Gag Me with a Ginsu Knife; Or Perhaps, a Tomahawk

William Logan: So Not Savage.









Under the title "Samurai Critic," Mark Ford reviews William Logan's Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue (Columbia University Press, 2009) in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review:

“Our Savage Art,” the latest installment in William Logan’s prolonged and rumbustious assault on the state of American poetry, comes furnished with no fewer than nine epigraphs in which the phrase “savage art” appears. One of these is taken from the second chapter of James Fenimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans”: an unsuspecting party of white travelers, including a pair of sisters, is passing through a gloomy forest unaware that they are being secretly observed by “a human visage, as fiercely wild as savage art and unbridled passions could make it.” “A gleam of exultation,” Cooper continues, “shot across the darkly painted lineaments of the inhabitant of the forest, as he traced the route of his intended victims, who rode unconsciously onward.”

At the bottom of some uncharted Adirondack cliff, the ghost of Magua moans a final "No!"



The Real Deal: Wes Studi as Magua.