David Bottoms and the Evolution of the Gob Aesthetic

Robinson Jeffers's first book of poems was titled Flagons and Apples; Wallace Stevens's was Harmonium; Edith Sit-well's, Façade; A. R. Ammons's, Ommateum; and Robert Bly's, Silence in the Snowy Fields. David Bottoms's first full-length collection was called Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. It was preceded by a slightly less funky title, a chapbook, Jamming with the Band at the VFW.

The aggressive reactionary nature of his early program is hard to miss. Here was a poetry that announced its subjects and also announced what its subjects were not. Bottoms was not going to experience another statue with Howard Nemerov or to contemplate a minor Renaissance painting alongside John Ashbery; he was not going to set up a fragile curio shop next door to Marianne Moore. He was going to hang out at the garbage dumps, the rancid beer joints, and the sluggish snaky rivers of the deep South.

Shooting Rats is an intriguing title, and the volume contains poems that work hard to live up to its promise. I once tried one of them out as a blindfold test on one of my bright graduate students when the book was new, handing her a Xeroxed copy of "Watching Gators at Ray Boone's Reptile Farm."

"Whatcha think?"

She regarded it attentively, then gave me a serious smile. "It's pretty good," she said. "A strong example of the GOB style."

"GOB? You mean, like a sailor might write?"

GOB = Good Old Boy, she informed me. "You know, like James Dickey, Dave Smith, Richard Hugo sometimes. Good Old Boys going hunting and fishing and playing sports and sitting around long-faced in bars."

"That's kinda dismissive," I said.

"You're supposed to say snobbish. These poets like to think if you take issue with their subject matter, you're a cultural snob."

"Well, I don't know about that."

She nodded. "No," she said, "you wouldn't."

I was forced to consider her remarks at length. She was a well-read person, a poet of bright promise, and a feminist, though not of the standardized Ms. Krankypants persuasion. When she spoke critically of poetry, she never tried merely to score points.

One of the qualities that had attracted me to this kind of work by Dickey, Smith, Hugo, Rodney Jones, James Seay, James Whitehead, Sidney Lea, and others was the feeling of liberation it triggered. It was solid stuff for the most part, not requiring for its composition Ezra Pound's encyclopedic historical knowledge, T. S. Eliot's accurate but sniffish acumen, Wallace Stevens's vocalic arpeggios, or Kenneth Koch's coterie-urban blab. The incidents GOB poetry addresses do not take place in museums, cathedrals, and lecture rooms, and rarely in Europe. They take place in the American outdoors. The poems are not about things that stand still to be gazed at but about things that go bang, woof, slither, plop, and whoopee, things that lie within the purview of my provincial, not to say parochial, experience.

It would take time and broader experience—and more ethical openness—for me to realize that my predilections were snobbish too, in a reverse way. My uninformed guess is that David Bottoms came to something like this same realization but proceeded to a very different resting place.

That happens—if indeed it does happen—later. First let us try to enumerate some characteristics of Bottoms's early aesthetic.

Here is an excerpt of the poem I tossed at my well-prepared graduate student, "Watching Gators at Ray Boone's Reptile Farm":

the gators never move,but look like floating logs almost ready to sink,wait as though long patience had taught them somethingabout humans,an old voice crying up from the swamps of our brain.

Once that cry called a small boyover the railing and the logs came alive.A black man in a Bush hat salvaged the legs.On the bottom of the poolRay Boone found a shrunken white hand clutching a stone.Our hands clutch concrete...