I found the following quote by Franz Wright about William Logan in Bookslut's blog (an entry written by Jordan Davis):
Personally, I have no clue as to how the reader will react when he/she reads Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No (my review of it should be up on miPOesias soon). I just write about the books I like and that excite me. Call this the Frank O'Hara method of book reviewing. It serves no good to bash a poet in print because he/she is bad. People may forget bad poets. It's more useful to promote good poets (read, "poets whose work you enjoy") because they don't get recognized enough. Those are the people who'll never see a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award or a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Which is also why I usually don't write about books that are published by major presses (read, "presses that can afford to pay big advances to Harvard freshmen for their advances and publish poetry to seem culturally acceptable and as a gesture of charity"; somehow, I feel a book publicist will read this and will stop sending me free books to review; if said reviewer works for FSG or New Directions, I will be more than glad to review new work by August Kleinzahler or Michael Palmer) and why I tend to review books by small presses (for now, I've reviewed Aaron Belz's Plausible Worlds, from Observable Books; The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel; Kent Johnson's Epigramititis from BlazeVOX; various small zines, with the exception of Spoon River Poetry Review and Circumference; and Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, from ActionBooks). Those books come from publishers that usually don't have huge PR budgets and can't really afford the type of exposure you would receive from EccoPress or FSG.
Now, Johannes has an interesting conversation about the notions of poetic "center." And yes, he is right (as is Derrida). The interesting poetry happens at the periphery
And apparently, my poet's pen name should be Lionel Quaffalot.
You get these self-ordained parasites in every generation, and without fail they are crude and pedantic mediocrities. Lasting and reasable criticism is usually written in a spirit of reverence and love; and that does not mean blind to its subject's faults. The critics we go back to and read over time have usually been preoccupied with writing in an inviting and illuminating way about poetry they love. Anyway, it is difficult for me to imagine a sadder destiny than someone like Logan's. This is the only way he can get any notice in the literary world (whatever that is), and I recently contributed to that in a rather ridiculous way myself, and for that I am sorry. But I got a poem out of it. I'm calling it "Attack of the Blog People."Now, I just hope people don't usually think of me as just "miPOesias's book reviewer." Sure, I haven't done much to change that. My book reviews (5) outnumber my poems published (2). But what I do in my book reviews differs quite significantly from what Logan does. Logan takes pleasure (it seems) in the attempt of destroying someone's work, just to promote his neo-formalist tastes, and quite unsurprisingly, his poetry veers toward the same aesthetic and looks dry, dull and awfully forced (methinks Mr. Logan should take some laxatives). I don't enjoy attacking a particular poet in print, unless they really really anger me, like Camille Paglia or Ed Hirsch or Wm Logan or Dana Gioia. And usually, it's not even because of their work (which I usually find boring and uninteresting), but because of how they view poetry, which is very conservative, prescriptive and exclusive. It bugs me that they use their "higher" levels of exposition to try to direct the evolution of poetry. And it irritates me how they reify/totalize the reader, such as when they say that poetry has lost its readership because "LangPo is too hermetic and poetry needs a natural language that is accessible" (as usual, blame LangPo for turning your bathwater cold and praise "natural language," which usually means the standard language they teach you in the schools and slang is just uneducated) or like when Hirsch writes in an essay in Five Points that the duty of the poet is to take "the reader on a trip to Mars" (for all that matters, I don't want to go to Mars; I am a human being, I'd asphyxiate with the high concentration of dioxide carbon).
Personally, I have no clue as to how the reader will react when he/she reads Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No (my review of it should be up on miPOesias soon). I just write about the books I like and that excite me. Call this the Frank O'Hara method of book reviewing. It serves no good to bash a poet in print because he/she is bad. People may forget bad poets. It's more useful to promote good poets (read, "poets whose work you enjoy") because they don't get recognized enough. Those are the people who'll never see a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award or a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Which is also why I usually don't write about books that are published by major presses (read, "presses that can afford to pay big advances to Harvard freshmen for their advances and publish poetry to seem culturally acceptable and as a gesture of charity"; somehow, I feel a book publicist will read this and will stop sending me free books to review; if said reviewer works for FSG or New Directions, I will be more than glad to review new work by August Kleinzahler or Michael Palmer) and why I tend to review books by small presses (for now, I've reviewed Aaron Belz's Plausible Worlds, from Observable Books; The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel; Kent Johnson's Epigramititis from BlazeVOX; various small zines, with the exception of Spoon River Poetry Review and Circumference; and Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, from ActionBooks). Those books come from publishers that usually don't have huge PR budgets and can't really afford the type of exposure you would receive from EccoPress or FSG.
Now, Johannes has an interesting conversation about the notions of poetic "center." And yes, he is right (as is Derrida). The interesting poetry happens at the periphery
And apparently, my poet's pen name should be Lionel Quaffalot.
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