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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Dec. 16, 2018
He’s a Legend of Contemporary Poetry. There’s Finally a Volume of His
Collected Work.
By David Biespiel
COLLECTED POEMS
By Robert Bly
505 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $39.95.
There might be little left to say about Robert Bly, the poet, critic,
translator and nonagenarian whose astonishing “Collected Poems” is now
available. Ever since 1962, when “Silence in the Snowy Fields”
established him as a poet of desperate sincerity, he has been a paragon
of Jungianism against the brutality of capitalism and militancy. He’s
hardly changed. But everything else has, and with it the significance of
a poet who believes that poems should be near the center of life.
Bly was born in 1926 in a Norwegian Lutheran community in Minnesota, the
son of a farmer. He served in the Navy during World War II and entered
Harvard as a 21-year-old sophomore in 1947. It is superfluous to say
that Bly is one of the legends of contemporary poetry, which never got
over its bewilderment at producing him; reasonably or not, he remains
the prototypical non-modernist, the one who set in motion a poetics of
intensity for generations to come. His methods were mined and sifted by
peers. The use of the poem as a luminous mat was gleaned by W. S.
Merwin; as a field for erotic surprise by Galway Kinnell; as an
awakening into consciousness and moral decency by James Wright and
William Stafford.
Bly rejects décor. What you see throughout “Collected Poems,” this
505-page retrospective of 14 books and some 600 poems, is that he is not
interested in covering an entire poem with incidents, but in hierarchies
of emphasis, beginning with longing. He offers little interest in the
hedonism of thought championed by his Harvard classmate John Ashbery.
Instead, Bly’s precinct of the imagination is like a womb of
consciousness: “Inside me there is a confusion of swallows, / Birds
flying through the smoke.” Here lay ambiguity, tangibility, the scrutiny
of tiny passages of existence abounding in a pastoral field, all with
the intensity of fairy tale. The title Bly gave his most enchantingly
atmospheric collection, “The Man in the Black Coat Turns,” about sums it up.
In early poems like “Surprised by Evening,” “Driving Toward the Lac Qui
Parle River,” “The Shadow Goes Away,” “The Grief of Men,” one sees the
translucency with which he traces the patterns of spiritual renewal. It
is what his imitators fail to do, those who can’t match his almost
supernatural control over the total effect of an image as representative
of thought and depth of emotion:
The evening …
has come through the nets of the stars,
Through the tissues of the grass,
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.
This language illustrates what’s known as the Deep Image in American
poetry, where light and darkness are always idealized and memory is
absolutely spontaneous, a perfected visual analogue to the cry of the
psyche, where “our skin shall see far off, as it does underwater.”
No wonder audiences were stunned by his anti-Vietnam War book, “Light
Around the Body,” which won the National Book Award in 1968, a year that
saw the deaths of nearly 17,000 Americans and an estimated 180,000
Vietnamese. The best poems in that book are triumphs of reserve, where
his drive to preserve the essences of human reality under assault leaves
no doubt of the strength of his conviction about a nation gone berserk,
beset by discrimination, poverty, mass marches, riots and war: “Let’s
count the bodies over … / If we could only make the bodies smaller … /
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight.”
Because American democracy is again under threat, coming apart with
chaos and bloodshed, I urge you to read what Bly said the night he won
the award. Addressing “gross and savage crimes” by the government, he
said institutions would have to preserve the nation, and risk
“committing acts of disobedience.” Donating his prize check to the
draft-resistance movement, Bly urged young men “not to destroy their
spiritual lives by participating in this war.”
You cannot read Bly’s poetry without appreciating his belief that
cultural integration might redeem us all. Nowhere is that more apparent
than in his translations of several centuries of European, Middle
Eastern and South American poets, especially Pablo Neruda, whom Bly
considered the greatest poet of the 20th century. You won’t find any
translations in “Collected Poems,” a shame since in those translations
there is something more than just an echo of his focus on the nature of
a capacious imagination:
Night after night goes by in the old man’s head.
We try to ask new questions. But whatever
The old poets failed to say will never be said.
In hindsight, the trajectory is pretty direct from Deep Imagism to
political poetry to “Iron John” — with its attacks against corporate
visions of masculinity — to his recent apologues of the unconscious. But
the popular success and controversy of “Iron John” resulted in Bly being
kicked out of the insular American poetry community for the crime of
being too influential in the broader public. For decades few literary
magazines have reviewed his new books.
How can one read “Collected Poems,” then, from its first wintry still
lifes, whose lyricism is as clean as snow falling onto bare trees,
through the grapplings with injustice, to the mannered ghazals of the
last decades, without seeing that Bly’s career is one of the few great
models of integrating the citizen with the mystic, whose body of work
makes the argument that being a poet does not excuse you from joining in
the national debate?
[ See the Book Review’s selection of 100 Notable Books and 10 Best Books
of 2018. ]
By my reading his best poems are sketched with earnestness, with
reverence to self-authority, and with the subtle and strange forces of
myth, where intricate connections of disparate motifs reveal the terrors
and charms of the world. In his fashion, he makes metaphors for grace.
Compared with that, the big, popular blunderbuss of Bly hardly matters.
David Biespiel’s memoir, “The Education of a Young Poet,” was published
last year. His sixth book of poems, “Republic Café,” is due out in January.
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