Perhaps no other contemporary poet is known more for his writing about poetry than William Logan. As a critic, Logan has been nothing if not divisive. His scathing reviews of almost every volume of verse subjected to his critical acuity have garnered him the sort of notoriety and name recognition that few poets could ever imagine. In fact, in 2002, an article in Slate reiterated the claim that Logan is the “most hated man in American poetry” — in the subtitle!

As if to abet this reputation, last year, Logan sparked one of the more interesting brouhahas in the world of American poetics by slamming the recently released collected poems and letters of Hart Crane in the New York Times. Or rather, Logan slammed Hart Crane — the man — and suggested with precious little attention to the poems that such judgments (and their air of puritanical righteousness) are reason enough to avoid the book — even if Aristotle (or a well-taught composition student) would instantly recognize the ad hominem argument and wonder what in the world Logan was going on about. Indeed, one glance at Crane’s “My Grandma’s Love Letters” might suggest that we ought to pay a little more attention to details other than Crane’s presumed suicide, sexuality, or drinking habits.

This, unfortunately, is the context in which I’ve situated “William Logan.” So, who could blame me, if, like many a young poet/critic (likely forgotten by now), I found myself sharpening my critical cleavers to serve up some pithy, Loganesque one-liners in an effort to eviscerate this master of evisceration?

But I can’t do it. I like William Logan’s latest book and would actually recommend Strange Flesh simply for the remarkable poem “The Anatomy Lesson”: a blank verse contemplation of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and, ultimately, our own mortality. Indeed, the final sentence, like Rembrandt’s painting, defies our expectations:

….He could have laid down
the memento mori of the skull, the candle,
the crawling caterpillar; but it was perhaps
more pointed to make the anatomists themselves
like corpses, silent in the house of William
the Silent, like words about to be spoken.

The steady accretion of death’s symbols summons to mind our own mortality, but with the semicolon, Logan turns his (and Rembrandt’s) attention away from the body on the table to the anatomists, who, in their stilled silence, serve as potent reminders of both life and mortality. More, by closing the poem with the pitch perfect simile, “like words about to be spoken”, Logan (like Rembrandt) leaves us absorbed in that moment of anticipatory silence, of life, while, ironically, the poem draws to its own (abrupt) silence.

Like “The Anatomy Lesson,” much of Strange Flesh is haunted by death and the idea of death. Indeed, “Cedar Key after Storm”, “Amsterdam”, and “The Blessed Redemption of Delft” work to extend the tradition of poems written in memoriam. More, as we move through each of the four sections of the book — “Homes”, “Abroads”, “Elsewheres”, and “Englands” — the sense of viewing each narrative or lyric from the perspective of a “tourist” becomes inescapable. To me, the book’s structure is evocative of the now-trite notion that we’re all just travelers, or as Bunyan suggests, pilgrims in this world.

Sadly, whereas Bunyan’s allegory offers the solace of Christian faith, Logan’s pilgrims are far more secular and thus subject to the seemingly inevitable failures of their quests. For example, “The Beast in the Jungle” tells what amounts, essentially, to a life story (or two) in three sections. Cast as a dramatic monologue with paragraph-length lines, the poem mingles dialogue between a man and a woman — essentially strangers — with the male speaker’s reflections in a colloquial voice. At first glance, the poem seems like a remarkable exercise in the compression of narrative and language. Here is the final section, in its entirety:

So she dies, and someone else gets all her money. I go away for, like, a year. See Asia. Then I come back. I go to see her grave. And I think, like, Shit, I should have married her.

The final epiphany is, of course, poignant, sad, etcetera. However, on closer inspection, there isn’t much to these characters. Aside from a reference to William Blake and maybe a reference to Beckett, the poem fails to fill in the textures that would make that final epiphany (even if it’s delusional) resemble the thoughts of anyone I’ve ever met. Frankly, this is a shame; the colloquial language with its filler words, fragments, and endless conjunctions is a brilliant evocation of a particular voice in our era.  More, along with “Tenting on the Plains” (a dramatic monologue in the voice of General Custer’s wife) and “The Blaschakas’ Invertabrates” (a long poem that incorporates a sort of found prose in one section), “The Beast in the Jungle” is among the most experimental that Logan manages in this collection.

Indeed, although the collection does show remarkable range in compositional techniques, the prosody in Strange Flesh is deeply indebted to 20th-century masters of formalism like (early) Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, and Theodore Roethke. Throughout most of the collection, Logan’s attention to the formal is something of a gift. Here, for example, is the first stanza of “Tenting on the Plains”, in the horrifyingly effective voice of Elizabeth Custer:

The steamer bumped the hooded shore,
lost paradise of hickory and sycamore,
and Negroes appeared, in quilted pants,
running across the gangplank like ants.

Here, the rhymes, though exact, are unobtrusive. Our focus remains, instead on the problematic voice that Logan has chosen to inhabit for the poem. Each of the three sections of this poem — “By Steamer to New Orleans”, “Mrs. Custer in Texas”, and “Dakota Territory, Spring, 1873” — moves through an impressive, individual detailing of racism (and its costs) in the pursuit of manifest destiny. Yet, even with difficult alterations in form, Logan manages to present a believable verisimilitude of both narrative and Elizabeth Custer’s voice through a variety of tones (sallow, jovial, desperate, etc.).

Nevertheless, Logan’s attention to formal minutiae is not without its missteps. “Song”, for example, may be envisioned as a musical exercise, but personally, I’d rather not be subjected to consecutive rhymes like “go/slow/know” unless it’s accompanied by a deftly played guitar. Similarly, on occasion, Logan’s obvious influences become more distracting than informing. Much of the first section, “Homes”, echoes Robert Lowell and his sometimes domestic vision of New England. Yet many of the poems, like “The Lost Boy”, which is thematically emblematic of the entire collection, do not suffer from the comparison — even if I found myself wishing for the oracular intensity of Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard  in Nantucket“.

In short, William Logan’s Strange Flesh is by no means a perfect book, but it does contain poems like “The Anatomy Lesson”, “1923”, “The Blue Laws”, “Venice at the Millennium”,  and “The Expensive Dress” that approach that ever elusive goal. And that’s one of the beauties of reading a volume of poetry, isn’t it?  Even if you abhor one poem, the next or the one after that could lodge in your memory like a letter from a long-lost childhood friend.

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