Thrashing in the Depths: The Poetry of Robert Bly

Thrashing in the Depths: The Poetry of Robert BIy CHARLES MOLESWORTH I Since Silence in the Snowy Fields appeared over ten years ago, Robert BIy has steadily accumulated a poetry of secrecy and exultation, that most difficult of combinations. While excoriating the destructiveness of false public values, he insists on a silencing solitude as the primary poetic discipline. Diving into the stillest mythic recesses, he resurfaces with thrashing energy, intensely unwilling to settle for any but the most blinding light. His body of work is relatively small—certainly the smallest of those others of his generation such as Levertov, Snyder, and Ashbery—and this sharpens the sense of a patient accumulation. In describing his contemporary, Robert Creeley, BIy uses the prose poem simultaneously toheroicize, domesticate, and totemize: The beak is a crow beak, and the sideways look he gives, the head shoved slightly to the side by die bad eye, finishes it. And I suppose his language in poems is crow language—no long open vowels, like the owl, no howls like the wolf, but instead short, faintly hollow, harsh sounds, that all together make something genuine, crow speech coming up from every feather, every source of that crow body and crow life. The crows take very good care of their children, and are the most intelligent of birds, and wary of human company, though when two or three fly over the countryside together, they look almost happy. Charles Molesworth teaches at Queens College of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, as have his articles on contemporary poetry. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW95 Though not the total picture, this offers a good grounding in Bly's poetics. For him, authentic language arises out of a depth, "coming up from . . . every source," and is never to be thought of as floating or being passed around aimlessly. All artistic intuition is body-centered, all "thou-saying" becomes a way of being-in-the-world. Articulations of the tongue are simply higher forms of the organism's exploration and control of the environment: adjustments, like the tilt of the head, to assure the proper perceptual thrust. But physical harmony provides for moral equilibrium, and we have a moral obligation to be intelligent for the sake of the species. We ought not seek to illumine nature so much as to make her dark energies the source of our own. The health of the individual's interior life measures the higher truths, for if we are concealed from ourselves, we will destroy everything thatdoesn'tblend with our own ego. You will notice, of course, how the poetics have become an ethic. But the highest virtue, aesthetically and morally, takes the form of patience: Beneath the waters, since I was a boy, I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures, Not of gold, or strange stones, but the true Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota. This morning also, drifting in the dawn wind, I sense my hands, and my shoes, and diis ink— Drifting, as all of this body drifts, Above the clouds of the flesh and the stone. A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass, A few oars weathered by the snow and die heat, So we drift towards shore, over cold water, No longer caring if we drift or go straight. It may seem odd to think of patience in connection with Robert BIy, when for many he remains a master polemicist, a "self-advertising" publicist (Allen Tate's view), or an intemperate dissenter. BIy has touched and often irritated virtually every poet and every issue in con96THRASHING IN THE DEPTHS temporary poetry in at least one of his roles: editor, satirist, theorizer, organizer, translator, regionalist, prize-winner, and iconoclast. One might well say, as Eliot said of Pound and Chinese poetry, that BIy has invented South American poetry for our time. No literary history of the last twenty years would be complete without reference to Bly's magazine The Sixties. And few social aestheticians would ignore Bly's acceptance speech at the 1968 National Book Awards ceremony: "I know I am speaking for many, many American poets when I ask this...