[New-Poetry] Logan Takes on the "Avant Garde"

[Bob Grumman]

William Logan has always seemed to me entirely ignorant of any American 
poetry not on the Wilshbury portion of the poetry continuum.  But in the 
latest issue of The New Criterion, he actually reviews Cole Swenson, 
whom he characterizes as "avant garde."  I don't know her work, but from 
the snippets he quotes of it, she sounds no more "experimental" (as 
Logan also calls her) than Ashbery or Graham.   

What proves his ignorance of post-Eliotic poetry, though, is his saying, 
"there are only so many ways of torturing syntax or splashing words on 
the page," and "most experimental poets still come out of William Carlos 
Williams's pickle jar or Charles Olson's boot heel."

(1) "Experimental" poets are probably torturing syntax and splashing 
words on the page ten or fifteen times as many ways as Logan and the 
poets he writes about are being nice to syntax and decorously laying 
down their words.  (2) Genuinely innovative poets are doing a lot more 
than fooling with syntax and splashing words on the page (hey, I know of 
one who carries out long division operations on words!).  (3) Very few 
genuinely innovative poets I know, or know of, are influenced by Olson 
(who did nothing Pound and Cummings hadn't done before him), or Williams 
(who is a favorite of mine but with no technical influence I know of on  
innovative current poets however influential he's been on contra-genteel 
poets, and a great many of the Iowa plain-text lyric poets Logan writes 
about).  That he knows so little about non-Wilshburian poetry is 
annoying, but--gah--the arrogant stupidity of his presumption that he 
knows enough about it to write it off the way he does!

Note: I'm not sure if anyone in poetry is really "innovative."  I use 
the term loosely to mean "use not-yet-established techniques."

--Bob