BY BEN SEARS · DECEMBER 8, 2023
No foolin’. I counted.
If anybody actually played along and obeyed the “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” acronym every Friday since the beginning, we are talking about significant absenteeism. That’s a lot of man-hours. It’s like stealing. Well done. Keep on going.
Give the boss whatever line he or she needs to hear. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth. Grab the weekend – your weekend – a few hours before the clock strikes bu-bye and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint. Watch a ball game. Flirt awkwardly. Go to the library computer lab, casually clasp your hands behind your back, and walk behind a row of people scanning the internet so you can pretend you’re Captain Kirk monitoring his bridge officers. It’s your time. Do with it as you please, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times: Make time for a little verse.
***
When I started writing these, I felt a little unsure because though I very much enjoyed poetry, I knew little about the nuts and bolts beyond what wisps remained from high school classes and what I picked up from a few later sallies into Graves’ published Oxford lectures. I remembered thinking Graves came off as arrogant. He was arrogant, but in the lectures I found him so in a previously unconsidered way. It was so impressive.
My copy of his lectures is not on the one shelf I absolutely know it should be on because I can picture the spine and no, it’s not in the dining room and I’m sure I remember the red on khaki title by the blue Rupert Brooke so it has to be there. I can’t put my hands on it at the moment so I can’t give you a direct quote, but Graves would read a few lines from [INSERT REVERED POET] and say something along the lines of “Where [REVERED POET REFERED TO CASUALLY BY FIRST NAME] goes wrong is that he…” and then explain how he would have improved upon someone else’s classic.
I remember reading and thinking, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” The answer is that he thinks he’s a poet of substance with as much claim to authority as those whose work he critiques. He’s right. There’s a less impressive but more important answer. He’s a guy who read a poem and has opinions.
As a guy who’s also read a poem, this matters. In my scholastic lifetime, the poetry that was presented to me was presented as an example of what is right and good. There wasn’t room in Mrs. Akerman’s 10th grade English class to question whether Poe was a good poet. He was. Write that down. Don’t like Walt Whitman? The fault is with you. This is how mushy headed young people should be taught. An informed concept of beauty is bequeathed. Aristotle would be proud, even though my multitudes largely still dislike Whitman.
Once you have a concept of beauty, or find yourself an irredeemably incommunicable castaway, you ask better questions. Is the poem – or painting, or cabinet, but I’ll stick to poetry right now – well made? Does it achieve what you think the poet wishes to achieve? That question has to be tempered with humility and a fair assessment of how reliable you are in discerning what a poet’s goal is. How does it compare to contemporary works? Historical works?
I started asking these questions seriously about poetry late in life. I enjoyed asking them and wanted know what others thought, what lines of inquiry I might be missing, and more about the crafting of poems; why do poets do what they do when they do it? I wanted my opinions to be informed. I started reading criticism.
T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is a marvelous gateway drug. If you ever want to wrap yourself in false erudition say something along the lines of “I think in this you see what Eliot meant in ‘Tradition’ when he wrote…” You can call it “Individual Talent” instead of “Tradition” if you like. Just be sure to pass yourself as being at home with recognized classics. It’s a middle class cousin to Graves’ [REVERED POET REFERED TO CASUALLY BY FIRST NAME] but effective.
Read Eliot’s “Ind. T” and before you know it you’re walking triumphantly out of a used book store with a three dollar paperback copy of The Permanence of Yeats, subscribing to The New Criterion, and “re-thinking” famous writers you heard of for the first time just last week. It’s a helluva high.
It’s a helluva crash too. I can give a much more informed reason to why I dislike Whitman. I can tell you why I should like Whitman but, in the end, I still dislike Whitman. Now I’ve spent enough time with poetry to say, “In my defense, I’m not alone,” and then “Ezra Pound agrees with me about the so-called ‘father of free verse.’” Fair warning: Poetry is one of the few subject where telling people “Me and Ezra are of a like mind,” is likely to do you any favors so be sure that everyone within earshot knows what you’re discussing before you go blabbing. I don’t know. I was expecting more smugness; I’d feel like one of the enlightened.
I assumed after all that reading I’d find Poetry Jesus and get raptured to new heights where poems I’d previously shrugged at made me sing joyfully in German. I did find new ways to look at old stuff I’d spurned. I even warmed to some of them. As with most things, you play with the toys you brought. I still dislike the kind of things I used to dislike, but I’ve found fault with some of the things I once enjoyed. My about face opinions were less revelations and more “Huh. Marianne Moore is better than I thought.”
So, no rapture but far from being disappointed, I’ve recognized huge benefits. I’m more familiar with how a poem works, for lack of a better phrase. I’ve found new ways to be amazed by poems and poets I thought I’d fully explored. I’m better able to articulate why I like a poet and so better able to find others whose work I’m disposed towards. Most surprisingly, I’ve found that I really like reading poetic criticism as a genre.
That’s a very roundabout way of introducing this week’s featured poet. I first came across William Logan in the online archives of The New Criterion. His reviews led The Hudson Review to dub him “the most hated man in American poetry.” He told The Paris Review, “One Pulitzer Prize winner claimed he wanted to run me over in his car.”
My favorite description of his writing comes from an uncredited biographical entry on Poetry Foundation’s website which referred to his poetry as “spiky.” It’s a snarky tag but it works, and I think it fits his criticism as well. He’s got a sharp sense of humor, is capable of barbed comments, and isn’t afraid of outright insults. That’s great fun and should be enough for me to commend him to you, but there’s more for the reader than a laugh and a bit of controversy. He’s a tremendous composer; in both poetry and prose he’s confident and draws the reader along. I’ve found him to be honest and consistent. That’s important. If criticism is an aid in understanding and appreciating poetry you’ll need an understanding and familiarity of the critic.
I got mad at him once over an article about Robert Lowell. I had written in my notes about Lowell’s book, The Dolphin, “revenge porn.” This was the collection where Lowell used lines in his poetry taken from private letters sent to him by his ex-wife. Some of it was verbatim. Creepy stuff. In the article “Lowell’s Dolphin” in the February 2020 issue of The New Criterion, Logan wrote, “to read the book would have been little better than finding that your ex has been posting nude pictures of you all over the web.” I liked “revenge porn” better, but he got there first. I couldn’t use it.
It’s goofy and shows an unearned haughtiness on my part, but that I was about to write something that he had already written elevated Logan to the “This guy gets it” tier in my estimation. I’ve sought out his writing ever since.
I picked up Logan’s spiky poetry shortly after reading the Lowell article. He’s kindly given permission to print a few of his works from Deception Island: Selected Early Poems, 1974-1999. I’ll say a little about each poem, but know that I think it’s cool that I’ve been indulged enough to write one hundred of these and wanted to mark the occasion. I said above it snuck up on me, but I’ve had time to consider and decide who I wanted to feature for the milestone. I really think you’ll like these.
The first selection is “A Portrait by Bellocq” and I misread it terribly. I should say I mis-glanced it terribly, and only for a second, because I thought it said “Belloc” and saw the couplets so I was expecting Logan to do something playful in the style of Hilaire Belloc’s rhymes for children; something along the lines of Sarah Byng. I’d even mentally mustered Belloc’s voice from what was in his time a no doubt gripping recording of the poet reading “Tarantella” but makes modern listeners grab drapes in mock imitation (I secretly like it.)
Logan wasn’t referencing Hilaire Belloc. The “q” should have given that away. The Bellocq in question is Ernest Joseph Bellocq, a photographer famous for his portraits of prostitutes from New Orleans’ Storyville district. I couldn’t find the picture with “a profile against a shadowed door,” but you can see some of his collection here. I suppose I should say the pictures are “Not Safe For Work” but probably okay unless you work as a cooper or have a lot of phrenologist friends.
A Portrait by Bellocq
One day even this transfigured flesh will shatter
or burn, and its remains shower the dirt
where motions freeze in a simple light,
whether or not the season submits to death.
This light, not simple or singular, divides
the self from the self, the portion
that passes through it and moves beyond it
and lies down, and what is pictured forever,
drawn into visionary circumstance, a profile
against a shadowed door. How a submissive
meter infects the heart is difficult to explain.
Why is difficult to remember. In every woman,
there is a moment when the past precludes itself
from defeat or victory; and for you that moment
came when you left behind the shallow season
of the photographer and chose a future,
not of fire or decay, but one that would
lead there in its own slow fashion.
I’m going to call back Robert Graves for a second. Graves was great at presenting a poetic persona drawn to and in awe of women; wary and wounded. To read “At Best, Poets” and “Man Is, Woman Does” is to warm yourself by a fire tended with blacksmith’s hands. It’s a hard persona to project and poseurs are easy to spot.
Logan projects that mood ably in this next poem. I enjoy how he directs the readers gaze as well.
Folly
Something of folly wipes the air
clean of its pretension, a woman
quilting madness into a pattern,
whose gold-threaded birds wing the compass rose
around a wounded tree the parliaments
of flowers choke. The mind’s
many deliberations issue
into love like muddy swans
breaching the bank for weeds their deep bills
cannot hold. They preen and sip
and otherwise complain their interest.
There is no love among them,
yet the madness clothed comes on again
and we call it love. But not ourselves,
though we word our declarations to our care.
I’ve watched three nights
the orb-weavers feast
on the window’s steady light, funnel
down which throb the gold-eyed moths
they tangle in their webs and suck.
My face bares back at me
the black behind the glare, while breezes
mock sweet husks of insects spread
within the sticky circle of the dead.
Finally, the poet/critic conjures Alexander Pope and his “Essay on Criticism.” This one’s clever. I think in this you see what Eliot meant in ‘Marvell’ when he wrote, “The quality which Marvell had, this modest and certainly impersonal virtue–whether we call it wit or reason, or even urbanity–we have patently failed to define.”
To the Honourable Committee
William Logan (1950)
Though now the act is almost commonplace
to beg relief from strangers courts disgrace;
but since our scholars, poets, and artistes
must worship galleries instead of priests,
it has the force of moral virtue when
it keeps the breathless arts in oxygen.
Arranged around your table in despair,
the poems can’t grind coffee, carve a pear,
or make a hat rack dance like Fred Astaire.
They’ll never hammer nails through concrete blocks,
and cannot open combination locks.
Great Fannie Mae has ruled: no banker shall
accept a sonnet as collateral,
and in revenge, perhaps, for which give thanks,
the poet never reads his work in banks.
Rude politicians think it rather funny
a poet has a hard time earning money,
or if he earns a bit, and then relaxes,
the IRS will seize his odes for taxes.
Biographers are wont then to distort
impedimenta of the common sort,
for poets, like their neighbors, cannot pass
for saints or martyrs when they cut the grass.
Though verse be undercooked or overdone,
it is unread by all and bought by none,
and so within the democratic state
a poet has a democratic fate.
Because he asks foundations for largesse
who once to kings had ventured in distress,
the poet may be tempted to complain
and soothe with quarrel his distempered brain,
or play the miser, who having priced his words
reduced his speech by half, and then two-thirds.
In time it may be judged by your committee
the artist’s last reserve just masks self-pity,
or that for those compression makes obscure
a weekend on the rack’s the only cure.
Most honourable sirs, you must remain
as cold as snow, implacable as rain,
but spend compassionate amounts one those
whose lives were better spent in writing prose.
With your award, I’d ask leave to explore
the rundown harbors of a foreign shore
and for a year there rent a terrace house
unfrequented by Time or Mickey Mouse.
Like Novocain, loud supplications numb
a charity as kind as cumbersome.
If scrupulous, the poet will refine
the silence at the end of every line,
and thus, in this as elsewhere, rather throw
his voice toward whisper than fortissimo.
Good sirs, I ask approval of this grant.
With kind regards, your humble applicant.
I want to thank William Logan for permission to share the above poems. You can get a copy of Deception Island, the collection in which they’re all included, here and here you’ll find his latest collection of critical essays, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History. Fans of criticism would do well to take a look at his “Notes towards an introduction,” and if you do, the reference to Gershwin’s French taxi horns in “An American in Paris” will drive you crazy trying to remember what they sound like, so here.
As always, thanks for reading.
