Anyone wishing to understand the contemporary poetry scene wants at least briefly to familiarize himself with the work of William Logan, and anyone wishing to comprehend today’s American wants to know something of its poetry. A nation’s poetry reveals its soul, its mind and heart. In this sense, Logan’s writings are emblematic of larger and essential issues. In the poetry world, Logan is best known for criticism that has appeared in book form since 1984, George Orwell’s future. Logan is known as an acerbic, reactionary critic. He is prone to blame, if not ridicule, rather than praise. He appears to have targeted for especially negative criticism the overtly experimental, vulgar "anything goes" school of modern and post-modern art. But this is only, guardedly, true. For Logan is something of blood brother to the fraternity he attacks, his sallies against it Pyrrhic victories. This is of necessity, and is easy to explain. To win the war would be defeat himself, a long-time member of the army of the avant-garde. With seemingly endless recruits it has waged war on our sensibilities for almost a 100 years with the ferocity of a German panzer division in tights. Nevertheless, Logan’s four books of criticism, mostly short reviews of contemporary poets, are trenchant, knowledgeable (to a degree), and worth reading. Over the last 20 years Logan has also published six books of poetry himself, amounting to hundreds of individual poems. This is part of the Diaspora of American poetry that is, indeed, so dispersed that it is difficult to find its center. Again, Logan is something of an exemplary figure. But only this makes the poems of his latest collection, "The Whispering Gallery" (Penguin, ‘05), genuinely worthy of review. Rhythmically, the poems show little life. Iambics come off either as wooden or sing-song; the free verse sounds, mainly, like prose in lines. Except by subjective association, Logan refuses to organize his material, his themes falling somewhere between opaque and sophomoric, his reasons for writing between Logan and himself. Educated at Yale, the ur-locus of frenchified theorists, Logan then matriculated to the University of Iowa’s poetry workshops. Iowa’s workshops birthed our ever growing MFA programs. They, in turn, have home-birthed innumerable sets of poetic sextuplets, teacher’s pets and copy-cats sent yearly into the literary world in search of publications and of additional workshops. Logan has the perfect training, then, for what he is up to. He is a man who, in his apparent alienation, has found home in the world of today’s American poetry, but in the end his book is only another example of its suffering since the sixties. He is a university professor of Creative Writing who needs a teacher of Creative Writing. This would be a poet that understands what it means to put one’s art before himself and his personal vanity. With an ironic and oddly deterministic view for a modernist work, The Whispering Gallery is tasteless and verbose. E.g. "Mostly you drove the gravel driveway,/where the woppa-woppa of a woodpecker,/ beating its head against the clapboard/ like a pile driver, echoed like a magnum at close quarters." Or (again with multiplying metaphors), "Common as fingerprints, our lives/burn like decaying atoms/ across the dark cloud of the negative./ "And there on the mantel your wedding photo,/two people fresh and immortal as Saran Wrap!" And this is not the worst, but typical. The casual voice hardly disguises the writing is undistinguished. It has neither technique nor matter that might move us to admire it. However, buried among its contemporary approach and its mask of metaphors, the book actually contains a few isolated lines of intelligent, perceptive statement illustrating the astringent restraint of classicism, where the pessimism seems justified and mature. "But memory of the dead will never/resurrect the dead./ The promises the living swear/ betray their long decrease… Or, "Death dines with reservation,/ never too hungry, knowing his next meal will come." How do the Logans of this world come into being? American poetry from roughly 1915 or so through the ‘60s comprised, perhaps, one of the four great bodies of poetry in the Western tradition. The poets were classically trained in language and formal rhetoric, and often in moral thought. They had studied Latin poetry as well English poetry from Shakespeare to Hardy. Thus when experiments such as free verse, for instance, appeared in 20th century America, or, with it, the new aesthetic morality of art-for-art’s sake, they cross-fertilized nicely with this traditional training in language and thought. Looking back on this poetry at its best, we have the freshest of new classics and the most distinguished of experimental. But poets since have taken the early modernists such as Pound ("make it New"), Eliot, and Williams as the only classics, while they have ignored even modern classical masters like Louise Bogan and Edgar Bowers, throwing the baby of great traditional poetry out with bathwater of 19th century Romantic slosh. Further, capitalism, that cormorant, has appropriated even poetry with its demands of production and more production- quantity of books over quality – and, then, with the illusory lure of that sweetest of academic sinecures, the elusive Creative Writing job. Lastly, the idea of CREATIVE Writing, all caps – like an advertisement for deodorant – has itself subsumed older, formative ideas of fiction and poetry, small f, small p. Every writer is a creator, his own god. To read Logan’s latest poetry is to remember that, in whatever guise, fake art is detectable; that half-educated art is incomplete; that clever, dilettantish, perfunctory work is not good enough; and that to ignore the example of poets prior to1900 such as Jonson, Pope, or Wordsworth (selected passages from the Prelude), is albeit fatal, and until poets and readers learn to school themselves on this as well as more recent poetry, the quality of American poetry, for lacking the maturity of classicism, will continue to find itself in decline.