Reviews for American poetry

The average rating for American poetry based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-04 00:00:00 Patrick Miller I first read Robert Bly's American Poetry twenty-five years ago. I was living in Mexico and I recall one moment when I was wrapped up in Bly's near-polemical arguments and a bolt of lighting hit the wing of the small plane I was in as we descended into Mexico City's brown pollution. The lightning bolt sounded like the crack of a very large, heavy baseball bat hitting a fairly large metal ball. The plane kept flying and I kept reading. When this book came out in 1991, it must have made a similar sound hitting the skulls of most American poets, but as far as I know, they have kept writing the kind of poetry Bly objected to and continued to attend the MFA workshops that he truly despised. In Bly's well-documented view, many of the most successful American poets had succumbed to confession and technique as opposed to reaching into their unconscious for contact with the darkness that they then could return to the world and their readers. They eschewed discussing politics, tended to admire themselves a great deal, and focused too much on "things" as if "things" told us anything about the human condition. Bly also took the position that truly critical criticism was part of the poet's responsibility as opposed to mutual back-patting and blurbing. I would suppose the poetry world in America more or less loathed Bly for all this. He eviscerated James Dickey for his bloated self-regarding rhetorical exploits in writing poetry about his love affair with personal power. He knocked Karl Shapiro over for telling us what it is like to ride in a New York city bus and just not know what all the things--and people--really mean...probably nothing, I suppose. He took the critic/professor Harold Bloom to task for writing only about poets he admired and praising too highly the airy mysteries of Ammons and Ashberry. He suggested that critics in previous decades like Edmund Wilson and R.P. Blackmur did much harder, more important work both on what they liked and disliked--and telling us why. Poets Bly admired like James Wright got adulterated praise. He quoted one poem to make a point, not, as he said, to assert that it was great. Other poets he liked, Lorca, for example, also merited Bly's admiration for their sudden, swift descents into themselves and out again. As a diplomat, I hosted a luncheon for Bly a few years after I read American Poetry. I was in Germany at the time. Bly was cranky. Luncheons like that are no place for serious discussion, so what was anyone getting out of it? I could see that question in his eyes, and it's a fair question, so I didn't hold it against him, and I knew, from reading American Poetry, that he was fully aware that he made a practice of biting the hand that fed him. In other words, he wasn't innocent of accepting reading fees or grants or varieties of institutional support that helped him along as a poet and critic, even if such support, in his view, contributes nothing to literary accomplishment or culture. Not long ago I picked up a collection of Bly's poems and found them too self-involved on the one hand and too programmatic on the other, pitching a theory of human experience I didn't need repeated on page after page. But this book is truly wild, not at all domestic, and I loved the risks he took then even if he's a little old for them now.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-03 00:00:00 John Krey Bly cracks me up in the same way Melville cracks me up, that sharp, precise humor coming through in unexpected moments. Reading these essays I was floored by how prescient his criticisms on the role of the writer in society and the ‘sameness’ coming out of a bloated proliferation of American writing programs were. I’d look at the dates they were written and shake my head. Have we really progressed so little in the last 50 years?