536 The American Century: Literature since 1945“Be guilty of yourself in the full looking glass,” a poet of a slightly earlier generation,
Delmore Schwartz, had said; and that injunction, to see and know the truth about
oneself no matter how painful or embarrassing it might be, is clearly the enterprise,
the heart of these poems.
This rediscovery of the personal in American poetry assumed many forms – as
various, finally, as the poets involved. At one extreme are poets who attempted to
plunge into the unconscious: in the work of Robert Bly (1926–) (whose best
collection is The Light Around the Body (1967)), Robert Kelly (1935–) (some of
whose best work is in Finding the Measure (1968)), Galway Kinnell (1927–) (whose
Selected Poems appeared in 1982), and James Wright (1927–1980) (Collected Poems
(1971)), for example, the poet dives down beneath the level of rational discourse,
using subliminal imagery and a logic of association to illuminate the darker areas of
the self, the seabed of personal feeling, dream, and intuition. In Robert Bly’s case,
exploration of the subrational has led him toward “tiny poems,” in imitation of the
Chinese, and prose poems that are, as he put it, “an exercise in moving against ‘plural
consciousness.’ ” His aim is to uncover the “dense energy that pools in the abdomen,”
as he put it in a poem titled “When the Wheel Does Not Move”: the fierce, mystical
forces that unite him, at the deepest level, with the looser, livelier forms of the natural
world. Kelly and Kinnell dip perhaps even further down. “My wife is not my wife,”
Kelly insists in one of his poems, called “Jealousy,” “ / wife is the name of a / process,
an energy moving, / not an identity, / nothing in this world is / mine but my action.”
To articulate the process, the activity that constitutes identity, Kelly has devised a
poetry that is a haunting mixture of dream, chant, and ritual: his poems are an
attempt to translate the interpenetration of things into intelligible (although not
necessarily paraphraseable) signs and sounds. “The organism / of the macrocosm,”
as he puts it in “prefix,” “the organism of language, / the organism of I combine in
ceaseless naturing / to propagate a fourth, / the poem, / from their trinity.”
Kinnell began from a rather different base from Kelly, in that his earlier poems were
informed by a traditional Christian sensibility. But, while retaining a sacramental
dimension, his later work burrows ferociously into the self, away from the traditional
sources of religious authority – and away, too, from conventional notions of
personality. “If you could keep going deeper and deeper;” he wrote in 1978, “you’d
finally not be a person ... you’d be an / animal; and if you kept going deeper and /
deeper, you’d be ... / ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone / could read poetry
would speak for it.”
The poems that issue from this conviction (as a collection like When One Has
Lived A Long Time Alone (1990) illustrates) show Kinnell trying to strip away formal,
verbal, and even surface emotional constructs, anything that might dissipate or
impede the poet’s continuing exploration of his deepest self and experience. “How
many nights,” he asks in “Another Night in the Ruins,” “must it take / one such as me
to learn / ... / that for a man / as he goes up in flames, his one work / is / to open
himself, to be / the flames?” Short, chanting lines, a simple, declarative syntax,
emphatic rhythms, bleak imagery and insistent repetition: all turn the poet into a
kind of shaman, who describes strange apocalyptic experiences in which he throwsGGray_c05.indd 536ray_c 05 .indd 536 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM