Knowledge of the Sea Never Comes Amiss

Robert Bly gets a bad rap because of the drums. But the man’s poetic vision has been consistent. Like Jung, he has been a champion of the unconscious. Twentieth Century American Poetics includes his 1963 essay “A Wrong Turning in Amrican Poetry.” From pp274-5:

The outward poem is like a pine tree made half of tin and half of wood. The poem of things conceives itself to be describing the world correctly because there are pieces of the world in it. The poetry cannot sustain the poet or itself because the imagination has no privacy in which to grow. In the last thirty years in America the intelligence of the poet runs back and forth hurriedly between the world inside his head and the world outside. The imagination meanwhile is thinking in its chamber. The intelligence knocks at the door, demanding some imagination to put between a flat statement and a piece of glass, and rushes out with the gift. Then it hurries back to get a little more imagination to prevent two subway cars from rubbing together. The imagination is continually disturbed, torn away bit by bit, consumed like a bin of corn eaten gradually by mice.

The imagination does not want to hear these constant knockings on the door. It prefers to remain in its chamber, undisturbed, until it can create the poem all of one substance—itself. The imagination out of its own resources creates a poem as strong as the world faces. (snip) When this happens the poem enters the unconscious naturally.

I know many would think me crazy, but in some ways Bly and the Avant Garde are concerned with the same thing: the inability of language to contain the world. Bly’s answer is to return to the imagination, like myth, to say the unsayable.