From Barnes & Noble
Book of DaysThe Best American Poetry series, launched in 1988 by David Lehman, has for the last ten years been a reliable source of hope for those discouraged by reports of the dwindling importance of good poetry in America. Each year, the series presents a surprising number of excellent American poems with an introductory essay by that year's poet-editor, who, after travelling through 12 months of the country's journals and magazines, returns with an evangel as promising as it is temperate. This year's messenger is Robert Bly, and his tidings are glad.
Bly is no stranger to the role. As founding editor of the literary journal The Fifties (and, in due time, The Sixties and The Seventies) he spent many crucial years monitoring the progress of the written word. In recent years Bly has achieved some fame with his book Iron John, which quickly became a classic of the men's movement, but his true place in American literature is as a poet, translator, editor, and defender of poetic style amidst its slow deconstruction by forces vast and unseen.
Style is where Bly begins. In his introduction, he writes that, "It's possible that...style amounts to recognizing and remembering the flavor of the decade in which one became an adult." Bly's own maturation (he was born in 1926) took place in the 1950s, when he discovered the poets Pablo Neruda, Caesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, and others. His translations of these poets and others are among the best and, collected, along with several of his essays in Leaping Poetry, introduced many an American poet to what Bly called the "leaping" style of international modernism. Formed as they were by apprenticeship to these masters (the South Americans in particular), Bly's tastes run to the simplicity of phrase and complexity of thought characteristic of their poetry.
Bly calls this quality "heat" and finds a wave of it in the current American poetry. There is the heat of arrival, the heat that comes from placing formal demands upon language, the heat of wit, the heat of nature. Heat, by Bly's definition, is a property of poets that are able to deliver unto the souls of their readers the things of their poems. Environmental developments have threatened this poetic grain, since, unlike the world it describes, the word is plagued by global cooling. Says Bly, "My main thought is that we, in 1999, being so worldly, so informed, so flooded with motifs from the past, find it more and more difficult to allow any object, whether a snowstorm or a toad or a painting, to pass through our subtle chambers to reach the soul." The best writing happens when the poet is able to struggle past these seductions and plunge the reader directly into contact with the object. A tall order, but one that the poets in this volume fill again and again. All in all, it seems to have been a very hot year.
Accepting Bly's idea about heat, and noticing the appropriateness of the late-August publication date, I came to see the volume as a compendium of high temperatures, a Summer of a collection -- the poems corresponding to the dog days themselves, the gradual march through the alphabet of poets' names to the humid passage from month to month. Lehman's preface and Bly's introduction stand as early-May forecasts; then the summer begins. Chana Bloch's "Tired Sex" has the feel of a day hot enough to suspend all faculties but the speaker's wry, tired wit, which, left alone, delivers a concise perception:
Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned --
You ought to read it, she said.
It's great literature.
Ruth Stone's "A Moment" is another hot day. Though the poem describes a day in late winter, it has all the languid heat of a midsummer afternoon. The speaker and her daughter are sitting in a parking lot. "Across the highway a heron stands / in the flooded field. It stands / as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless, / as if the field belonged to herons." The poem swells with heat. Each short sentence seems to bulge into the silence of the poem like the hours of a hot, listless day. The poem finishes with
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.
Bly says that this poem has the "heat of arrival," by which he means that it gets us somewhere and wastes no time doing so. Every sentence bears down on that last line.
Phillip Levine's "The Return" is another poem that has this heat of arrival. After reading his father's journal for the first time, the 70-year-old Levine flies to Detroit, rents a car, and goes in search of a grove of apple trees mentioned in the journal. He finds it, steps inside, and the poem ends with these four lines:
I took off my hat, a mistake in the presence
of my father's God, wiped my brow with what I had,
the back of my hand, and marveled at what was here:
nothing at all except the stubbornness of things.
Levine's arrival is a disappointment of sorts, but a marvelous one. The heat in his poem may be more aptly described as a friction of the mind that wants to know moving against the unwillingness of objects to reveal themselves. Paramount, of course, is the friction of the son trying to know his dead father.
Objects are stubborn; words are stubborn, too. Here we have an excellent collection of poems that struggle against this stubbornness of words. Other scorchers include a previously unpublished, and rhetorically lovely, poem by Elizabeth Bishop; John Brehm's funny and inspiring "Sea of Faith"; Czeslaw Milosz's "A Ball"; Charles Simic's "Barber College Haircut"; William Stafford's posthumous "Ways to Live," a poem that seems to confirm Stafford's practice of writing before dawn; and Richard Wilbur's finely-wrought "This Pleasing Anxious Being."
—Jacob Silverstein
