Finally I have the opportunity to write a piece about “the most hated man in American poetry.” When Robert McDowell referred to William Logan this way in the Hudson Review, Logan adopted the phrase as a jacket blurb for his book of poems Night Battle (and I think he has used it on other books too). If I remember the piece correctly, McDowell couched the phrase in terms of praise. As many readers of American poetry of course already know, Logan has been awarded this reputation for his poetry reviews, which I shall not discuss here. What I shall discuss–at least in passing–is what a wonderful and inspiring teacher he was to me back in the early nineties when I was a student in the MFA program at the University of Florida. I am hoping that Logan will not mind, at least not strenuously, that I name him as an important influence, for I cannot deny his influence any more than I can deny his fierce intelligence and devotion to the art of poetry. I have no doubt that he could have devoted himself successfully to any number of other pursuits–from theoretical physics to medicine to law–many of which would have been far more lucrative, but instead he found a vocation in poetry. In the short time that I was his student, one semester, he taught us several years’ worth of lessons concerning everything from prosody to the shaping of a poem’s implied worldview. In a piece that he wrote about Donald Justice, Logan indicates that what Justice’s diverse students learned is not so much a single style of language as a conscience about language, a conscience that Logan has lived by and teaches.
Perhaps Logan’s own conscience about language shows up best in his poems, such as in “The Imitation of Things Familiar,” which appears in the current (summer 2007) issue of the Kenyon Review. To begin with, anyone who can rhyme ‘abysses’ with ‘Narcissus’ as Logan does in the poem’s closing couplet (“As we get older, we stare into all-too-deep abysses. / The pools we love were once loved by Narcissus.”) gets my vote. Because this poem is largely a meditation on the past, the influence that the past exerts on the present, the traces of the past that show up in the present, the abysses of the penultimate line quickly become the abysses of the not-wholly-recoverable past. Like Narcissus staring into the mythic pool, do we not stare into the past and often see there images of ourselves–our concerns, our desires, our anxieties and fears? And yet the poem swerves away from a narrowly narcissistic reading of the past precisely by this self-consciousness; the moment of recognizing one’s tendency to project an image of oneself onto the other, including the other of history, is also a moment of opening up a possibility of some release, however partial, from one’s narcissistic view.
Rereading the poem with this closing couplet in mind reveals how much these dynamics of projection are the concern of the poem. Thus, what the speaker says about those he observes upon landing in England–“The girls from the sixth-form college look / bedraggled and oppressed, as if they took // from school no more than names and dates. / Everything, for them, has happened too late– // The dead are just their secret sharers”–reveals his own bedraggled sense of belatedness in a world that he himself negotiates merely with names and dates (those stamps of language), a world in which the signs of legitimacy he receives are merely the “new stamps” he gets on his passport.
But having ackowledged this anxiety of belatedness, the poem turns toward a more intimate sense of history with the allusion to Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” The engagement with history now surpasses that of mere names and dates; it becomes a matter of smuggling the dead aboard our lives and carrying them along with us, as the narrator of Conrad’s story does to his peril. There is, I take it, always something perilous about carrying the dead along with us, for we do not know what demands they might make, but the perils are not as great as those of living such a solitary and abject existence as Conrad’s young narrator does even aboard the ship of which he is the captain, until the stowaway becomes his secret sharer–such a solitary and abject existence as we risk, even among our contemporaries, if we cut ourselves off from the past. The past may be a foreign country, and it may be “like water, indifferent and cruel,” but it is also at least in part “built of love” and speaks in “whispers.” If the doves at the opening of the poem are “featureless as souls,” then human souls must be featureless as doves. Further, as the English doves in these opening lines take on distinction by their acts of imitation–of owls, of “their American cousins”–so featureless souls take on features, take on resonance and depth, by acts of imitation. And what is the source of what is to be imitated but the very past that speaks only in whispers? The poem’s closing line leaves us with a narcissistic gaze into the cruel waters of history, though reading these lines in the context of the sweep of the whole poem reveals the possibility of hearing the the whispers of our secret sharers, the dead. It requires strenuous effort and discipline to overcome one’s too-easy narcissism in looking into the past, and to hear the dead speak. But as in this strenuously exquisite poem, the dead will speak, if only in whispers, when one takes on the severe disciplines of listening. A fierce talent and intelligence such as Logan’s can enable tradition to whisper anew, and the familiar world to echo from its depths.