>I had been thinking about posting a note about Logan's whole review, but
>Candice has made all the points that need to be made:
>
>If Logan's _New Criterion_ review article (which covers a number of poets
>besides Graham, btw, and finds only one to praise) is anything to go by, his
>bombast serves no purpose but loudness so far as I can tell, and he struck
>me as one of the crudest critics I'd ever read: statement after statement
>that alleged flaws in one poet's work after another without troubling to
>provide much evidence of them, while ostentatiously dragging in
>irrelevancies like Grinling Gibbons' woodwork (which Logan
>hilariously/offensively dismisses as "fussy and dust-catching" in the course
>of more legitimately criticizing Richard Wilbur's ornateness), and all
>rendered in a style suggestive of aspiring to immortality as a denizen of
>book-blurb hell. Worse yet in that NC piece was the kind of comment made
>about a poet whose work Logan had come not to trash but to tout--Linda
>Gregg. In her place, if a critic had turned from attacking the work of
>Graham and Anne Carson in such terms as Logan favors ("the oddity of Anne
>Carson's poems conceals every virtue except their originality and exposes
>every flaw except their contempt") to say that my "poems glow like Cezanne
>apples," I'd have felt nothing but excrutiating embarrassment.
such a wholeheartedly negative attitude toward all kinds of poetry seems
rather counter-productive, to say the least...
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I chose poetry because every line set out
so hopefully from a new margin, and
because my heart was hot and unbowed.
Michele Leggott
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