52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
54. American poetry: wildness and domesticity.
A collection of essays, poetry criticism and interviews, dating from the mid-sixties through the eighties. Bly laments the direction of American poetry as “away from the center,” lacking the life, spiritual intensity and connection to the unconscious of the Latin American and Spanish poets. He also thinks the contemporary era of poetry instruction is creating too many poets, and too similar to each other, poets who have learned at too little price and so can write nothing earthshaking. He loves, everywhere, this concept of the “deep image,” when the poet accesses the unconscious and writes something true from it. He praises: Neruda, Wright, Lorca, Levertov, Etheridge Knight, John Logan, Thomas McGrath. He tears apart Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot. I find Bly both fascinating and a little repulsive. His poetry is good, and I was thrilled to be a fly on the wall for an extended conversation with this practicing and established poet. But he references psycho-spiritual nonsense as if it were established fact, and I was left with a weird feeling, as if the Sixties had overlaid the current decade, and Bly was the result.
