Vim and Vinegar

Abstract

Vim and Vinegar David Mason (bio) William Logan, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. Columbia University Press, 2009. viii + 346 pages. $29.50; Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds., Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. xli + 875 pages. Illustrated. $45. Most writers get more than their due. —William Logan The words won’t change again. —Elizabeth Bishop As a college student in the 1970s I was taught to read closely and to admire a coterie of contemporary poets, mostly male, who were deemed important and who no doubt expected to be read with care. For better and worse those days are transformed utterly, and what we have instead is the terrible beauty of another scene—far more diverse, sometimes less vital, little of it written or read with exacting standards. In fact poets and critics who claim to uphold standards for their arts are now thought of as cranks or cuckoos. What sets the best of them apart is the same quality Ezra Pound identified in his definition of a classic: “a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” It is the presence of vitality, not “correctness” of any kind that makes writing last—though Pound’s word eternal now seems muddleheaded, since immortality is impossible to predict. What I can confidently assert is that a great many books of poetry and criticism that come my way prove soporific in the extreme. I seek voices that will cast a compelling spell, or at least wake me up with language of beauty, precision, vitality. Difficulty, in my judgment, need not be a criterion, nor is it a barrier as long as some surface allure has caught me. Vulgar enticements like story are also welcome. I see my job as being alert to freshness where I find it, but I prefer voices that arrive with confidence and command, more than those that are slovenly or accidental or mumbling. Most important I can admire writers with whom I disagree, as I occasionally do with William Logan. Logan is one of the few critics alive who has the courage to be loathed. Sometimes he deserves it, acidly scoring points against a book he has not bothered to understand, but at his best he remains an indispensable critic. Other [End Page 104] poet-critics I admire include Charles Simic, James Fenton, and the more philosophical Susan Stewart. Logan is the most combative of the bunch. If his poetry were as feisty and vital as his prose, he might be one of our major writers. Known primarily for dishing it out in omnibus reviews, he does his finest work in essays, bringing wit and sharp judgment to bear on both poetry and criticism. Logan’s new collection of prose pieces, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, contains sixteen extended essays, ten verse chronicles, and an interview with Garrick Davis. The verse chronicles, usually containing six short reviews apiece, are chiefly the source of Logan’s infamy. They are also, with the exception of a few zinger lines, his least impressive work. In the longer reviews and essays, Logan excels. Some reviewers of this collection have complained about Logan’s consistent negativity and about the short list of poets he chooses to review. He can be careless and uncharitable, and he rarely reviews lesser-known poets, but his chronicles nevertheless cover an impressive range. At least fifty contemporary poets are reviewed here. Those he reviews more than once include Billy Collins, Franz Wright, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Geoffrey Hill, and Louise Glück. With the exception of Hill, Logan usually points out such flaws as complacency and lack of development in prominent careers—not a radical point of view. I read these short reviews with a dash of schadenfreude tinged with jealousy and pity. Being reviewed by Logan must be hell; being ignored by him is an uneasy picnic. Auden opined that poets should not waste energy on negative reviews. Auden’s criticism was most often descriptive or taxonomical, and as such it proves useful to this day. Logan’s pronouncements are often wrong—he can’t find a way to approve...