Analysis
Despite winning critical acclaim and the respect of his peers, John Logan never enjoyed a wide readership. The reasons are many, but most important is the fact that, like Walt Whitman, Logan was an intensely personal poet who demanded an ultimate commitment from his reader. Logan’s poetry transcends the ordinary form of things and transforms those things into something more real, more useful, than conventional reality. Consequently, the reader of a Logan poem cannot in any way remain passive; instead, he must confront the shadow or inarticulate counterself that exists within. Logan’s commitment to this type of self-searching was absolute, and while such intensity may alienate some readers, his insistent demands lend power, depth, and psychological complexity to the poems. At his best, Logan explored the inner self without moral judgment, conceit, sentimentalism, or self-pity. Instead, he uncovered what at first seems threatening and perhaps grotesque in order to reveal what is finally beautiful in all living things. Logan built a personal poetry from his own obsessions: grace, the search for more than anonymous love, the friend or lover as rescuer, the father-son relationship, death, and poetry as rebirth.
“Poem for My Brother”
“Poem for My Brother” (from The Bridge of Change), a characteristic Logan poem, dramatizes the desire for acceptance and reconciliation between brothers that have grown apart. The younger of the two feels intimidated—or at least awkward—around his more athletic elder sibling and wants desperately to identify with him. This sense of physical and emotional alienation pervades Logan’s poetry, paralleling a similar alienation in his career as a writer.
In “Poem for My Brother,” Logan explained the many differences between the poet and his elder brother, but always with a desire for identification. The contrasts between the two remain sharp (as illustrated by the brothers’ colors, blue and brown), and this is what gives the poem its natural power. A capsulized history of the color blue included in the poem explains that many societies still do not have a word other than “dark” for this “last of the primary colors to be named.” “It’s associated with black. . . .” Blue, for Logan, represented the other, the society of other lovers to which Logan sought admission—a place where, had he gained access, he would not have stayed. Logan realized that the redemption and grace of being accepted and forgiven is only temporary since any person soon finds himself alone again as he began, arguing only with himself, and being accountable, in the final analysis, only to himself. The tension between desire for the other and the knowledge that the consequent redemption is only temporary fuels much of Logan’s poetry.
Grace through rescue
Grace, by Logan’s assessment, is the escape from anxiety through supernatural means—the sacraments and divine redemption—or through natural means: art and love. Logan’s need for forgiveness and its subsequent grace motivated his outward and inward search, and his poems often showed that such rare and precious gifts are not easily won. Indeed, implicit in Logan’s poetry was the necessity for taking risks. Even in the early Cycle for Mother Cabrini, Logan charged his poems with a nervous energy that thrives on the anticipation of danger. At the same time, the volume overflows with classical allusions, establishing Logan as an extension of the poetic tradition that he revered. He carried on “The Lives of the Poet,” the first poem in Ghosts of the Heart , both figuratively and literally; that is, the book begins a tradition of poems celebrating the lives of other poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Lord Byron, that continues with E. E. Cummings,...
(This entire section contains 1711 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
John Keats, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas, to name only a few, through several of the other books. These homages, tributes, and elegies not only reassert the presence of literary figures in the reader’s consciousness, but also often reveal a great deal about Logan’s feelings and position as a poet.
Spring of the Thief deals primarily with the need for spiritual and physical change through imagination or uncanny transformation: the dread of stagnation suddenly transformed by new realization. This theme, however, does not fully mature until The Zig-Zag Walk. Although rich with translations of Georg Trakl and Tibor Tollas, the tone of The Zig-Zag Walk is more informal and the poetry less academic. Here Logan freed himself to explore personal relationships without the encumbrance of a superimposed poetic structure. Love becomes the central meaning of life, and it is love that saves the poet from his own self-destruction: “. . . as you reached for me/ . . . it was my self you hauled/ back from my despair.” These lines from “The Rescue” resonate with lines from several poems, including the “Medicine Bow” (from The Bridge of Change), in which the poet, shaking and losing his energy, is shocked back into life when he brings a handful of snow to his mouth. Such rescues always occur when the poet was on the edge, and, by their somber moods and continuing recurrence, the reader understands the transience of both rescue and relief. Not until The Anonymous Lover is there any realization that the poet is also responsible for himself, that he is capable of self-rescue (as dramatized in “Medicine Bow”), and that he, indeed, must find or build his own refuge.
Poem in Progress
In Poem in Progress (first published as a chapbook and then reprinted in The Bridge of Change), Logan managed to transcend many of the limitations that his younger obsessions seem to embody. He took up with authority the wealth he has learned and constructs the world of his imagination (his fear of death and the desire for rebirth) around an in-depth study of the father-son relationship.
Throughout Poem in Progress, the poet appeared variously as friend, brother, son, father (teacher), and lover, recapitulating many of the roles already established in Logan’s poetry. (When Logan shifted his role, companions would change their position as well. In “Lines for Michael in the Picture” (from The Zig-Zag Walk): “. . . that transforming island fire/ that seems to fade in your eyes in the picture./ It makes you brother, friend, son, father.”) From the poet’s shifting viewpoint, Poem in Progress explores a series of personal relationships that, to some degree, originate in erotic attraction creating homoerotic overtones and suggesting incestuous fantasies. Some critics have made much of the text’s “atmosphere” and have dwelled unnecessarily on what appear to be unfulfilled homoerotic confrontations. The characters in any one situation are of no importance to the total effect of the poem since love is fulfillment, even redemption, and love is not preferential about partners: “love in Plato’s ’Phaedrus’ is not thus: the need of man/ for woman, or of man for man, woman for woman;/ instead, it is the love that will be felt as fulfill-/ ment.” Love that relieves human anxiety cannot be limited by predetermined judgments and prejudices. It must be accepted when offered and appreciated, for, as Logan knows all too well, its effects will not last.
Here, as in most of Logan’s work, the poet was on an endless journey or search for the means to achieve grace. Moments of love and acceptance offer only brief respite from the continuing frustration of grace that eludes. For example, the poet in “IV Rescue in Florida: The Friend,” feeling insecure and childlike before a reading, takes strength from a stranger sitting in the audience. This unknown person will soon receive the poet’s love, and so, for that moment, the poet is not isolated or anonymous. The stranger, again, performs a temporary rescue.
The word “anonymous” recurs several times in Poem in Progress, and working at the center of this one-word refrain is Pablo Neruda’s idea that poetry is “an exchange between strangers,” a token of thanks, perhaps, for what is given unknowingly. For example, the young lovers in section 5 give the poet a wooden figurine in thanks for what his poetry has given them. This gesture is unexpected, and the poet as traveler identifies with the figure of the old Colombian man, sack over his back, with “fifty-year-old-hands.” However, more than merely identification, the gesture of the gift returns to the poet some of what he has given: “. . . the breath/ he has breathed into it—or it has blown inside him—/ is given back again.” Once more, Logan dramatized the respite from the search, the rest in the middle of the journey.
Art, however, like love, offers only a temporary rest, and the friends, sons, brothers, students, and lovers who rescued Logan from time to time on his journey could not offer what the poet ultimately sought—a permanent state of grace. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Logan was frequently subject to spiritual vertigo; just as Poe feared chaos and entropy, feared falling into the maelstrom or being sucked into the whirlpool, so Logan feared the ultimate falling away of his gifts and powers. This fear is evident in Logan’s images of his youthful sons and friends—godlike and indestructible—and the poet’s own admissions, even guilt, over his slowly diminishing powers: “(. . . but my Greek is no longer sure).” What saves Logan’s poetry at this level is that the narrator is not morose about his insecurities and fears. His offhand comments about his slipping abilities and his celebration of youth and confidence come as the natural components of Logan’s total embrace. Poem in Progress portrays the lost, searching, sometimes fragile poet at odds with the various roles thrust on him, but a poet nonetheless reveling in a sea of anonymous lovers provided by the Mardi Gras where the heat of the sculptor’s kiln consumes the outer coverings of both the poet and his friends leaving them “stark naked there as for making love or art.”
“Believe It”
“Believe It,” the last poem in The Bridge of Change, is all at once a celebration of life’s diversity and absurdity, an acknowledgment of fear concerning the loss of power and ability, the reassertion of the poet as a lifelong and constant traveler, and, finally, the reaffirmation of life and giving—an invitation to all the anonymous lovers that they are free to come and partake of the poet’s joys.
