Poet and critic William Logan offered his take on the life and work of Frank O’Hara in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.
Among other things, Mr. Logan restated his belief that if O’Hara were alive today, “he might have written a blog.”
Bloggers took note, and they quickly offered up their take on the life and work of Mr. Logan.
To wit:
“wow,” writes the scribe at Vowel Movers “we’re all for the grey areas and fine tuned distinctions, but chrissakes Logan, did you like the friggen book or what?”
“It troubles me,” says Short Schrift” to see a critic taking so much of O’Hara’s self-built mythology at face value . . . ”
“Typical of Logan, the overall tone is snide, and, I would also say, a bit homophobic,” offers Philip Gentry.
John Latta sneers, “Logan generally proceeds with the archest of manoeuvres, attempt’d pummeling by one-liners.”
“A NY Times kicking on Gay Pride day to boot! A real ‘time-sensitive’ editor there, I say!” writes Stephen Vincent
“Not again, BIlly,” moans Greg Rappleye.
“Stupidity after stupidity,” seethes Jack Kimball.
“On the positive side, Logan is always bold, loud and exciting to read,” sighs Levi Asher.
I posted this reply to Greg Rappleye’s “Not again, Billy” post:
Posted By: Joseph Hutchison on June 30, 2008 at 5:49 pm“Logan continues to be one of the nastiest, shallowest reviewers around. He wears his cleverness like a cheap cologne (remember English Leather?), and the odor—part anger, part envy, part groundless vanity—is overwhelming. His atrocious poetry gives off the same reek, laced with a dash of sour malaise. His writing in either genre makes me want to take a mental shower, which I’m going to do right now….”
I did take that shower, by taking down my worn-out copy of O’Hara’s Collected, which fell open (I kid you not) to page 240 and this posthumous riposte:
THE BORES
Detraction is their game.
Like parrots, they caw forth
the ennui of the last time
that was theirs, and always
will be, empty. Unaware of what
is, or what’s moving toward,
with their sharp wings over
their eyes and tongue on palate
and beak on seat, they take each
singular event for someone’s
dear convention. Use an eraser
to take notes for their article.
The difficult is foreign and
the simple vulgar, to them.
They entertain each other.
Not O’Hara’s best, but certainly apt when considering Logan. From now on I’ll take notes with an eraser whenever I read him.
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Shame on Logan, blah blah blah… but some of this makes it sound like Mark Ford invented Frank O’Hara, for gosh sake. I’ve never understood why some of the same folks who loved the recent big Phillip Whalen or Cesar Vallejo volumes can’t deal with the collected O’Hara or Creeley. And say what you will about the Ford selection, it doesn’t have the great Larry Rivers cover the earlier selected poems did: a great loss (that cover originally intended, by the way, for the Collected Poems).
Posted By: Doodle on July 1, 2008 at 9:22 amReport this comment
Hi,
Posted By: Steve Fellner on July 1, 2008 at 9:55 amThe thing that I find the most disconcerting is his odd emphasis of how uneven the book is. It seems like Logan thinks he stumbled across a particularly erudite observation. Would he say that Keats is uneven, Wordsworth, Shakespeare? What poet doesn’t write poems that one is not fond of? How many pages of this volume needed to be brilliant too receive an unequivocal recommendation? As Logan went trhough the book, did he tally the number?
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The Collected Poems with the Larry Rivers cover did actually get printed, but the publisher reconsidered only a few copies in to the run.
Posted By: Travis Nichols on July 1, 2008 at 11:19 amIt’s the type of book you could have hoped to find a few years ago in some off the beaten path used bookstore, though now your best bet is online where the two copies I found are selling for $395 and $12000, respectively.
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I’ve never understood the critical esteem for O’Hara – Logan may have been too flippant to make a really strong point, but at root his critiques of the work seems accurate, if only too kind.
Posted By: Daniel on July 1, 2008 at 11:40 amReport this comment
For what it’s worth, I reject almost everything Logan says about O’Hara.
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 1, 2008 at 11:40 amHowever, I find him one of the funnest, most refreshing critics at work. He’s tremendously witty and funny, and dares to put pointed pen to over-pumped poetry pantaloons, when everyone else is tip-toeing around with pucker-lipped politesse.
Not sure what an over-pumped pantaloon is, actually. But what I mean is that he’s *readable.* And he makes people pissed-off, me included. Isn’t that a good thing for a critic to do?
I buy the New Criterion, carefully tear out his reviews, put them in my pocket, and throw the magazine in the waste basket.
Kent
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Logan really wasn’t up to his usual vile self with the O’Hara review; I’ll defer to those who feel it somewhat homophobic because I’m not as attuned and, if they are correct, is anyone really surprised? As Levi notes, he’s always exciting to read, in that he is like D. H. Lawrence; you scream back at the page louder than you would if he was simply full of it. Travis Nichols is spot-on. Unlike the hatchet job Logan recently performed on Ted Kooser’s Valentines (you’d think someone as savvy as Logan would understand the nature of occasional verse), he seems to have merely demurred when it came to O’Hara.
Posted By: Don on July 4, 2008 at 1:15 pmIn any case, we’ll be reading O’Hara long after Logan: for that matter, Kooser, too.
Don @ Lilliput Review
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Oh, I think we’ll be reading Logan’s criticism after Kooser is forgotten. The O’Hara piece struck me as rather benign, for Logan. He’s wrong most of the time, but do we read critics because they’re right? Yvor Winters is one of my favorite critics, though I disagree with almost every judgment he makes about modern verse; Hugh Kenner viewed Virginia Woolf as a kind of dilettante & Stevens as a dandified Lewis Carroll.
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 4, 2008 at 2:13 pmAt any rate, I for one will not be reading Kooser now or in the future.
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Hey, another Don! Welcome!!
Posted By: Don Share on July 4, 2008 at 4:09 pmKent, just make sure you don’t run those Logan pages through the wash when you do the laundry!
Travis, thanks for the clarification about the Rivers dust jacket – all the more reason I’ll hang onto my old copy of the selected while honoring, in its place, the collected.
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Michael, touché. I guess I’ll take honesty in verse over dishonest criticism any day. What Logan did to Kooser was dishonest, which is what got up my nose.
Posted By: Don on July 5, 2008 at 7:21 amI needlessly dragged Kooser into it with my comparison and shouldn’t have. I respect, very much, your opinion on Kooser, as I do Kooser himself, though I realize he is looked down upon by many.
Talented and insightful as he is, however, it’s Logan I don’t respect.
Don @ Lilliput Review
PS Thanks for the welcome, Don Share.
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Hi, New Don — Yeah, I respect & understand yr admiration of Kooser. & I agree that sneering at his (or, say, Billy Collins’s) verse is about as controversial as dissing Céline Dion. (Which reminds me of Carl Wilson’s great little book on Dion, subtitled “A Journey to the End of Taste” — which reminds me of Dave Hickey’s great observation that “Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.” (It seems like I’m saying you have bad taste, but that’s not my point.)) But I don’t think honesty is a useful criterion for poetry (though it may be for criticism) — isn’t poetry constitutionally dishonest (except for Philip Larkin)? Wilde said that all bad poetry is sincere. As Drive-By Truckers have it, “Rock & roll means well, but it can’t help telling young boys lies.”
Posted By: Michael Robbins on July 5, 2008 at 12:29 pmReport this comment
Don,
Posted By: Kent Johnson on July 5, 2008 at 1:43 pmTrue, it seems I too-often forget to check my poetry pockets before putting my clothes in.
Unfortunately, lots of people know this, by now…. I wish more thought it endearing.
Really, though, I’m glad Logan is around. The mix is richer. Who, after all, wants to read yet another fawning review of the last recycled voicings of Jorie Graham, Charles Simic, or Dean Young?
Just FYI, my reply to Tony Towle and Andrew Epstein on the Frank O’Hara mystery concerning the true authorship of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” will appear at John Latta’s blog, Isola di Riffiuti, this week on Thursday, July 10, the day that marks the 50th anniversary of the poem’s supposed composition.
Kent
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Michael, I guess life is more interesting with William Logan around, as Kent points out. I always read his reviews when I see them because, though I may swear under my breath, I always learn something.
Posted By: Don on July 6, 2008 at 8:14 amPerhaps I’m naive (god, at the ripe young age of 56), but I tend toward the Eastern sensibility in poetry: show, don’t tell. I believe honesty to be a prerequisite there. And this is the type of work I’m attracted to.
Of course, I can’t really have been around this long and been naive the whole time. Beside haiku and tanka, I love the work of Louise Glück, Gerald Stern, Whitman, Sexton, Atwood, Erdrich, Mary Oliver (who regularly takes her lumps), James Wright (& Franz), Dickinson … obviously I could go on and on, but that’s the idea. In the sense that much written in poetry is fictive (could we get more circumspect than Emily), I’ll yield to the idea of dishonesty.
But in the sense of intent, I’ll stand my ground when it comes to honesty in poetry. Perhaps I’ve come full circle back to naive. I think I understand better where you are coming from and I really appreciate the explanation. You’ll have me thinking about this for some time, no doubt.
best,
Don @ Lilliput Review
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This adds a little spice to the discussion:
Posted By: Don on July 9, 2008 at 6:18 amhttp://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2008/06/logans-run.html
Not completely on target, perhaps (for instance, Logan seems to be a semi-regular poetry reviewer for NYTBR these days) but certainly a number of points are well taken.
Don @ Lilliput Review
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Logan’s review seemed tame to me. He appears to miss the best of what O’Hara had to offer, and not to comprehend what frequently makes his work so refreshing, and charming, though to be fair, he does tip his hat to Frank’s good cheer.
Posted By: Curtis Faville on July 10, 2008 at 12:46 pmI tend to agree that O’Hara’s longer works do stretch and strain to contain banalities that don’t accomplish much beside “humanizing” their narrator.
The point, for me, is that reading second-rate “Quietist” poetry is always so much duller than reading frankly effusive or “in your face” poets. Crabbed, compromised rhyme and hackneyed formalities are so tiresome, but Logan keeps defending them. It’s the old Auden debate all over again. What Wystan liked in Ashbery was this very formality, yet it wasn’t what eventually made Ashbery a fascinating writer. O’Hara, too, in his youth, wrote sonnets and polite quatrains. Is Satie as good as Scarlatti?
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The NYTBR published Daisy Fried’s letter about this review here:
Posted By: Emily Warn on July 14, 2008 at 10:38 amhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/Letters-t-2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=review&pagewanted=print
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Since I write mostly in form, I want to question Daisy’s unexamined assumption in this NYT letter that a “neoformalist” (whatever that is) should be expected not to like O’Hara. O’Hara’s ear is fabulous, his early sonnets, btw, wonderful, and his control of diction, syntax, and tone against the restraint of both narrative and line are brilliant and aware enough to fully satisfy, at least, this form-writer; O’Hara has been on my own fave shortlist for 30 years.
Posted By: Annie Finch on July 14, 2008 at 12:07 pmActually, I’m surprised at the way most people here are reading the review. Sure, Logan says O’Hara’s collected has a lot of weak poems, but that could be said of most poets; his main point throughout is really that he likes O’Hara in spite of himself. He contrasts O’Hara favorably with Ashbery, saying that he was already way ahead of Ashbery at the beginning and then moved beyond him; calls his work refreshing, says it’s hard not to smile in appreciation at it, says many of the poems are “wonderful” (again, which prolific poet’s collected does not show us wonderful poems drowned out by mediocrity? This is true of Frost, Yeats, and I’m sure of most of Logan’s favorite writers), and closes by saying O’Hara’s poems “give us as much of a life as poetry can.”
This is one of the most positive reviews I’ve seen by Logan—one where the expected curmudgeonly stance seems at worst a habitual tic, at best a decorative strategy. Maybe the people who are getting so bent out of shape haven’t seen Logan trash Rita Dove (”tries to fob the reader off with sentimental rubbish”) or Gary Snyder (” the disconnected thoughts of a man trying to make verse with magnets on a refrigerator door”). When I started reading the O’Hara review I expected so much worse; instead, Logan’s overall appreciation of O’Hara’s strengths increased my respect for Logan.
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Annie–
Posted By: Daisy on July 15, 2008 at 8:19 amI use the term neoformalist when I want to describe critics and poets whose embrace of and use of traditional form is oppositional–to other kinds of writing, that is. It’s not necessarily pejorative, though I think it does describe a conservative tendency. (I think that many “experimental” writers are conservative in the same way.) The term is obviously not descriptive, then, of many, or most, writers who concern themselves with form.
Daisy
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Daisy,
Posted By: Annie Finch on July 15, 2008 at 9:58 amThanks for the clarification. It sounds as if this usage harks back to the 80’s when the neo was borrowed by analogy with the neo in “neoconservative.” Your definition is precise and useful, though I wonder how many people who read the term without the definition would infer this meaning. So many people use the term interchangeably with “formalist,” ignoring the political aspect of your definition. So often, specific contexts or ironies get lost in translation. I wonder how history will sort all this out.
Annie
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It may be safe now to post a link to Herbert Leibowitz’s review of the Collected Poems, which appeared in the New York Times of November 28, 1971.
Posted By: Don Share on August 14, 2008 at 8:55 amReport this comment