Mary Oliver, William Logan: Tenderness, Meanness, and How Much Is Enough

White-Eyes by Mary Oliver : Poetry Magazine

NEW CRITERION,  December 2008

Shock & Awe   

by William Logan

 

One of my problems with poet and critic William Logan—the Don Rickles or Simon Cowell of the poetry world—is that his wicked humor so often has a legitimate target, and I often, guiltily agree with him. Sometimes I feel as if he and I are the last two people on the planet who believe poetry is a pure, tight, sacred thing that examines objects, thoughts, feelings with the incisive care and intuition they deserve—often gentle curiosity, occasionally blunt force trauma.

But it’s usually with some shame and regret that I find myself in Logan’s camp because his words are often mean. I cannot believe that the poets he tries to marginalize or vaporize are so . . . professional? or aloof, detached, clinical?  . . . that they are immune to his mockery. He seems to want to hurt poets who offend him, and I struggle to find that okay, even as I grin at his jokes.

In speaking perceptively or provocatively, how acerbic is one allowed to be before the words turn back on their speaker and say more about her or him than the intended subject?

Here is William Logan on Mary Oliver’s 2008 book of poems Red Bird:

Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human spirit is indomitable, that the animal spirit is indomitable, that she loves birds very much, that she loves flowers very much, that even her dog loves flowers very much.[1] . . .  If we trust the landscape of her poems, Oliver lives in a vast nature preserve she polices like a docent, strolling from bush to bush from beast to beast (I’m told the wildlife of Cape Cod have asked for a restraining order against her).

Let’s not deny it: that's funny stuff, that's awfully clever satire. And those who know poetry can see where Logan is coming from, whether or not they entirely approve of his content or his tone. But is he squashing an ant with an avalanche (or however that boulder-to-bug analogy goes)?

Logan concludes his review of Red Bird by tossing Sharon Olds, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins into the Mary Oliver mold (onto the poet funeral pyre?), as he suggests that Oliver and, by implication, the others write the way they do for the money:   “The worship of simplicities is not a mean thing; but it is made mean when conducted with such hand wringing, such urgent tears, such Victorian sentiment. Those tears are shed all the way to the bank.”

I find it hard to believe that anyone would choose verse as an avenue toward riches, but I don’t have an insider's knowledge of how such business goes. Are those four writers and others really raking in millions from their verse and their readings? 

Even if they are, does it mean they write the way they do—call it populist verse—in order to get rich or stay rich?  Or do they write that way because that’s their mind and voice—the only mind and voice they have? That’s the way they see the world, and those are the words and sentences they use to talk about what they see. Even if some of us (occasionally? always?) find it inferior—shallow, simplistic—shall we take those putative wannabes downtown and lock them in the Poetryville stocks? And ditto their readers? Lock them up too, for aiding and abetting?

In any case, does it matter?  Those poets’ poems are there, on the market, and they offer additional ways to think about poetry. Quite possibly they are only enacting Wordsworth's dictum about the language of the common man. Moreover, they’ve brought tens of thousands of people to the reading of poems, which I like to think makes tens of thousands more observant, thoughtful, less aggressive humans. Maybe a handful will one day migrate to poems even William Logan can respect. 

In the meantime, I'll probably keep reading the man. But not at bedtime--my squirming would keep me awake.

White-Eyes by Mary Oliver : Poetry Magazine

NEW CRITERION,  December 2008

Shock & Awe   

by William Logan

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Cedar Waxwings, "Psyche and Eros in Florida" by Debora Greger

Saturday I caught this cedar waxwing in a treetop. I didn’t know what it was—maybe “just another” cardinal, I thought--a female. But with digital photography, your chances cost nothing, so I fired away, without much hope. I’m especially happy to have caught her with crest raised. (Why “her”? I guess it's the lingering notion of female cardinal. Otherwise, I have no idea.).

 

At the same site a week earlier, I tried to catch some cedar waxwings, casual but flitting among berries. They seemed to be posing, and I thought I had at least a couple of fine shots. But here, sadly, is the best of them:

I looked for a poem specifically about cedar waxwings and found this one by Debora Greger, who has published eight books of poetry. She is the life partner of poet and critic William Logan, who’s been discussed here a few times in the last few months. Both writers teach at the University of Florida.

Psyche and Eros in Florida by Debora Greger : Poetry Magazine

Once again, this is my first experience with a poem, and I'm not sure how all the parts fit together. However, I like some of it very much:

They devour the fruit no local bird wants.

Unswerving, they swerve through clotheslines.

Let their whispery cries be mine.

Their whisper of wings is yours.

 

The drop of wax that fell on your bare shoulder.

Why didn’t you want me to see you? 

what of the traitorous, languorous body?

It lies down. It begs.

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Robert Frost, "The Draft Horse," William Logan, Literary Criticism and the Power of Thought

 
I write this in the wake of some schools’ (cowardly?) surrender to ignorant, cowardly parents (and, remarkably, one college professor) who have supported or caused the banning of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and/or Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I assume such parents fear their children will be led to thought, among other disturbing experiences, like laughter, kindness, friendship, along with a distaste for hypocrisy, war and bigotry, both personal and institutional.

I also write this with thanks to William Logan (see this blog,  June 2, 4, 7, 26, 2011) and The New Criterion magazine for directing me to an intriguing Robert Frost poem I had never seen.  

 Frost's horse, Wilbur's ride by William Logan - The New Criterion

THE DRAFT HORSE by Robert Frost

With a lantern that wouldn't burn
In too frail a buggy we drove
Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees
And took our horse by the head
And reaching back to his ribs
Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down
With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees
In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair
That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe
Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself
Or someone he had to obey
Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way.

I’d think “The Draft Horse” would spark good classroom discussions, with questions pouring from teachers and students alike.

Who is this strange couple, who speak so dispassionately about such a traumatic, mysterious event? Do they represent more than their old-timey,  agrarian selves?

Why is the assailant so anonymous and motiveless to the victims, as well as the rest of us?  

Isn’t there the feel of third person point of view, even though first person plural (“we”) is made clear in the second line?  If so, how does Frost accomplish that feeling of an omniscient perspective, and what might it add to the poem? 

Can a grove be “limitless”?  Isn’t a grove a somewhat small cluster of trees?  Is “ponderous” an okay choice of words?  Who would use it, and therefore what does it say about the narrator? 

“In one long invidious draft”—isn’t that rhythm rather awkward?  And, like “ponderous,” isn’t “invidious” an word in a poem and speaker from rural America?  “Any more than we had to to hate”—that’s natural, even folksy speech, yet it’s likely to make a reader pause at “to to” (16).  Is that okay?

If “The Draft Horse” is as teachable as I suspect it is, why is it not included in more anthologies?  Is it so ambiguous that teachers (and editors)  don’t have a comfortable number of definitive answers for student questions?

Does the poem challenge mainstream, submissive, unquestioning behavior, such as we see in the victims, who squirm at any notion of hatred?  Would too many of us, including teachers, be forced to acknowledge that we are similarly “unquestioning”—so much so that we assume a horse-murdering assailant merely wanted us to walk instead of ride in our “frail” buggies?  Or that he was the agent of someone, or some force, too powerful to investigate? 

Are those questions too uncomfortable to inflict upon American teens and their teachers (and then their angry, litigious parents who might complain that a mere poem has agitated Jimmy and Susie, made them nervous or irritable table companions)? 

I suppose that’s far-fetched . . . .  

I highly, highly recommend William Logan’s analysis that surrounds the poem in 
The New Criterion. I don’t know if I’d go where he does on Christianity or the importance of horses in America, but his arguments are always an interesting, fine example of what’s good about high-caliber literary criticism. First, it chooses a subject that deserves careful attention. Then Logan avoids glossing over things; he looks at details and provides thoughtful responses to them. His language is professional, but not ostentatious or forbidding.

I don’t expect anyone to take me up on reading Logan, but for what it’s worth, I find it an extremely worthwhile, important kind of thinking, and I look forward to reading what he has to say about Richard Wilbur in the second half of the essay.

Frost's horse, Wilbur's ride by William Logan - The New Criterion

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Sylvia Plath's "Mirror," Conrad Hilberry's "Tongue," Six-Shooters, Walking Naked

Mirror?

'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

I'm offering Sylvia Plath's "Mirror" again because of a recent visitor comment about the poem at my June 4 post. Mr. Somewords says: "'I have looked at it so long / I think it is a part of my heart.'  This line, coming from the mirror itself, is one of my favorite lines of Plath, ever. The mirror confuses a wall with its heart. I love the idea of a mirror worrying about losing its own essence because of what it has reflected for so long.”

No argument here, Mr. Somewords. To offer one’s Self as a confusion (conflation?) of mirror, heart and wall—that takes guts, and it would probably be a worthy insight coming from any of us. 

I wonder if William Logan and Sharon Olds have found any walls within their hearts.

Wall.  Mirror?

Stones in water = wall or mirror?

Adolescent narcissism and self-pity are probably two of the risks Sylvia Plath takes repeatedly, and she’s been heartily criticized for it  (or was all of that criticism after death?).  But I challenge those who smugly condescend toward Plath from their imagined heights as scholars or reviewers.  How about we all reveal what we see in ourselves in our most honest, most naked moments.  Reveal it, force-feed it to ourselves—then share it with a reading public.

Climbing up a wall

Might that lead to world peace?   Some say toting six-guns is a way to keep the peace; some Texan even proclaimed, “An armed society is a polite society.”  Well, I 'spect. Maybe.

Or could it be that all we have to do is walk naked, in every sense of the word, everywhere we go?  Instead of muttering or chirping some meaningless “hey” to everyone, like Yeats’ “polite, meaningless nods” . . . we confess our most recent taboo thought or obsession. 

Would that lead to less violence? Or more? Might it lead to a mass scramble for cover, both literally and figuratively?

There may be a more polite, though brutal version of all that in Conrad Hilberry’s poem, “Tongue”:

   Conrad Hilberry - Tongue       

(my apologies for white on black—it’s the only version I could find—why do it that way?)

And here is Conrad Hilberry reading the poem:   Dr. Hilberry Reads Poem

 The poem involves behavior rather than thought, but I see it as the boy’s being caught unaware, fully exposed, as if he'd confessed to three counties all his puerile dumbness—which looks remarkably similar to adult dumbness. Hilberry’s youngster is King Lear’s “man more sinned against than sinning."

Embarrassment often overrides pain when we’re caught in our most moronic, vulnerable moments, as we all are from time to time. Don’t you think?  I’d love to invite examples, but for now I’m not offering any of my own.

Organic twisting

Organic

Thanks, Mr. “Somewords,” for starting this train of thought, which I think has some value. Although I too partake aplenty, I’m sick and damned tired of all our asinine pride and posturing, much of which has a frantic quality, because we’re trying to sprint away from self-awareness instead of swallowing whole the blood of our dumbness, like Hilberry’s kid, who has no choice.

Organic Thrust

Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." William Logan and Sharon Olds, continued

I'm not ready to leave the issues and questions I've tried to stimulate in the previous two posts about William Logan, Frieda Hughes and Sharon Olds.  However, my mysterious attraction to my own photo of a fish, along with the humorous comment about it from Pasadena Adjacent at my last post,  have recalled for me a poem by Sylvia Plath.

Since Sharon Olds is sometimes discussed as Plath's psychic daughter, and Frieda Hughes is Plath's actual daughter, and William Logan writes about them all, and I write about William Logan writing about them all, a practice that William Logan has mockingly called Theory . . . well, all the stars seem in alignment for us to consider the three luminaries: William Logan, Sharon Olds, and now Sylvia Plath.

Here is "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath:  'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

First, I'm interested in my own acceptance of Plath's bold, explicit, perhaps self-indulgent switch in speakers to open the second stanza (or verse paragraph): "Now I am a lake." Part of me wants to reply, "Really. You get to be what you want, when you want. Well, I'm an avalanche, baby, and I just crashed some boulders into your lake, just cluttered you up, just obliterated your arrogant damned lake."


Does she get to do that, simply change horses in midstream because she feels like it and then she can shout it from the rooftops? Doesn't that break some important rule? Is she thumbing her nose at old stuffed shirts, telling them (us? me?) to stuff it if we can't loosen up, can't take a joke? But this is no joke, is it? This is aging, this is shriveling, flesh-gone-to-scales mortality, isn't it?

I feel as if Plath has seized something of mine, and I've said that's okay, boss, go ahead, you can have it. Maybe I didn't want it anyway, though I wasn't sure yet. But go ahead, take it. It was only my cornucopia, my horn of plenty of male logic. It wasn't doing me much good, and your mood, or your mysterious . . . strategy . . .  is surely more important.


Secondly, I'm intrigued by the power of the poem's closing: "rises toward her . . .  like a terrible fish." Sometimes I have images, or personifying glimpses, of old age that are not unlike terrible fish. Yet I'd never have pinned them down and thought, "Oh, yeah, terrible fish, that's exactly what I saw-felt-imagined."  My images had nothing to do with fish, yet I'm perfectly satisfied with Plath's decision that a fish is what she and I both saw in the mirror.

Finally, I am thoroughly satisfied with her vague adjective, "terrible." Why?  Usually I'd ask for something more precise to describe the poem's most dominant image, the fish; but "terrible" seems not just acceptable, but perfect. Maybe it's because I don't usually think of fish as terrible; or maybe something more individualizing about this fish would distract and separate me from the real issue and its creator, while a "terrible" fish, rising at me, feels like just the right transmogrification to capture the universal insult of aging. From flesh to scales in the stroke of a pen. Or tick of a clock.


I wonder if William Logan would say that Plath has managed to capture an unflattering portrait of the human body without resorting to the peep show tactics he attributes to Sharon Olds.  I sure think such wondering is important fun, like a seventh grade dance, where we're all fools, and, whether we dance or stand against the wall with our hands folded, we're glad to be there. But don't tell a soul.

'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

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Sex, Literary Criticism, William Logan and Sharon Olds, Part Two

Here is William Logan writing about Sharon Olds, who is one of America’s most popular headliners at poetry conferences and other readings. 

. . . part of the hypnotic fascination of Olds’s poetry is its headlong, hell-bent hubris.

She trades in shameless prose chopped up into lines of poetry, lurid as a tabloid, returning to the primal scene more often than a therapist: her cold, sadistic father; her cold, masochistic mother . . .

If someone is raped in her apartment building, we never hear about the victim. We’re told instead about Olds having sex the next day . . .

Everywhere brute shock is taken as a sign of honesty.

Olds has as many teases as a strip show, and the psychology that drives her poetry is dourly exhibitionist.

‘Look at me! Look at me!’ the poems say, poems of someone never loved enough.

She loves to rub your nose in it: if you look away, you’re a coward; if you keep looking, you’re complicit.

Olds is sometimes mistaken for a confessional poet, but she has nothing to confess: she never feels anything as subtle or scouring as guilt, and it’s hard to believe she’d recognize a sin if it bit her.

. . . for all her radical pretense, she’s a homely Redbook moralist, believing in motherhood, family, and honey on her nipples.

Well, that ought to offer some of the flavor of both William Logan and Sharon Olds, whose poetry has provoked almost identical reactions from me. I’m particularly concerned with the question of whether it’s prose or poetry (as I am with many of the celebrated poets out there), and it’s comforting to have an aggressive intelligence like Logan on my side.

Although I'm a blogger, I’m also impatient (to put it nicely) with narcissism and exhibitionism (if there’s a difference), whether in blogs or poetry or conversation. I’ve often recoiled from Sharon Olds’ recurring exposure of her body, others’ bodies, others' vulnerabilities, her sexuality, and some other inglorious concerns, like her obsessive, repetitive hatred toward her father and her invasion of her children’s privacy (which is the way I see some of her poems about them).



However, there’s a counter-argument that Logan has not mentioned. Americans and other humans are slow to see their own flaws. Without an honest, humble reckoning of how disappointing or downright disgusting we are—cosmetically, , domestically, politically, morally—how can we begin doing better as sharers of the planet? If everyone looked at himself in the mirror as frankly as Sharon Olds does, no matter how uncomfortable the sights there, we’d surely be prompted to behave better—or at least more humbly.  Or maybe we could simply get out of the paths of others who have found a better way to be.


Or would we? And that is one of Logan’s most important points:  Olds may be willing to examine herself and her loved ones in full view of us, but the flaws she sees tend strongly to be minor, brief, or attached to other people. I rarely hear her reprimanding herself or feeling a need to change.

As Logan says, she’s not really a confessional poet because she doesn’t own up to any sins or guilt, without which she is simply demanding attention: “Look at me,” says Sharon Olds (and that’s undeniable).  Logan replies, “Why should I? The only insights you offer are centered, microscopically, on your body, your psyche, and your very individual biography.” 

However, I’m not comfortable thinking that’s the end of the discussion, whereas Logan might be finished. Ever the moderate, caught in the complex middle, I think there might be value in Sharon Olds’ invitation to think about what makes us uncomfortable and why.  For one thing, it’s worth wondering about the undeniable centrality of sex in human lives. From burqas to strip joints to wondering whether less is more and bigger is better, we don’t seem to know what to do about this troublesome feature within us. Shall we try to smother it completely or give it free reign? How wide is the middle ground in between?

In any case, sex, along with war, will win out, however grotesquely we may twist and turn it in an attempt to wring out the hormones, control the thoughts and desires. Maybe Sharon Olds’ poetry is one small step toward getting the genie more happily out of the bottle. Logan himself makes an unconvincing attempt to state that he’s on the sex team:  “Poetry in our prudent hour needs more sex, not less . . . .” But that’s one drop of honey in a bucket of vitriol he’s hurled across the distance between himself and Sharon Olds.

Still, William Logan’s challenge is essential:  if we must be made uncomfortable by our intimate knowledge of Sharon Olds, and the part of her that's a part of us, what’s in it for us and the rest of the world? If we are not elevated by poetry, why not go straight to Hustler or petty Cosmo blurbs about starlets and their troubled lives?

Notice, by the way, all this presumes that the details of Olds’ life are factual. For a variety of reasons, I still insist on the traditional, valid distinction between poet and speaker. Olds’ poems certainly seem autobiographical, but we don’t know that, and we shouldn’t care.

I think you should love my fish, and I'm going to keep posting him until you do.

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William Logan, Bitter Words, and the Nature of Criticism

Color, Upward

 Reviewers are often accused of being rejected, frustrated, embittered people who failed at becoming “real” writers. If it’s true that “those who can’t do . . . teach,” maybe it’s also true that those who can’t write  . . .  review.  And many a poet would go on to say that some reviewers are obtuse sadists who review with venom one wouldn’t fire at a rabid skunk.

Although I suspect that reviewing in recent years has become more of a family affair, tending toward generous remarks about “one of our own,” there might still be critics who have axes to grind. If so, William Logan, the Simon Cowell of literary scholarship, is probably the first to be accused.

Turtle Peeks Around

I marvel at Logan’s meanness when he doesn’t approve of a book or poet or poem, but I also marvel at his courage and what seems to be his integrity. I have no idea what impure agendas might drive him, or if any do, but this man is so willing to take a verbal machete to so many poet-luminaries that he must be one of the lonelier scholars in the university scene (he teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Florida).

Whatever William Logan’s personal or professional agendas might be, his prose has a wit, an edge, an insight, a reverence for language as the art of poetry, and a search for truthfulness that are absent in many contemporary poems.  If a professor’s prose is livelier, more impassioned and more fun that the putatively lofty art he’s reviewing, maybe we ought to listen—and then reread the poetry with Logan’s criteria in our minds.

Carved Beech

In The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin, some of Logan’s analyses zero in on issues of character. We may not agree with this or that point about this or that poet, but we ought to listen to what he values or criticizes in human beings and their art.

We may find ourselves thinking, “I don’t want to be her,” the one about whom someone would say:  She “wants to be a poet a lot more than she wants to write poetry.” Or, “She likes to strike a pity-me tone; yet . . . you find nothing but static, lifeless observation.” Or, “She can bash out a simile whenever she wants to; but her damp clichés of feeling and blood-filled ideas act poetic for a line or two, then start faking it. She . . . grinds the images out like sausages.” 

These comments about writing (directed at Frieda Hughes, daughter of two significant modern poets, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) also imply cautionary notes on how to be more thoughtful, honest humans. I haven’t thought often enough about the ways perceptive, probing literary criticism can take us toward insights about motives, integrity, aesthetics, even morality. I wonder how many of the principles of good writing transfer nicely to codes of decent behavior. Be honest; don't fake it; avoid histrionics; be economical with words and other material; look for big truths; reach out to your audience; treat people and other subjects honorably; perceive the world and yourself as accurately and completely as possible.

None of that means writers have suddenly become responsible citizens or poster children for mental health; but it does mean we can yank them by the short hairs when we hear their words bearing false witness.

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