28 Dec Believe It by John Logan
(for Tina Logan, after visiting the Believe It or Not Museum with her in San Francisco—1980)
There is a two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken
and a sad lamb with seven legs
whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland,
California. I saw the man with doubled eyes
who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit.
Will it snag upon this aging flesh?
There is a strawberry that grew
out of a carrot plant, a blade
of grass that lanced through a thick rock,
a cornstalk nineteen-feet-two-inches tall grown by George
Osborne of Silome, Arkansas.
There is something grotesque growing in me I cannot tell.
It has been waxing, burgeoning, for a long time.
It weighs me down like the chains of the man of Lahore
who began collecting links on his naked body
until he crawled around the town carrying the last
thirteen years of his life six-hundred-seventy pounds.
Each link or each lump in me is an offense against love.
I want my own lit candle lamp buried in my skull
like the Lighthouse Man of Chungking,
who could lead the travelers home.
Well, I am still a traveler and I don’t know where
I live. If my home is here, inside my breast,
light it up! And I will invite you in as my first guest.
About the Poet
photo credit Christopher Felver
John Logan (1923—1987) was an American lyric poet who published seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and essays in his four decade long career in American letters. Logan taught at St. John’s College in Maryland, the University of Washington, Notre Dame University, San Francisco State College, the University of Hawaii, and at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was professor of English from 1966 to 1985, and played a pivotal role in the emergence of a diverse Buffalo poetry community.
Logan was the author of fourteen books of poetry. Among his most well-known works are Only the Dreamer Can Change the Dream (Ecco Press, 1981), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Poets in 1982; The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980 (BOA Editions, 1979); and Spring of the Thief (Knopf, 1963). John Logan: The Collected Poems was published posthumously by BOA Editions Ltd. in 1989.
Logan “was considered one of the superb lyrical poets of his generation,” his publisher at BOA Editions A. Poulin, Jr., told the Los Angeles Times at the time of his death in 1987. “He referred to poetry as a ballet for the ear.” Logan was born in Red Oak, Iowa. He earned a BA from Coe College and an MA from the University of Iowa. He began writing poetry in the early 1950s, while teaching English at Notre Dame University. The founder-editor of the poetry magazine Choice, he is remembered as the inventor of what poet Hayden Carruth, writing in the American Book Review, once termed “postacademic academic poetry.” Carruth explained the term this way: “Before the advent of the Beats or Black Mountaineers in the mid-fifties, [Logan] had begun to break up the formalism of Lowell, Bishop, Wilbur, Hecht, et al., creating a new lyricism based on free movements of syntax against line and many new uses of rhyme and off-rhyme.”
Logan’s first book, A Cycle for Mother Cabrini (1955), paid homage to an immigrant nun who built schools, hospitals, and orphanages in Chicago. Writing in The Nation, William Jay Smith stated that the book “introduced a poet whose intense religious feeling was set forth in poems that reflected the kind of classical education encountered at the time only in Robert Lowell. In the four books that followed [Ghosts of the Heart (1960), Spring of the Thief (1963), The Zigzag Walk (1969), and The Anonymous Lover (1973)], the poet’s struggle between flesh and spirit became more pronounced and more personal.” Although Logan gradually abandoned Catholicism and began dealing with less ethereal concerns, his work remained sharply defined by what the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom called “the secular priesthood” of the poet.
Logan’s early poems, the critic Paul Carroll wrote in The Poem in Its Skin, “announced a new sensibility in American poetry.” His religious concerns in particular marked this change. Carroll remarked that Logan’s title poem “Spring of the Thief” was “one of the radiant moments of poetry in [his] generation.” Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Dan Murray discussed the complex themes that dominated Logan’s writing. “The philosophical foundation of [his] work has been closely related to the existential humanism of Martin Heidegger, whose aim is an authenticity and wholesomeness of human ‘being.’ Logan too, wants to rescue man from the meaningless void of nihilism. … [His] poetry is, on the surface, disarmingly casual and immediate, but at its center engagingly metaphysical and meditative.” Logan once told Contemporary Authors, “I think of poetry as a kind of anonymous loving, which occasionally becomes personal, when there are those present who care to listen.”
In addition to his poetry, Logan also wrote an autobiographical novel, a children’s book, a collection of criticism and reviews, a play, and a book describing a visit to China. He served as mentor to many younger poets including Marvin Bell and Robert Haas, the latter at The University at Buffalo. “He was extremely involved with his students and the people he cared for,” Logan’s son, Peter, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times at the time of his death. “He was the best reader of poetry in the country. He was very melodic; it was like going to a concert to hear him read.”
Logan died in 1987, in San Francisco, California. This poem first appeared Only the Dreamer Can Change the Dream: Selected Poems (BOA Editions Ltd.,1981).
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.