tremble at the thought that an unworthy poet might sneak through. Others see themselves as slightly more observant or, perhaps, slightly more articulate but otherwise ordinary readers, with the advantage of a forum. The first sort lectures and berates like a Puritan in a whorehouse; the second sort converses with saints and sinners alike, aware that their common humanity greatly outweighs their superficial differences.
To my mind the only useful thing Logan points out is the dangling modifier. As a poet, I'd love to have someone alert me to such a slip of my own (although I'd have to take a deep breath to keep from being defensive in response to such needlessly dismissive language). The two stanzas he contrasts? His discussion is merely an assertion of taste all dressed up in critical terminology. It's okay not to like one or both, but why pretend you're invoking the eternal verities in condemning it or them?
There's enough bad poetry published to keep a churlish critic busy for life, but who wants to spend a life that way? Gresham's law does not apply to art; if it did, the good stuff would have disappeared long ago -- so there's no service rendered by wholesale condemnation.
Submit to the spell. Subvert your vanity. Trust me, it'll come back soon enough.
RPW

What really bugs me about this kind of review is not that he failed to appreciate something that I appreciate greatly --though he did-- but that his agenda was to prove to his readers how clever he could be in issuing his negative opinion. To make such mean yet ultimately pointless barbs such as saying a given poem could have been written by "Frost’s deaf yardman," for example, makes one wonder if he can be equally humorous when issuing praise, and, if not, whether he sometimes prefers to display his sense of humor rather than being fair and accurate.

Just as I don't like critiques at Erato when people come up with wittily condescending one-liners in place of criticism, I don't like reviews that use the same tactic.

Anyway, if I were Dick, I'd look upon this bad review as the fortuitous cause of my inclusion in Tim's poetic tribute, and I'd therefore be grateful to the reviewer who attacked me. (Well, almost...)

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited June 08, 2002).]

I pity William Logan. All he got out of Dick Davis' beautiful monorhyme was the dangling participle. Dick knew better than to remove the birthmark from his beloved's cheek.

Very nice response, Tim!

On the bright side, a negative review and any attendant controversy in the protected world of poetry can sometimes increase a books sales better than bland praise. And all of us who have copies of "Belonging" here heartily recommend it.

Although (or perhaps because) he can be infuriating, I do think William Logan performs a valuable service for poetry. A healthy art needs its negative reviews, and a reviewer who isn't afraid to make enemies (boy he sure isn't). He is especially good at poking a pin in the many overinflated reputations that pass for successful poets these days. And I must confess that I always read his reviews, both for their wit and their iconoclasm. I only wish he were as generous with his wit in his praise. (And about the only time I see him give unstinting praise, it is to a poet's previous book, to which he is unfavorably comparing the current, less successful effort.) He is very good at close readings, but I don't think I've ever seen an appreciation of a poet by him.

It is interesting in his review that he says he should "eat his words" referring to Hill's previous book, "Speech, Speech." I wonder if he often has second thoughts about books he has panned.

Putting aside the relish Logan shows in his own acidulous rhetoric, I did think his comments on Geoffrey Hill, some of whose work I rate very highly indeed, were not unjust.

Clive Watkins

I always relish Logan's "acidulous rhetoric" when he's trashing poets like Graham whom I despise. From the little I've seen of his own work, I regard him as a middling poet, not really worthy to shine the shoes of a Davis, a Wilbur or Hecht. And I wonder to what degree he is motivated by envy. On his latest book, by way of blurb, he quotes Robert McDowell: "The most hated man in American poetry." Now that's a guy with a hell of a chip on his shoulder. Yet he is very clever, and in person he is perfectly affable. He maintains that the non-accomplishment of the New Formalists is ascribable to our learning meter and rhyme too late in life to gain any real facility. That may be true of some of us, but others (like Steele, Gwynn, yours truly, Davis, etc.) never wasted a minute on free verse and were writing formally in our teens. I believe it probably is true of Logan, who like me, studied with Strand and Howard at Yale around 1970, and probably didn't turn to form until he was in his twenties, perhaps at Iowa. To his credit he is fiercely loyal to Donald Justice.

Here's a witty epigram from Belonging which Professor Logan didn't quote--perhaps because it cuts too near the bone.

"We Make The Canon"

--a Professor of Literature

An angry pustule on the face of letters:
A zealous Zoilus carping at his betters--

Who has the cheek to claim that he's the cause
The cheek he spoils has garnered such applause.

I agree with Roger's comments above. The best contemporary poetry critics--James Fenton, Dana Gioia, Tom Disch, and Bruce Bawer all spring immediately to mind--are just as witty and iconoclastic as Logan, just as willing to puncture poetic pretension and silliness. But they can appreciate as well as excoriate, and their enthusiasms--often, for new or neglected talents--are infectious. When he was writing regular poetry reviews in England, for PN Review among other journals, Dick Davis was this kind of critic too (I believe he was the first reviewer to praise Wendy Cope's early poems). That sort of generosity is missing in Logan. The only pleasure I've derived from his reviews is (when I happen to dislike the poet on whom he's turned his sights) the comparatively cheap one of schadenfreude.

As for Belonging, it's a testament to the book's manifold pleasures that the first batch of 20 copies sold out the first day at West Chester.

As an aside, I can't help but notice that Logan seems to drip particular venom on poets who take as their subject married love. Interesting, for instance, that he holds up for ridicule the opening line of the splendid and touching "A Monorhyme for the Shower," which celebrates desire's endurance in a union lasting more than twenty years (how anybody could perceive such a poem as "dogged" or "humdrum" is beyond me). And what sort of criticism is it to say of Davis's poems that "if they were married, they'd be monogamous"? Richard Wilbur is of course another great poet of marriage, and marital happiness. And Logan disparaged Mary Jo Salter's latest book a few years back in similar terms. I haven't read that much of his criticism, so I don't know whether it generally holds true, but the pattern seems striking.

Yes, I also was rather surprised to find "monogamous" such a pejorative term! (It does seem telling somehow...)

"Monorhyme for the Shower" is perhaps my favorite poem in the book. What perversity to pick that poem to carp on.

Great poem, Tim! I suspect that Logan's work will survive only as a brief reference in a footnote to your poem, included by some future anthologist by way of explanation.

I would be tired of hearing about William Logan if I heard more about him. I think his negative critical personality induces such anxiety because of a kind of dramatic irony, similar to that found in the characterization of the most nightmarish antagonists as smart, well-dressed gentlemen. He shows verbal intelligence by his use of diction, syntax, and punctuation. He is well read, and formulates trenchant critical remarks. He is calm and polite in person. Then again, in print he is always on the offensive against those capable people who, at a given moment, might see a point in rendering him publicly null. The time is seldom ripe to criticize his bland, mediocre poetry, and his po-faced obsession with pointing out over and over again that there will ever only be one Milton or one Shakespeare, and his disingenuous, tiresome playing of the Marketplace-of-ideas Card. It isn’t surprising, considering his purpose as a critic, which is apparently to win by knocking the cards on the floor, that he should come to the game exercising every other available caution. But this should distract no one from the fact that, far from relying on serious analysis, he really relies in his criticism on a mixture of simple assertion, pedantry, mere rhetoric, and audacity to argue his inscrutable taste with as much certainty as if it were scientifically grounded. One problem with answering this kind of thing is that, because he is intelligent and industrious, it is a pain to address the particular points on which he is most groundlessly smug or inconsistent--unless your purpose is like his. It is an awkward pain to argue defensively. It is exhausting to separate, formally, the bad and gratuitous from whatever might be persuasive. These are also pains that most people are probably inclined to live with because they are hardly life threatening. But they may unfortunately always be there as long as he writes. It is the fact that no one knows what to do about pains such as these that creates anxiety and in the end does little but reduce the quality of life somewhat. Though it might cause anxiety, my suggestion (for whatever it's worth) would be to let him remain as he is: a de facto nihilist in the guise of an uncompromising idealist, a man concerned mainly with developing an already crazed sense of the absolute sovereignty of his own critical judgment. It regards him more than it does anyone else.

Thanks, Bruce: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" And Josh, welcome to the Sphere. Are you the dedicatee of Dick's lovely poem, "Aubade?" No, I don't think Logan's criticism will quite have the shelf-life of Eliot's, Arnold's, or Coleridge's. To the above enumeration of fine contemporary critics who have the capacity to make you want to read good books (a far higher and more difficult calling than Logan's), let me add the names of three of our brothers, Wakefield, Lake, and Mason.

Hi Tim. I was sorry not to see you in PA this year. I hope you're well. What's up?

Josh(ua Mehigan)

I find myself agreeing with many of the people who responded to the Logan review. With Alicia, I feel that too often Logan is simply storing up and delivering punchlines and zingers; and like Catherine and Roger, I keep looking for Logan to spend as much time praising work he likes as savaging work he doesn't.

I'm not opposed to negative criticism. In fact, I relish it. We need more of it, but when a critic seems to blast everything that comes before him, his barbs lose some of their bite.

Personally, I prefer praising work I admire. I've all but quit writing reviews, but I recently enjoyed writing a longish crtitical article on Kay Ryan for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Likewise, I enjoyed reviewing Tim Murphy and Sam Gwynn. I'll post a link when, as I expect, the reviews come on line.

I haven't yet read Davis' s Belonging, but I heard him read the Mono-rhyme poem about his wife bathing at West Chester last year and thought it was a tour de force.

Apologies for the above speechifying. It was very late and I was outraged.

I don't honestly know what all the fuss is about - I thought it was a very entertaining piece.

Nigel

Nigel, In the unlikely event you ever attract so unjustly hostile a review, you'll understand "what all the fuss is about." The review is so bad, and one telling point I've neglected to make is that the two tercets in 15 syllable lines are snatched from the context of a 120 line dramatic monologue, the speaker being a lady born in Persia some 400 years ago and presented by the Shah to an English diplomat, who took her to wife. These two tercets further and deepen the reader's understanding of her character, yet Logan presents them as though Davis were speaking in his own voice, "best left to the professionals, the greeting card writers." A dramatic monologue of this power is quite beyond the reach of our friend Barbara Loots and all her staff at Hallmark. This is critical persiflage at its worst. Furthermore, this is not "Kipling in a malarial fit." If I am not mistaken, the demanding form is Browning's. R.S. Gwynn emailed me this link from West Chester, with the note: "Yet another reason to stock up on ammo and head to Florida."

Tim Murphy wrote:

R.S. Gwynn emailed me this link from West Chester, with the note: "Yet another reason to stock up on ammo and head to Florida."

Hey, Tim, you've piqued our curiosity, so where's the link?

I also wanted to mention how much I liked your poetic response to Logan. Such chiseled stanzas honoring Wilbur and Hecht, Hope and Davis, say more than any critical prose.

I would add that his criticism of stanza two of "Shadows" is unjust and, again, misleading. I've always thought of answering a primary with a secondary accent as a petit coup, but Logan sounds as if he's speaking against it generally. In any case, innumerable precedents come quickly to mind. e.g.: "thee" and "posterity," "free" and "Euphrosyne," "come" and "Byzantium." And, in Logan's own poems, e.g., "pack" and "Cadillac." These do precisely what Logan has just said Dick doesn't do: vary the rhythm as against the meter. And if he's criticizing this particular rhyme, it's merely his opinion, for which he gives no reason, and one I needn't agree with. And it doesn't make it any more objective a criticisim to co-opt the language of prosody.

But this is what I mean about its being a pain to answer Logan. "Shadows" is a personal favorite, but, out of context, it surely comes closest to suiting Logan's needs if he wants to criticize the collection as humdrum. Well, it might be if every line were like those he quotes in "Shadows," but that's far from being the case. The criticism is so petty and minor! Why doesn't he mention "Guides for the Soul," or "Aubade" or, as you point out, Tim, the greater part of "Teresia Shirley," or "Iran Twenty Years Ago" or "Gongora," etc., none of which is in the least humdrum. I think these are fantastic poems, and among Dick's best!

[This message has been edited by Josh (edited June 11, 2002).]

Dear Paul, humane critic that you are: The link was to Logan's essay in The New Criterion. By contrast, Professor Mezey sent me today a yellowed clipping from the NYT Book Review, in which my great teacher, Robert Penn Warren, remembered his great teacher, J.C. Ransom. There Donald Davies was reviewing the Selected Essays of JCR, his review superimposed above Warren's affectionate memoir, and Davies spoke of JCR's 'mannered prose,' offering praise to those great, vanished critics who had some 'manners.' By contrast, Warren's reflections gave the lie to Yeats' reflection on a man choosing between the life and the work.

Tim,

My point was simple - that critics are amusing - Logan, cleverly so. It's his job.

I think the mere fact that he chose Davis's work to critique in his own way, says a lot about the quality of the work. I really don't think that someone who couldn't write good poetry would even be worthy of his attention.

In this case, sarcasm appears to be the highest form of flattery. I don't see any need to defend Dick - his work does that by itself.


Nigel

It's 10:30 and I'm getting ready to go to bed,
so all of this is utterly random, but heartfelt.
It can't possibly summarize the sense of the board,
but...

Richard and Josh (I suspected that was you!)
and Alicia have answered Nigel very well. Logan
loves to store up poison and use it for almost every
review he's ever done. As so many point out, where
are the passionate appreciations and loves in his
poetic gallery?

Yes, seeing Jorie Graham and others skewed is delightful,
but only--does this really need saying?--because her work is very
bad and Dick's very good. Notice that Logan never gives
specific, detailed, practical reasons for his dismissals
of bad OR good poets. Something is very very wrong here
when he can call Dick's work "soulless" and not explain
what the hell that means. As I said to Ruthie, it's an
empty counter, a meaningless critical term with no content--
or as Richard put it, mere taste dressed up in ersatz
critical terminology.

I saw the modifier problem in the monorhyme poem and
pointed it out to a few friends a while ago, but Dick's poem
(and work in general) is virtually unaffected by
Logan's catch of it.

What DOES Logan think of meter? Is it to be "monotonous"
and "determined" in Dick's work and thus dissed, and then Logan gets to turn around and say Wright has extra syllables?

What the hell could that possibly suggest?


Logan exists for one reason only--to be as savage and snotty
as he can possibly be and hope people will notice him and
pay a lot of attention to his work--even as we here on the
Sphere are doing right now. And to answer Tim's point about not
responding in discursive prose to Logan's challenge, well...
a whole essay in practical criticism could be written on
the logical contradictions in his review of Dick.


Ah, NUTS!

Good night to all,

Len

Sorry, but I have seen people on here be equally snippy and snotty about poetry and forms of poetry they don't like. The double standard is alive and well here.

On the one hand, even bad publicity is publicity, and poetry and poets can use all the publicity they can get--particularly since the vast majority of the media does not recognize the existence of said poetry or poets at all.

On the other, people like William Logan often turn out to be their own worst enemy. Since he is known almost exclusively for snide, condescending reviews, he is also rather easy to dismiss. As in, "Oh well, why bother reading him--we already know what he will say." He is rather like the theater critic John Simon that way.

From what I have read of him, it sounds like Logan wants to be the new Randall Jarrell, but he comes across more like a self-serving, whiny noodge.

Len,

Your argument is full of the same holes and contradictions that you so acidly accuse Logan of. I suggest you read your post again.

Yes, seeing Jorie Graham and others skewed is delightful

At least Logan was amusing.

Nigel

Reviewers have different styles of critiquing. Logan's a not-so-subtle, though not a ranting polemicist, writing to stir up debate, which he's obviously done here. To be useful to poets, he doesn't have to offer an even-handed approach, which seems to be the implication of a good few crits of him in this thread, though he did offer at least one point in praise of each poet. It also doesn't have to result in a laager mentality among poets. If it does, it means people have lost the wider perspective on what poetry criticism is all about.

Logan is only one type of critic among others who offer different ways of looking at poetry - among them, the sycophantic, disparaging, balanced, polemical, encouraging and wide-sighted. Why bother to pick him off and crit. him in his own style, if that style isn't liked?

Freda

I think it fair to say that poetry needs controversy. Alicia has told me she thinks her negative review by Richard Moore sold more Archaic Smiles than the positive ones, and Rhina certainly relished the response here to Salemi's sandbagging of her new book. And let's not forget the reaction to Hardy's first book, published at age sixty, when one reviewer suggested that a great novelist should not endanger his reputation by straying into an art form in which he had no competence.

Well, there's "criticism" and then there's "entertaining bitchiness."

As I learned long ago with movie reviews, the folk who specialize in entertaining bitchiness don't offer any real perspective on whether something is good or bad, or even any real knowledge of genre or conventions of form. What they do offer is an entertaining read, best savored after you've seen the movie, read the book, or experienced whatever other form of art they're being catty about.

Unfortunately you're never going to get a publisher to put "entertaining bitchiness" on a book cover in place of "criticism," but you eventually learn to recognize the style and can peg the reviewer yourself.

Kevin

I heard Billy Joel discuss the fact that no one was buying his records until the Catholic Bishop of St. Louis (if I remember correctly) tried to ban the song "Only the Good Die Young." Sales immediately skyrocketed and Joel wrote the bishop to thank him and encourage him to ban any other records in the future. A negative review doesn't necessarily have the same effect, but it is true that poetry gets little attention, and that an entertaining review (even if negative) can call a poet to the attention of readers who would otherwise never have heard of him or her. So I'm not writing to defend Logan, but just to say that the effect of a negative review isn't always what the reviewer had intended.

Give me a break, Nigel. I didn't set out to
be funny or comic or bitchy.
I simply said that a rather long essay
could be written about Logan's empty vocabulary
disguising his personal taste. God knows I didn't
have the time or energy to do an essay on Jorie Graham.

And just because I pointed out that I don't like her work doesn't mean that it can't be attacked in substantive detail, so there is no contradiction or inconsistency in any of this. If you'd like an essay on Graham that does go into considerable detail, try Jan Schreiber's brilliant piece written last year for EP & M. If you like, I can go look it up and type the reference here for all Sphereans.

Neither does claiming that Logan is wrong require snippiness or any "double standard." We all of us understand that some people like Graham and some like Dick Davis. But if it were to come down to a contest between the diligence of say, Alan Sullivan's criticism--its specificity and exactness--on the Sphere and Logan's bitchy similes in the Criterion, there's no contest. Alan wins hand down. The difference is that Alan is blunt but has some content to his critical counters, while Logan is virtualy impossible to answer. What DOES "soullessness" in verse MEAN?

And of course nothing I say (who the hell has ever heard of me?) is ever going to affect anyone's opinion of Graham
or dampen the sale of her books or reduce the honors
that continue to rain down on her.

__________________


Footnote on dangling and misplaced modifiers:

From the New Republic, June 17, 2002, page 16 (an article by Michael Rubin on the Kurds--and he probably gets paid for this sort of thing):

"And based on past U.S. behavior, they aren't convinced...."

Richard Wakefield has proposed continuing or supplementing this discussion, or part of it, in "The Discerning Eye" forum. This strikes me as a good idea, because I think that there are two discussions going on here at once and the result is some avoidable punchiness. Some of the posts are specific responses to Logan's review of Dick's book. Others (although the two groups are not mutually exclusive) are using this occasion (quite appropriately) to make general comments on the nature, purpose and effect of criticism. The first group is engaged, while the second is more detached, and I think the result, for good or ill, is that the emotional stakes in posting here have been raised. In any case, I just wanted to call attention to Richard's post before I rush off to compose my monograph on The Critic's Endeavor.

So much talk about such a little thing. I like Dick
Davis' work and I agree that Logan is almost always
negative, but Gresham's Law is as true of poetry as
of money and I say, better negative reviews even if
wrongheaded or heavyhanded than the usual thing one
sees, one friend washing the other. Even better if
the reviewer is especially witty, as Randal Jarrell
was, or Moses Hadas. (Hadas once began a review:
"This book fills a much-needed gap in the literature.")
Alicia is right that this sort of thing is good for
the health of the art, however little you might like
the individual judgment. And yes, a bad review is far
better than none at all---I'd happily accept a few,
and I'm a little disappointed that Logan hasn't bothered
to trash my book.

Dick Davis read "Teresia Shirley" at West Chester this year, and I thought it a masterwork. His subtle reading contributed to that. He also happens to be quite modest, as I saw when I praised him in person.

Terese

RM >> Gresham's Law is as true of poetry as of money. . . <<

Ain't that the truth. I liked Logan's article. I'm not very current & was otherwise unaware of him, but based on this, he's very witty, intelligent, knowledgeable, and he cares. And he comes up with some great sayings. "satire is a form of forgiveness, too," says he, and (next sentence!) "Nihilism is too rare in contemporary poetry, where sentiments are sold on the sidewalk." These are the type of thoughts that, right or wrong, plunge you into a subject. You don't see that too often.

I haven't read the Davis book so I can't comment on the overall justice of Logan's review. I do think he takes some cheap shots. A matter of style, though; the sophisticated reader takes it in the appropriate spirit. More importantly, he isolates an aspect of Davis's poetry, that exhibited in the "astringent epigrams," for praise. He says: "A poet who can write epigrams shimmering with such wit, ragged with such despair, has no business writing anything else." Presumptuous, perhaps, but the epigrams he quotes are convincingly good.

RM >> Hadas once began a review: "This book fills a much-needed gap in the literature." <<

Sublimely funny.


[This message has been edited by AE (edited June 13, 2002).]

After taking a couple months off the internet to do some reading, I come back to this very interesting thread. I’ve read the review, but I haven’t read Belongings and don’t have it, so I don’t know how much of what Logan says I would agree with. I did hear Davis read the monorhyme shower poem at WC, which I loved. I’ve heard a great many poets say how the watered down reviews are doing more harm than good for poetry. They talk about the good old days where there were critics like Jarrell, who weren’t afraid of hurting anybodies feelings. Now, I’ll say that Logan is no Jarrell, and yeah, a lot of these little quips he says are pointless, and meant to further his image, but at least he’s not afraid to write a negative review. Though from what I’ve heard of him, he seems afraid to write a positive review. Still, it’s William Logan. It’s what he is known for. I don’t know him that well, and I know him for that. You have to know that if he is reviewing your work, odds are you’ll get a review like this. Now, I haven’t read enough reviews by Logan, or read the books of those he’s reviewed, so I’ll have to ask those of you that have: how often is he right about what he says? Regardless of whatever unnecessarily cruel things he say. Tim Murphy said, “I always relish Logan's "acidulous rhetoric" when he's trashing poets like Graham whom I despise. From the little I've seen of his own work, I regard him as a middling poet, not really worthy to shine the shoes of a Davis, a Wilbur or Hecht.” Seems to be a bit of a double standard. These types of reviews are ok if it is a poet who we don’t know or like their work? But if it is a poet we like, well then that’s unnecessary and he’s a hack? And you have to keep in mind that there are different tastes in poetics. Nobody I know likes Jorie Graham, but there are people out there who think she’s a genius. Or at least I keep hearing that there are people out there who like her work. I mean just looking around here, the way free verse is treated by some. Part of any review is going to be personal opinion. And one other thing, isn’t one of the first things a young poet is taught is to develop a thick skin? Not to take it personal? Learn from it or get over it. I know it’s one of the things I had to learn. Some people will like your work, but some people aren’t going to like your work. There’s really no point in pouting about it. Sorry if this all sounds a bit disjointed, but I’ve been away for a while.

jason

Welcome back, Jason. You'll find a lively discussion on criticism over at the Discerning Eye board.