William Logan (poet)
William Logan (born 1950) is an American poet, critic and scholar. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts to W. Donald Logan, Jr. and Nancy Damon Logan. Educated at Yale (BA, 1972) and the University of Iowa (MFA, 1975), he has authored seven books of poetry as well as four books of criticism. For twenty years, Logan's poetry reviews regularly appeared in the New York Times Book Review.
Work in poetry criticism:
Despite the awards and accolades his poetry has received, Logan is best known for his reviews of new poetry collections, notably his regular Verse Chronicle contributions to The New Criterion. Logan's reviewing methodology, which seems to take as a maxim that a poet's worst work is as relevant to a critical evaluator as a poet's best work, is at odds with the views and sentiments of many others in the American poetry establishment. Occasionally, poets whose work has not met with Logan's approval have taken it upon themselves to publicly attack him. In 2004, the popular and pugilistic winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry of that year, Franz Wright not only publicly accused Logan of being a "grotesquely mean-spirited mediocrity", but threatened him with a "crippling beating", should he ever encounter Logan in person.[1] While Logan is generally recognized as one of the pre-eminent American poetry critics, there is no doubt that, like any critic, his judgement is somewhat idiosyncratic, and not always objective. For example, Logan has shown a hostile attitude towards poetry coloured with religious sentiment; indeed, one of his primary grounds for disliking Wright's Pulitzer-winning collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard was its religious sentimentality. Logans reviews are marked, however, by a pleasing, humorous prose style that almost always has the reader laughing along with Logan's barbs, regardless of the Reader's personal opinions. Logan's particular tastes, baises, and talents can be seen more nakedly in his original poems; and so it is to them that we turn.
William Logan's poetry
Logan's poetry has undergone shifts and changes in style and content since his first collection, Sad-faced Men, was published in 1982. Logan seems to drift towards, then away from formalism, and similarly adopts classical and idomatic dictions alternately. Because of the variety of style that one sees in his work, some have been lead to criticize Logan for not having developed 'a voice of his own'. In his defense, however, it could be maintained that his ability to adopt many voices is a sign of his wide-ranging talent. It is difficult to know how to approach a judgement of Logan's work as a whole. Certainly, in his most recent collections, there have been many wonderful pieces, such as Sonnet After a Line by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blues for Penelope, and Song, from Night Battle (1999), and the Punchinello and Macbeth sequences from Macbeth in Venice. In the pieces from Night Battle, Logan manages to mix a sincere sense of pity with the sensual beauties of elegy, in the Sonnet, and blues-jazz, in Penelope. Logan's attempts in Macbeth in Venice to sustain those effects through poetry sequences are largely successful. While it is appropriate to maintain a single emotion through a short lyric, however, a sequence of some dozen connected lyrics requires more emotional variety. while Logan certainly obliges by supplying uproarious humour in the Porter's Song and quiet, adolescent sexuality in Lady Macbeth to her Mirror, the collection as a whole can be fairly blamed for an excessively homogeneity in tone. Given his late maturation, we can expect further accomplishments from him, but Logan's greatest triumphs for the time being remain a number of short to middle length lyrics, the finest of which are genuinely of the highest quality.
Logan has shown a consistent attachment to certain themes; notably the decline of western civilization, the emptiness of false belief, and adultery. He delights in re-versifying old stories, especially ones that were once common knowledge, and have fallen into obscurity.
William Logan currently lives in Cambridge and Gainesville, Florida where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Florida.
Awards
- National Book Critics Circle award for criticism
- Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle
- Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets
- John Masefield and Celia B. Wagner Awards from the Poetry Society of America
- J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry
- Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
Bibliography
Poetry
- Sad-faced Men (1982)
- Difficulty (1985)
- Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988)
- Vain Empires (1998)
- Night Battle (1999)
- Macbeth in Venice (2003)
- The Whispering Gallery (2005)
Criticism
- All the Rage (1998)
- Reputations of the Tongue (1999)
- Desperate Measures (2002)
- The Undiscovered Country (2005)