• Biographical and Critical Essay
  • Sad-Faced Men
  • Difficulty
  • "Heart's Needle"
  • "Arcanum"
  • Sullen Weedy Lakes
• Writings by the Author
• About the Essay

An April 1981 Life magazine feature on eleven poets, with photographs by Annie Leibowitz, pictured William Logan lying on a sleeping bag in a sparsely furnished apartment. The accompanying text proclaimed that, although "early in college, Logan's love was rock 'n' roll," he was pursuing "more literary" interests; he is quoted as saying, "I was thrilled by The Waste Land." Of a piece with the fashion magazine mentality of the spread (with a barechested Robert Penn Warren and with Tess Gallagher shown as Lady Godiva on horseback), there is little in the photograph or text that suggests the erudite formality of Logan's poetry.

Born in Boston to William Donald Logan, Jr. (a salesman with Alcoa, and later the general manager of Allan Marine, the director of gas marketing at Con Edison, and a real-estate broker), and Nancy Damon Logan (also a real-estate broker), the young Logan was raised in Braintree and Westport, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh; and Huntington, New York, where he graduated from high school in 1968. He received his bachelor's degree from Yale in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Iowa in 1975. Since 1974 he has lived with the poet Debora Greger.

Since 1975, Logan's poems and reviews have appeared regularly in major magazines and newspapers, such as the New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Paris Review. He has received grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has won an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, the 1988 Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. Since 1983 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program of the University of Florida, where he is currently associate professor of English and director of creative writing.

Logan spent four years in England over the course of the 1980s, and his poetry often seems more British than American. Even when he deals with highly personal subjects, he is reticent and allusive. His poetry is composed, for the most part, in tightly formal structures that often seem as constricting as they are potentially expansive and invigorating. Both his admirers and his detractors characterize his poetry as "impersonal." Simon Rae, writing in TLS, said, "William Logan's poetry is cerebral, abstract, and elusive. Its tone is fastidious, at times clinical, and its prevailing mood is sombre" (14 December 1984). Praising Logan's first full-length collection, Sad-Faced Men (1982), Richard Howard in the Nation almost succeeded in burying it. Although he lauded the "expert, lowering poems" as "the poems in Prospero's drowned book," he criticized Logan's poetry for its unrelenting severity--"its figures [are] drastic in their closure, their abeyance from sealed realm to realm; its measures slack with exhaustion, a tension literally beyond bearing; its vocabulary chastened ...." Howard praised the poems individually as "enigmatic and resonant" but concluded that the collection as a whole is "more likely to foreclose than to mystify" (20 March 1982).

Logan's poems seem antinarrative, a quality that may, as Howard suggested, rescue them from sentimentality but one that also leaves them open to the charge of willful obscurantism. Logan's distrust of narrative is made explicit in one of the best poems from Sad-Faced Men, "The Man on the Bed," in which he describes his grandfather's use of anecdote to persuade "Midwest housewives to buy / His merchandise":

My grandfather was no honest man,
For honesty is of little use when a man,
By profession, sells kitchen gadgets
To people who will be hard-pressed recalling
The reason for their purchase.

Recognizing that this stance might lead him to "write things into extinction," Logan grapples with this problem in his second book-length volume, Difficulty (1984). Critic Stephen Romer recognized the power of the long title poem, acknowledging that "Logan's linguistic difficulty finds a purpose, in trying to come to terms with a terminated love affair" (New Statesman, 18 January 1985). However, none of the reviewers of Difficulty seemed to recognize the central crisis, which concerns the couple's "Phantom daughter," who has been lost either through abortion or miscarriage. In section 5, with its echoes of W.D. Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle" (in the 1959 book of that name), the speaker, having envied a man who "wrestl[ed] with his daughter," rejects the image of the lover in a photograph as "Design without speech, a face starved of text, / it does not promise what it cannot deliver," and he decides to burn her letters,

clumsy dissections of a passion's reach.
Your once familiar blue
scrawl became a scroll of ash, more true
where pictures alone are honest teachers.

I understand that now. I understand the love
That twists us into lives we never meant.
One long night, before you were pregnant,
You held a wet cloth to my head and hour
after hour whispered love into my ear.
I know better what those whispers meant.
Or tell myself I know. The clock has stopped,
whose hour comes by accident. The carpet's
in the attic. You're never coming back.

The problems of narratively and reflexivity in language are also taken up in Difficulty. "Arcanum" bears an ironic epigraph from René Descartes ("as soon as I see the word arcanum in any proposition I begin to suspect it"), which introduces a poem that lampoons the jargon of poststructuralist literary criticism, while at the same time paying homage to the importance of the poststructuralists' discoveries:

Writing cannot
comprehend the lineaments of message.
Deaf to its own urgings, it outraces
presence, arriving before beginning,
always already the father of itself.

The multilayered ironies and the important subject matter of the best poems in Difficulty show Logan's poetic growth between his first and second volumes. However, some of the less-ambitious poems signal the direction Logan's work takes in Sullen Weedy Lakes (1988). "The Shootist" (from Difficulty ) is a ballad presumably spoken by John Hinckley as played by John Wayne:

I'm in a hotel waiting,
watching a man on t.v.
I can see him on three channels
but he can't see me.
Tomorrow I'll take a stroll
down by his hotel
where he'll be talking and talking
like a guy with a car to sell.
.......................
I have no mother or father,
no daughter and no son,
no past and no future,
but I have a little gun.

A similar poem in Sullen Weedy Lakes , "Political Song," elicited the praise of Sven Birkerts (Boston Review, October 1988), who commended Logan for "Audenizing" poetry again; likewise, David Lehman calls Sullen Weedy Lakes "vivaciously Audenesque" (Washington Post Book World, 28 August 1988). Both critics assume that such "Audenization" is a virtue--hardly a foregone conclusion. Randall Jarrell, a great admirer of the early work of W.H. Auden, said of Auden's work after the 1930s, "a poet has turned into a sack of reflexes" ( Kipling, Auden & Co., 1980). To his credit, Logan, in his poem " Auden," seems fully aware of this decline. Yet all too often in Sullen Weedy Lakes, Logan succumbs to what Jarrell (again speaking of Auden) calls "dreary facetiousness that would embarrass a radio comedian."

Though Sullen Weedy Lakes offers welcome relief from the almost unrelieved darkness of his earlier books, one hopes that Logan has not abandoned grappling with the difficulties of human relationships and language. When Logan writes about more personal concerns, as in "Debora Sleeping," his characteristic wit seems more honest than it does in poems such as "To the Honorable Committee," which is merely witty. In "Debora Sleeping" he ionizes the neoclassical rhetoric that mars some other poems in the volume:

Sleep's our disease, the heart's adagio.
We wallow in its sty, refuse to leave
the rundown precinct of its raveled sleeve,
the only ease bodies so close can know.
Or so I thought.

William Logan is currently completing a new volume of poems, "Vain Empires," and has collected his essays on contemporary poetry in a volume he says is "tentatively and recklessly titled" "All the Rage: Prose on Poetry, 1976-1990." He is an accomplished, engaging, and idiosyncratic poet and critic.


Writings by the Author

Books

Dream of Dying (Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf, 1980).

Sad-Faced Men (Boston: Godine, 1982).

Moorhen (Omaha: Abattoir, 1984).

Difficulty (Edinburgh: Salamander, 1984; Boston: Godine, 1985).

Sullen Weedy Lakes (Boston: Godine, 1988).

About the Essay

Written by: Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, 1992, pp. 195-199.

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