BOOKS
169
V.
Listening to Bach
Inside this music there is someone
Who is not well described by the names
Of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts!
"Six Winter Privacy Poems"
The counterparts to these terse panegyrics are the public
poems, many from the Vietnam era. To evoke the psychic disloca–
tions of a nation divided, Bly deployed a brand of neosurrealism
which came to be known as deep imagism. Simplifying grossly, the
technique has the poet juxtapose radically disparate images aimed at
detonating an emotional explosion in the reader. Here poems that
fail lack inevitability. Their images seem arbitrary and cartoonish:
Filaments of death grow out.
The sheriff cuts off his black legs
And nails them to a tree.
"War and Silence"
But the blunt rhetorical strategies can also be unnervingly effective:
Tonight they burn the rice supplies; tomorrow
They lecture on Thoreau; tonight they move around the trees;
Tonight they throw firebombs; tomorrow
They read the Declaration of Independence; tomorrow
they are in church.
'Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants"
The war also inspired what may be Bly's finest single poem,
"The Teeth Mother Naked At Last." Structurally reliant on Whit–
manesque anaphora, the poem, part catalogue, part document,
keens the loss of America's political innocence. A combination of
Mauberley,
a condensed
Cantos,
and
Howl,
it could be read as the
bloody right parenthesis to "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomed":
I know that books are tired of us.
I
know
they are chaining the Bible to chairs.
Books don't want
to
remain in the same room with us anymore.
New Testaments are escaping .. . dressed as women
they slip out after dark.
