I

Since Silence in the Snowy Fields appeared over ten years ago, Robert Bly 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, Bly uses the prose poem simultaneously to heroicize, domesticate, and totemize:

The beak is a crow beak, and the sideways look he gives, the head shoved slightly to the side by the 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.

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 that doesn't blend 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 this 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 the 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 Bly, when for many he remains a master polemicist, a “self-advertising” publicist (Allen Tate's view), or an intemperate dissenter. Bly has touched and often irritated virtually every poet and every issue in contemporary 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 Bly 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 question: since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, have we the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence? Isn't that out of place?”

As a critic and poetic theorist, Bly has contributed much to the recent shift from a tightly ordered, highly structured verse, with irony as its dominant mode, toward a poetry more open in form, associative in structure, and ecstatic in intention. When people attempt a balanced assessment of his accomplishments, though, his criticism all too often outweighs his poetry. It has become almost necessary to right this situation, and concentrate for a while on Bly's poetry, placing, where possible, his criticism in relation to it rather than picking at the poems through the grid of the polemics. What follows is an attempt to do just that, but before proceeding it is useful to have before us at least two of Bly's critical assumptions, assumptions unavoidably central to his work and almost invisibly dispersed throughout it. The first, from a review of David Ignatow's poetry, argues for a proper sense of the position of ideas in poetry:

In the most nourishing prose or poetry, I think, we always find ideas. But an essay and a poem are different in the way an idea lies inside them. In an essay, obviously, the idea must be clear—every inch of the idea's skin should be visible. The idea should be laid out flat—like the skin of a goat—we should be able to walk around it, tell the head from the tail. Ideas in poems don't appear that way—in poems ideas lie curled under tree roots, only a strong odor of fur indicating anything is there. … To learn to read poetry in fact we have to learn to reach in and uncover ideas, which actually are so much fresher than the ideas in prose precisely because they have been lying curled.

As several people have pointed out, William Carlos Williams did not say “no ideas, only things,” but rather “no ideas but in things.” Likewise, Bly doesn't exclude ideas or choke them into submission or dilute them into mere fancies when he writes his poems. Instead he places himself differently in relation to the idea, approaches it differently, than is done in expository prose or more traditional poetry. Ideas lie close to the source of nourishment and support in his poems, but they must work their way in almost by stealth. Bly's use of animal imagery, his emphasis on olfactory and kinesthetic sensation, tell us more about his “thinking” than any paraphrase can. His thought aspires to a form in which gesture and intention are the same, an integrity that ties together perception and conception, object and subject. His psychology and epistemology are clearly much closer to those of the phenomenologists (such as Merleau-Ponty) than the classical materialists or idealists.

The other principle in Bly's poetic creates more heat than light in his polemics, but vitalizes his poetry in ways that are very important: it claims that technique is the work of rationality, ego, and hence suffocation:

I refuse to say anything at all about prosody. What an ugly word it is! In the true poem, both the form and the content rise from the same place; they have the same swiftness and darkness. Both are expressions of a certain rebellious energy rising in the psyche: they are what Boehme calls “the shooting up of life from nature to spirit.” What is important is this rebellious energy, not technique. If I write a bad poem it is because I have somehow taken the thought from someone else—I haven't really lived it: it isn't my energy. Technique is beside the point in this matter.

Such a doctrine, in the hands of unskilled enthusiasts (critics as well as poets), might easily spell bathos. But the theories of Eliot and Pound had begun to do the same when Bly wrote this. Few phenomena need a clarifying historical context more than literary theories do; we can identify what past and established theories these words are attacking more easily than we can see, precisely, where they will lead. And so Bly's poetic resembles his Populist political sentiment: it is rooted in deep feeling, intimately “known” but seldom analyzed, and often more vigorous in its denials than its affirmations.

The positive aspects of Bly's poetic revolve around his concentration on the image. In a series of reviews and essays in The Sixties, Bly, in conjunction with James Wright, erected a theory concerning the “subjective image,” produced by the workings of the trans-rational mind, charged with mythic resonances, and bearing the major responsibility for organizing the poem's energies. This image, as the passage above suggests, resulted more from a special gathering of consciousness than from any purely verbal manipulation; it came from a region beyond syntax and it had powers more than grammatical. To write such poetry, a carefully plotted surrender was needed, and to read it required a discipline less passive than deeply meditative. “But at last, the quiet waters of the night will rise, / And our skin shall see far off, as it does under water.” Bly's own images were often liquid and cold, like lake waters soundless and dark, and the poems are often filled with gazes and deep snow. They end with suddenly opened vistas, consoling with something like infinite regress (“Our ears hear tinier sounds, / Reaching far away east in the early darkness”), or vague, indefinable threats (“The doors are open, many are called to silence”). Clearly the poetry needed the theorizing to clear a space for what might otherwise have been a scant, febrile, and barren order.

II

Bly draws up his poetic sensibility out of at least three obvious sources: the heritage of Imagism, with its brevity at once precise and evocative; the argumentative diffidence, especially in metaphysical matters, associated with the haiku; and the body-centered mysticism perfected by such Protestant writers as Jacob Boehme. This relatively wide-ranging literary mix both precedes and results from Bly's interest in translation, for he is quick to appropriate structures of feeling and thought from whatever region or epoch he finds necessary and useable. “We reason with a later reason,” as Stevens says, and few writers are more aware of their drawing on an extensive, multivalent jumble of traditions than is Bly. For all his emphasis on cutting against the grain of too-readily-accepted poetic modes, and his antipathy to questions of technique, Bly demands an unequivocally centered sense of his vocation—it is only when his aesthetic geometry seems eccentric to others that his polemics become necessary. What critics might view as the limitations of various modes, he insists on regarding as poetic necessities. For example, I spoke above of the diffidence associated with the haiku, but Bly argues that only when the forces of rationality are stilled, or at least dampened, can the configuration of emotion rightly shape the poem's truth. What some might see as a poetry based on modesty or exclusion, he sees as daring and assertive. Far from reluctant to address ideas in prose argument, Bly makes his own poetic statements turn aside from the ease of identifiable cognitive patterns and plunge instead into dense, pathless areas of experience and darkly associative pools of feeling.

Such a sensibility as Bly has developed could easily have led to a host of predictable enactments and debilitating excess when the time came to write individual lyrics. A memorable life-style, or even a reassuringly humane conscience, as Bly's critics rather smugly repeat, cannot guarantee verbal magic. My sense of Bly's poetry is that it indeed exhibits the skill it does because of its author's high seriousness, but such a sense can only be averred, not demonstrated. However, we can register the characteristic energy of Bly's lyrics by exploring them as resolutions (not solutions, as to problems disposed of, but resolutions as in consciousness articulated) through which two apparently opposing compulsions redefine one another. One of these compulsions is most visible as theme, the other as style. Thematically, the concerns of meditative poetry, namely the structures of consciousness and the relation of fact and value, outline the range and subject of these poems. Poetry for Bly offers a criticism of life, but a criticism available only through discipline, by a rectification of thought and feeling. Bly's anti-war poetry doesn't settle for the expression of humanistic values; rather, he alleges that the grossest forms of false consciousness are necessary for such inhumanity to occur, and only through a fundamental relearning of the world can it be prevented. This accounts for Bly's aggressive, sometimes intemperate modernism: he sees the poet simultaneously as a solitary craftsman and as a moral scourge.

With regard to style, the language of ecstacy and spiritual autobiography energizes Bly's exploration of his thematic areas. Resembling voices employed by authors as distinct as Thoreau and Mailer, this style employs a dialectical structure as it oscillates between ekphrasis, or heightened description, and a schematizing impulse akin to allegory. Bly insists the reader surrender to the moment, the intensely peculiar conjunction of sensations stripped of any mediating common circumstances. On the other hand, any satori can be equivalent to any other; the hidden world constantly surrounds us, and any breakthrough, despite and almost by virtue of its arbitrariness, can serve as template to reassure and instruct readers in the abiding presence of that hidden order. The sacred, masked by the ordinary, escapes our vision, trained as it is to look for the wrong significances. Neither strictly transcendental nor existential, Bly's style nevertheless owes much to these “methods,” especially in their American guises.

This apparent disjunction of theme and style may explain the difficulty many readers have with Bly's poetry. Meditative poetry often relies on a highly developed discursive sense, one willing to be patiently self-correcting, never totally sundered from its framework of ideas, though never subsumed by it. To know our own minds or the landscapes that surround, shape, and support us, we must open out deliberately, intent and almost passive, as a snowy field. Autobiographical or ecstatic poetry, on the other hand, proceeds by what Bly calls “leaping,” a non-discursive, elliptical process that stakes everything on the momentary verbal gesture. All accumulative or qualified judgments are untrustworthy; we must be willing to jump from our bodies (or drop, renewed, back into them), anxious as the silent dark itself to blanket the false lights of the rational mind. Fully responsive readers of Bly's poetry must have undergone long preparation, disciplined and meditative, and yet be willing to undo it all at a moment's notice. This, too, explains why Bly resorts to polemics and chafes at technique: the protective space around his poetry has been laboriously cleared, though he chooses to conceal the evidence of axe and plumb.

Running as an almost silent current beneath this part of Bly's work is a strain of prophetic or chthonic music, a response to very large rhythmic pulses, caught in a vision that can zoom from a nearly microscopic to an archeological measure. This, too, can be confusing, sometimes even toneless, as in “Looking at Some Flowers”:

Light is around the petals, and behind them:
Some petals are living on the other side of the light.
Like sunlight drifting onto the carpet.
Where the casket stands, not knowing which world it is in.
And fuzzy leaves, hair growing from some animal
Buried in the green trenches of the plant.
Or the ground this house is on,
Only free of the sea for five or six thousand years.

That one word “only” conveys almost all of the emotion of the poem, though of course its placement and its context make such emotion available to it. But this is often part of Bly's effect, a sense that we are sharing some secret, glimpsing some long concealed vista that closes shut as soon as the poem ends. In the political poetry this often causes people to complain that Bly is preaching to the converted, but of course such people seldom admit that no poetry built on political vision has much persuasive power, whatever its strengths and reassurances. And when we call Bly a “nature” poet, we must remember visions of nature are as various as political opinions, and often the result of an ineffable mixture of temperament, experience, and self-discipline. Also, Bly's political poetry earns some of its most moving successes when he adopts the viewpoint of his political enemies, as in the bizarre “Counting Small-Boned Bodies”: “If we could only make the bodies smaller, / Maybe we could get / A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!”

Bly's political poetry plunges past the metaphysical tenuousness of Imagism and Symbolism into a hidden order. But this hidden order he openly declaims. Like Marxist notions of false consciousness, Bly posits a common awareness of mundane reality as something to be altered, and if necessary smashed, if we are to uncover the true (and truth-revealing) relations that shape the polis and the psyche. Bly's hidden order differs from, say, Mallarmé's because we can trace it from the dailiness of the world—we needn't slip into a world of albums and fauns and cabalism to discover it. On the other hand, it also differs from Stevens', since we need no patient dialectic, no tone-juggling irony to coax it from the welter of physical sensations that flood our thirsting eyes. His politics insistently slice along an emotional bias, essentially Populist though without the xenophobic isolationism of Populists, and tolerate no analysis, no “party structure,” no compromised platform.

The time for exhortation is past. I have heard
The iron chains scraping in asylums,
As the cold bird hunches into the winter
In the windy night of November.
The cold miners rise from the pits
Like a flash flood,
Like a rice field disintegrating.
Men cry when they hear stories of someone rising from the dead.

Official culture and the State work for the oppression of the spirit, but so pervasive is their success that the evidence of their crimes hides everywhere, and hence is visible only in dream or trance.

Ministers who dive headfirst into the earth
The pale flesh
Spreading guiltily into new literatures
That is why these poems are so sad
The long dead running over the fields
The mass sinking down
The light in children's faces fading at six or seven
The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved

Bly's political poetry thus arrives repeatedly at a crux: though the language must be hushed or ecstatic, appealing to suprarational truths, yet the evils must be squarely, almost pictorially, addressed. Part dream-vision, part diatribe, the poems seem laughable to anyone who is unsettled by all-embracing pathos or all-damning bile. Satire and ecstacy make strange bedfellows and often produce a tonelessness, a cancelling-out of effect, in the service of an ineffable wisdom.

The crane-handler dies, the taxi-driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile, high in the air, executives
Walk on cool floors, and suddenly fall:
Dying, they dream they are lost in a snowstorm in the mountains,
On which they crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus.
Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles.
Or hares flying from a fire behind them,
And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs;
Their trains come through the air like a dark music,
Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.

Because Bly mastered the idiom of pastoral ecstacy in Silence in the Snowy Fields before the directly political poetry appeared in Light Around the Body, many people will continue to regard his political writings as deviant, a falling-away from a purity of diction and viewpoint that was perhaps too intense for its own good. The voice, however, is a seamless garment and the “leaping” imaginativeness operates in both field and city, imprinting victim and villain with a distinctive animism.

III

In some instances Bly clearly separates his political poetry from his poetry of pastoral ecstacy, as when he entitles a section of The Light Around The Body (1967), “The Vietnam War.” On the other hand the two small collections of prose-poems, The Morning Glory (1969) and Point Reyes Poems (1974), are completely without political content, yet they contain some of Bly's most moving and intensely rhetorical writing. His latest full-length collection, Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), though largely ignored by reviewers, contains both sorts of poems (though without being placed into distinct sections). This collection also has an extended expository prose essay, “I Came Out of the Mother Naked,” related directly to the longest poem in the book, and the longest poem Bly has written, “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.” Concluding this volume is a long poem-sequence that gives the book its title, and it stands as Bly's most challenging and most beautiful poem to date, one that merges perfectly his pastoral and political obsessions and mythologies. “Sleepers Joining Hands,” with its five sections and long, loosely cadenced line, is Bly's celebration of himself, a poem that attempts to reconcile the chanting openness of Whitman with the mythic intensity of Rilke. Before considering it closely, however, we might linger a while on that medium Bly has slowly, unobtrusively, and patiently mastered, the prose-poem.

Most readers think of the prose-poem in connection with Rimbaud's Illuminations, hence as aggressively scintillating but fragmentary insights spilling from a deranged mind, perhaps the devil's work, perhaps not. Then, too, there is Mallarmé with his imposingly rigorous sophistication, in love with and caused by its own etiolation (Eliot's “Hysteria” obviously belongs to this part of the tradition), while more modern still are the interiorizations of material objects perfected by Francis Ponge speaking “on the side of things.” In any case, the prose-poem appears decidedly French, rather a bourgeois invention and hardly suited to a Minnesota poet intent on breaking through the mythically resonant images. Yet if his first books showed Bly working with an essentially pastoral poetry, his prose-poems illustrate how he has moved closer to a poetry of natural history. The pastoral remains resolutely literary, always conscious of tradition and audience, always at some important level an exercise, an attempt to test and redefine the limits of its own saying. Natural history, on the other hand, cultivates a prosaic idiom, it is concerned to observe precisely and label tentatively, and yields little to its audience by either addressing its emotional needs or reaffirming its metaphysics or even its proprieties.

In the earlier brief collection, The Morning Glory, Bly introduces his prose-poems with this short apologia:

There is an old occult saying: whoever wants to see the invisible must penetrate more deeply into the visible. Everything has a right to exist. If we examine an animal carefully, we see how independent it is of us. Its world is complete without us. We feel separated at first; later, joyful.

Basho says in his wonderful poem:

The morning glory—
Another thing
that will never be my friend.

This becomes the central theme and the recurrent strategy of these poems: the exclusion of the human. Emotions and subjectivity are not totally removed, certainly not denied in these poems, but the phenomena under scrutiny displace ordinary human reactions, and relegate them to a subsidiary or marginal role. (This, of course, makes them more like Ponge than Rimbaud, but they are quite distinct from either.) We are on the outside, or at the edges, looking in, and our curiosity might exfoliate into any of several emotions. But this perceiving energy dwindles if we lose our curiosity, our reverence, or our patience. Though never directly about “seeing” as both a psychical and physical harmony, these poems presume and demand it as our most human activity. This is the second half of “The Large Starfish”:

How slowly and evenly it moves! The starfish is a glacier, going sixty miles a year! It moves over the pink rock, by means I cannot see … and into marvellously floating delicate brown weeds. It is about the size of the bottom of a pail. When I reach out to it, it holds on firmly, and then slowly relaxes … I suddenly take an arm and lift it. The underside is a pale tan … gradually as I watch thousands of tiny tubes begin rising from all over underside … hundreds in the mouth, hundreds along the nineteen underarms … all looking … feeling … like a man looking for a woman … tiny heads blindly feeling for a rock and finding only air. A purple rim runs along the underside of every arm, with paler tubes. Probably its moving-feet. …

I put him back in … he unfolds—I had forgotten how purple he was—and slides down into his rock groin, the snail-like feelers waving as if nothing had happened, and nothing has.

All the ellipses here are Bly's, and he uses them frequently in the Point Reyes Poems. These poems occasionally recall the sensibility of Marianne Moore, or A. R. Ammons, in their loving care, their careful hovering that sustains itself by shifting from one tack-sharp observation to another. Bly's seeing has seldom been more precise than it is in his prose-poems: we are shown gulls “with feet the color of pumpkin” or the orange belly of a salamander “The color of airplane gasoline on fire,” a seeing that refracts the emotional rather than parading it, as in the case of the starfish, “a delicate purple, the color of old carbon paper, or an attic dress.”

But the overriding impression of these poems reveals itself as a diffidence, almost as if the prose were used to protect the speech-act, because formal verse patterns might announce too much of a shaping impulse, or initiate a solemnity that could disrupt the ruminative spell. The use of ellipses, along with phrases like “as if” and “a kind of” reinforce the sensation “that we are sailing on skeletal eerie craft over the buoyant ocean,” as Bly concludes one of these self-effacing performances. Tentativeness of structure is heightened by similes and metaphors proposed but not pursued, their wayward or incidental charm left to do the work: a wave has the “gentleness of William Carlos Williams after his strokes”; a heron “slowly ascends, each wing as long as Holland”; we see several sea-lions “looking neither arrogant nor surprised, but like a billfold found in the rain.” In some cases the comparisons are relatively extended, but never to serve as logical support or thematic underpinning: watching the light come through a white bird's nest “we get the feeling of those cloudy transoms above Victorian doors, or the manless hair of those intense nurses, gray and tangled after long nights in the Crimean wards.” Human emotions and human weaknesses, though submerged, are omnipresent. Humility of format has its designs, for it wants to reveal its own vulnerability, to get close to those moments of connectiveness and insight that ordinarily we quickly dismiss with an anti-sentimental jab at our reverie.

Closely related to this tentative sense of structure, a thematic concern with various kinds of movement and growth makes itself felt throughout these poems. The variety extends from motility to glaciation, and the “leaping” associative energies of Bly's poetic attentions test themselves against a world where surprise, spontaneity, immeasurably slow drift, or immense geological transformations are the order of the moment. These various modes of motion become evident to the human senses only at moments of great stress or utter freedom; they are available only to a body-centered consciousness, an awareness that cuts across perspectives and breaks down categories. You can well read these poems with a sense of Bly's pragmatism in regard to form, as though a primer course in developmental biology were a prerequisite. The scale can be either macro- or micro-scopic, focusing on life at either stage, exploring the growth of cells or galaxies. Our vision must learn a different pace and a new frame of reference, until, like the moon, it “moves slowly southward as the clouds flow past. It is an eye, an eyetraveller, going so alone … sturdy as an orphan. Bold and alone and formed long ago.”

Here is “Walking among Limnatour Dunes” (the Point Reyes Poems are topographical, even incipiently chthonic in their pursuit of the genius loci):

Thinking of a child soon to be born, I hunch down among friendly sand-grains … And the sand grains love us, for they love whatever lives with force not its own, a young girl looking out over her life, alone, without horses, with no map, a white dress on … whatever is not rushing blindly forward, the mole blinking at the door of his crumbly mole Vatican, the salmon sensing in his gills the Oregon waters crash down, or this planet abandoned here at the edge of the universe, the life floating inside the Pacific of the womb, near the walls, feeling the breakers roaring.

Bly's objective here clearly resembles those evanescent moments of sudden expanded consciousness he rendered so often in the early books, as in the following example:

“DRIVING TO TOWN LATE TO MAIL A LETTER”

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

(From Silence in the Snowy Fields)

However humble these early poems might have been, however concerned to defeat their own ambitions and lose the ego in the momentary sensations and prevailing drift of the scene, they remained poems vaguely “confessional,” lyric celebrations of an exacerbated, private sensibility. But the recent prose-poems develop a different consciousness, no less emotional but much more impersonal (if that distinction will stand), in which the ego is always measured against contexts capable of rectifying our obsession with it. Here is the end of “The Turtle,” from The Morning Glory, where Bly inverts the animal and sees

The bottom is a pale, washed-out, rose from being dragged over the world—the imagination is simplified there, without too much passion, business-like, like the undersides of some alien spaceship.

This clearly sounds a note not heard in Silence in the Snowy Fields. The prose-poems speak with less protection from the sometime-hectoring theory of the deep image; they clear their own ground as they go, or rather float like fog “over soaked and lonely hills.” Bly continues to use many of the strategies of the earlier poems, such as those deep images sprung loose from Jungian depths, and the barebones narratives, exemplum-like in their simplicity, and the heightened description. But Bly has realized that the image alone can't do the work of the poem, that ego and pseudo-rationality will make themselves felt in any surrealist attempt (especially a programmatic one) to escape them. If we trust too much in the theory, “mind” will be there anyway, not necessarily supplying significant form, but more likely in the form of having designs on us, and the only way to keep the possibilities of discovery open is to acknowledge the presence of the intellect but relegate it carefully from the seat of control. Much of the putatively surrealist poetry spawned by Bly's theories comes out clichéd and conceited, in both senses of the term, as the far-fetched and the self-advancing merge histrionically. But Bly, especially in his prose-poems, manages to skirt the foolishness of his students. Here, as coda to these points, is the conclusion of “The Dead Seal Near McClure's Beach”:

He raises himself up, and tucks his flippers under, as if to keep them warm. A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me—the eyes slanted, the crown of the head like a leather jacket. He is taking a long time to die. The whiskers white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes, goodbye brother, die in the sound of waves, forgive us if we have killed you, long live your race, your inner-tube race, so uncomfortable on land, so comfortable in the sea. Be comfortable in death then, where the sand will be out of your nostrils, and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don't want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way.

IV

If somewhere behind his prose-poems stands Francis Ponge or even Robinson Jeffers, the tutelary spirit of Sleepers Joining Hands is surely Pablo Neruda. It is odd, but beneficially so, that a Norwegian immigrant meditating in the snowbound isolation of Minnesota should, in part, extend his resonance through the tropically surreal imagination of a Latin diplomat. Though there are only ten short poems included in Sleepers Joining Hands, most whittle their language out of a sense of distance and anguish, and they tell of a natural world almost preternaturally capable of storing and releasing great depths of human emotions. Some of these poems are like Neruda's early work, such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Desperation (1923), and they make us realize the poetic value of constant separation working in consort with the hope of ultimate possession. This passage is from “Water Under the Earth,” and the lines in which the poem describes itself recall Neruda's self-conscious modesty, born of a desire to create an organic language at home in the world of growth and decay:

Everything we need now is buried,
it's far back into the mountain,
it's under the water guarded by women.
These lines themselves are sunk to the waist in the dusk
                    under the odorous cedars,
each rain will only drive them deeper,
they will leave a faint glow on the dead leaves.
You too are weeping in the low shade of the pine branches,
you feel yourself about to be buried too,
you are a ghost stag shaking his antlers in the herony light—
what is beneath us will be triumphant
in the cool air made fragrant by owl feathers.

In the long anti-war poem, “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last,” we can also hear the influence of Neruda in the poem's surrealism, as here where the central image might have come from a carnival fair-grounds, but its new context renders it anything but entertaining:

There is a black silo inside our bodies, revolving fast.
Bits of black paint are flaking off,
where the motorcycles roar, around and around,
rising higher on the silo walls,
the bodies bent toward the horizon,
driven by angry women dressed in black.

This dissociating juxtaposition of images with associative complexities alternates with a straightforward set of connections between mundane surfaces and horrifying realities:

It's because the aluminum window shade business is doing so
                    well in the United States that we roll fire over entire villages
It's because a hospital room in the average American city now costs $90
                    a day that we bomb hospitals in the North
.....It's because we have new packaging for smoked oysters that bomb holes
                    appear in the rice paddies
It is because we have so few women sobbing in back rooms,
because we have so few children's heads torn apart by high-velocity bullets,
because we have so few tears falling on our own heads
that the Super-Sabre turns and screams down toward the earth.

Some will mutter in disbelief at these lines; others will think of Sidney's “The poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lyeth,” and wish Bly had heeded the advice. But like Neruda's anti-imperialist poems in Canto General (1950), I think Bly's anti-war poems will become even clearer and more striking in time, and their “excess” will be recognized as Blakean.

“The Teeth Mother Naked At Last” is followed, and its title image explained, by an essay Bly has written and included in the midst of Sleepers Joining Hands to outline his theories and his method of “psychic archeology.” His argument's tone is, by turns, allusive, hectoring, suggestive, definitive, and exploratory. The essay shows Bly at his rhetorical best and at the same time shows how far beyond even Neruda his search has carried him:

Whenever a man enters the force field of a Mother, he feels himself being pulled toward mothers and childhood, back toward the womb, but this time he feels himself being pulled through the womb, into the black nothing before life, into a countryside of black plants where he will lose all consciousness, both mother and father. The teeth in the vagina will strip him as he goes through. He is dismembered while still alive. The job of this Mother is to end the intensification of mental life that the Ecstatic Mother began, to end ecstacy and spiritual growth. The alcoholic has seen the Stone Mother, and he drinks to dull the fear that his inner rivers will turn to stone. He avoids looking at the Mother and the alcohol turns him to stone. The Stone Mother stands for numbness, paralysis, catatonia, being totally spaced out, the psyche torn to bits, arms and legs thrown all over; Poe's “Descent into the Maelstrom” suggests the horror of the descent. My Lai is partway down; hard drugs that leave the boy-man permanently “stoned” are among the weapons of this Mother.

Though virtually every aspect of this argument could be “traced” to some previous writer—the dichotomy between “mother consciousness” and “father consciousness” echoes and parallels Lawrence's “blood consciousness” and “mind consciousness”; Bachofen's Mother Right is openly acknowledged as a source; the interest in force fields and archaic consciousness as energizing templates for contemporary poets recalls Charles Olson—still the essay becomes distinctive and distinctly revealing for Bly's poetry. Bly continues to favor images and associative structure over ideas and logical distinctions, and he continues to see good poetry as a result of disciplined consciousness, not so much a criticism of life (though it is that, too) as a search for almost lost origins, a patient surrender almost Christian:

I see in my own poems and the poems of so many other poets alive now fundamental attempts to right our own spiritual balance, by encouraging those parts in us that are linked with music, with solitude, water, and trees, the parts that grow when we are far from the centers of ambition.

But the most praiseworthy achievement in Sleepers Joining Hands is the title sequence, a five-part dream-vision deserving comparison with the best of contemporary poetry. As I suggested above, this sequence has affinities with Whitman, especially as it announces a new consciousness founded on a new sense of the ego, and also with Rilke, for it develops a complex symbolism in its search for a transcendent vision, a desire “to see things from the other side.” Bly attempts to formulate a special sense of space and time in this poem, and while his predecessors are apparent and many, he succeeds, and succeeds largely in his own terms. Simply put, Bly's temporal sense combines the perspectives of a floating present, such as we experience in dreams, with an archeological, even a geological framework. At the same time, this temporal sense accompanies and is supported by a spatial sense, really an awareness of “inwardness” in which again a dream-like space is modified by a consciousness directed toward the inner reaches of the body.

Thematically discussions of the poem are apt to be clumsy, for reasons that should now be obvious. Yet the sequence does offer vague outlines for its “argument,” and careful readers can sense a “plot” rising and falling with the speaker's energies, his trust and doubt concerning his own visionary powers. The point of simplest and most intense affirmation comes in the third section, “The Night Journey in the Cooking Pot”:

Leaves slip down, falling through their own branches.
The tree becomes naked and joyful.
Leaves fall in the tomby wood.
Some men need so little, and even that I need very little.
Suddenly I love the dancers, leaping
in the dark, jumping
into the air, and the singers and dancers and leapers!
I start to sing and rove around the floor,
singing like “a young Lioun.”
I want to rise far into the piney tops
I am not going farther from you,
I am coming nearer,
green rain carries me nearer you,
I weave drunkenly about the page,
I love you,
I never knew that I loved you
until I was swallowed by the invisible. …

This acceptance, however, is much more problematic than it appears in this passage, and the poem goes on to record self-hatred and despair. Slowly the necessity becomes clear: we must accept our mortal bodies, but the necessity can be cruel long before it is kind:

I fall into my own hands,
                    fences break down under horses,
cities starve, whole towns of singing women carrying to the burial fields
                    the look I saw on my father's face,
I sit down again, I hit my own body,
I shout at myself, I see what I have betrayed.
What I have written is not good enough.
Who does it help?
I am ashamed sitting on the edge of my bed.

Like many dream-visions, “Sleepers Joining Hands” unravels the speaker's vocation, his being called to the knowledge of a higher, hidden order, and though his guides announce their other-worldly origins, the speaker must finally conduct his own initiation:

I have been alone two days, and still everything is cloudy.
The body surrounds me on all sides.
I walk out and return.
Rain dripping from pine boughs, boards soaked on porches,
gray water awakens, fish slide away underneath.
I fall asleep. I meet a man from a milder planet.
I say to him “I know Christ is from your planet!”
He lifts his eyes to me with a fierce light.
He reaches out and touches me on the tip of my cock,
and I fall asleep.

The sleep within sleep, the savior who rejects our recognition, and the symbol of assertive power rendered weak by gentleness: we are clearly closer to Jung than to Freud, to hermetic rather than rational knowledge.

Some savior appears to have come, but the arrival is on a different scale, in a different world, than we expected:

The barn doors are open. His first breath touches the manger hay,
and the King a hundred miles away
stands up. He calls his ministers.
“Find him.
There cannot be two rulers in one body.”
He sends his wise men out along the arteries,
along the winding tunnels, into the mountains,
to kill the child in the old moonlit villages of the brain.

Body politic merges with the transfigured body, for this poem wants a new consciousness and a new world and it will settle for nothing else, even if it must live in dreams and phantasies:

Sometimes when I read my own poems late at night,
I sense myself on a long road,
I feel the naked thing alone in the universe,
the hairy body padding in the fields at dusk. …
I have floated in the eternity of the cod heaven,
I have felt the silver of infinite numbers brush my side—
I am the crocodile unrolling and slashing through the mudded water,
I am the baboon crying out as her baby falls from the tree,
I am the light that makes the flax blossom at midnight!
I am an angel breaking into three parts over the Ural Mountains!
I am no one at all.

Whether passing “under the earth through the night-water” or “all alone, floating in the cooking pot / on the sea,” the speaker remains isolate, self-less, lost through his own irresolution or defeated by false energy. But if he is “the last inheritor crying out in deserted houses,” he also sees himself as “an eternal happiness fighting in the long reeds.”

The poem spills out images, it gathers towards clarity, it moves through thickets of association, and through it all develops an emotional force-field, a sense of temporal simultaneity and spatial diffusion. Quotation, even frequent and lengthy, will not convey this force, and this critical canard becomes freshly true. We must become patient readers, for the lyric bursts of the shorter poems are here protracted, though with no dampening of the lyric intensity. But the poem is lyrical, its audience a better, secret part of the speaker, or someone willing to assume that role. The speaker imagines himself joining an Indian tribe, and as “the suppressed race returns,” Bly resembles Thoreau, another spokesman for solitude who desperately wanted to be inside the body of the red-skin, the poet-naturalist, the transcendentalist waiting to give birth to the new man:

There is another being living inside me.
He is looking out of my eyes.
I hear him
in the wind through the bare trees. …
That is why I am so glad in fall.
I walk out, throw my arms up, and am glad.
The thick leaves fall,
falling past their own trunk,
and the tree goes naked,
leaving only the other one.

One can hear some Thoreauvian puns here as the tree and the man uncover their common state. The poem ends with the following lines, and their utter difference recalls the end of Eliot's “Prufrock” with its two three-line stanzas, but the mermaids and the solitude and the destroying waves are replaced by something shared, a joy, and the waters of release:

Our faces shine with the darkness reflected from the Tigris,
cells made by the honeybees that go on growing after death,
a room darkened with curtains made of human hair.
The panther rejoices in the gathering dark.
Hands rush toward each other through miles of space.
All the sleepers in the world join hands.

How far he has taken us from Eliot's “pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”!

Robert Bly has shaped contemporary poetry as forcefully and distinctly as any other poet now writing. As is often the case with innovative poets, his work bears the strain of pressures larger than he can sometimes contain. But the contexts of his own saying have made that much more speakable the words beneath our chatter and our promises, the false and the true. Gratitude is in order, of course, though Bly's fervor makes smugness on our part totally out of place. Still, I like to think that at this point, as far as we might be from the end, Bly would at least allow himself and us a word of patience, and a momentary sense of deep satisfaction.