[New-Poetry] Daisy Fried's letter re Logan's O'Hara review in NYTBR

[jforjames at aol.com]

It seems like Fried's main argument is that they picked an aesthetically unsympathetic reviewer.
Who are the poets Logan adores through & through? 

As someone, I think Sam?mentioned, we don't know exactly what O'Hara would have chosen to collect for a Selected or Collected. He's a famous and influential dead poet now....so every scrap and scrawl will in time see be published. It will eventually become a translation project as three-sheets-to-the-wind napkin poems from Cedar Bar are uncovered. But?what I want to say about O'Hara is that?perhaps the weak/lesser poems are not weak but?necessary. This is probably the case in most oeuvres. You can't do it at the same level poem after poem. And the poet probably can't even see the difference poem to poem as he/she's?pushing them out into the world. Someone with O'Hara's taste and intelligence?could tell good from bad, but?poets are generally in love?with the poem they are writing: It may be a fling, it may be a protracted and rocky affair, it may be a committed relationship that lapses into a shared?silence after so many years, but each poem is a love affair. I think O'Hara would agree.

Finnegan??
?


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Lott <chris.lott at gmail.com>
Sent: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 5:06 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Daisy Fried's letter re Logan's O'Hara review in NYTBR



On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 08:51,  <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/Letters-t-2.html?ref=review
>
> But Logan's condescension toward O'Hara's "genial fanatics" (those of us who
> think O'Hara is certainly one of a small handful of great 20th-century
> American poets) suggests that he doesn't really understand the kind of
> poetry that rejects the idea of modernist-style capital-G Greatness.

But wait-- isn't that snippet a perfect example of the genial
fanaticism that Logan-- ah, forget it...

c
_______________________________________________
New-Poetry mailing list
New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080716/10a985d6/attachment.html