Right up front let me say that I don’t know anything about poetry and am not qualified to judge it. Like any naive critic, all I can say is, I know what I like. I do know that this review by William Logan is one of the funniest, and most savage, reviews of any kind I’ve read in a long time. Apparently Logan has a reputation for savagery — looks like it’s well deserved.
Here are some samples. You almost have to pity the poets under review.
John Ashbery has long threatened to become a public monument, visited mainly by schoolchildren and pigeons.
Perhaps I’m not the only reader who thinks that, while scribbling down far too much poetry in the past fifteen years, Ashbery lost the cunning of his sentences, which sometimes dodder about as if they’ve forgotten their subject. Were he unfortunate enough to develop Alzheimer’s, the poems wouldn’t change a bit.
Few confessional poets have possessed a life with so many built-in headlines; it’s a shame Frieda Hughes [daughter of Ted Hughes and Silvia Plath] doesn’t have the literary skill to take advantage of them. She excels in wide-eyed, slightly crazed run-on sentences that sound like excuses and read like indictments—they’re so near to being illiterate, you weep for English syntax…
Even before the litany of Hughes’s illnesses (endometriosis, chronic fatigue, M.E., Crohn’s disease, a twisted colon, an allergy to fleas, and some mysterious problem with her feet), her roller-coaster ride of elation and depression provokes the reader’s sympathy. The poems are hypnotic as a train wreck; but it’s hard to pity someone so good at pitying herself, someone who loves playing the victim and manages to be humorless about it.
Hughes is a perfect example of what happens when a poet, though possessing none of the art necessary to turn a plain old messed-up life into literature, is the sun in her own Copernican system (she puts the Sol back in solipsism). [Ba-da-bump!]
The poems don’t make you like Frieda Hughes. They make you afraid Robert Lowell’s children will take up poetry, too.
(via Critical Mass)
Ouch! Interesting thought that bad poetry is genetic, or perhaps he is referring to nurture, not nature, but what did Robert Lowell’s children ever do to deserve this?
>.
[...] defending Goodyear against Orr, Casteen brings up the name William Logan a lot. How is it that Logan comes to have a dog in this hunt? Poetry forgot the critic’s role [...]