52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
53. The light around the body.
Bly was a friend and champion of James Wright, the ‘friend’ featured in ‘A Blessing.’ I picked up and am reading a book of poetry criticism by Bly, and thought I’d read some of his poems; somewhere, this volume was suggested (it won the National Book Award). Bly is apparently a champion of ‘image,’ that poetry should be deeply concerned with looking inward and with a language of the subconscious. Often he titles his poems very forthrightly: ‘Watching Television,’ or ‘Listening to President Kennedy Lie About the Cuban Invasion,’ and then approaches the subject sideways through language. He imbues businessmen, accountants and politicians with natural, predatory characteristics— they bore into trees for grubs, their wings buzz fitfully. Many of these are protest poems, against the Vietnam War specifically, and Bly uses well an image of decay and darkness:
We long to abase ourselves
We have carried around this cup of darkness
We have longed to pour it over our headsWe make war
Like a man anointing himself
(from ‘At a March Against the Vietnam War’). As the book moves through five sections, it becomes steadily less concrete and more truly inward, until the final poems are all image and make little objective sense. But they are, all of them, striking poems. I find myself feeling contradictory about Bly—he’s a prickly fellow: reaching farther, maybe, than his grasp, but deeply invested in what he’s doing. I’m a little turned off by Bly’s criticism, so I had expected his poetry not to resonate, but I was wrong. As the poems steadily descend into pure ‘image,’ Bly proves he can navigate a forthright emotional poetry without lapsing into the vapid trippiness that characterizes some of his ideas.
