酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Poetic Lens

Leaping Poetry: More Than a Leap from One Image to Another (The First Draft)

(This introductory essay on Robert Bly’s “Leaping Poetry” grew out of my passionate and most satisfactory discussions on the differing poetic notions of the “image” conceived by Ezra Pound and Robert Bly with my newly acquainted American poet Emusing, published poet and editor of Word Walker Press; Moonday Poetry; Kyoto Journal. For anyone who is interested in our discussions, please read my essay entitled How to Write a New Kind of Poetry: The Ideogrammic Poetics

The following piece is the first draft outlining the summary of the main topics on an essay in process; I’ll come back to flesh it out later. I am open to any and all suggestions. Constructive critiques are more than welcome)


In ancient times, in the ‘time of inspiration’, the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons’.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke.... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. -- Robert Bly



As an internationally acclaimed poet, critic, essayist, and translator, Robert Bly has had a profound impact on the shape of Contemporary American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry; more importantly, he has introduced to American readers numerous European and Latin American poets who possess different literary voices and visions. In doing so, he has helped enrich and broaden the American poetic sensibilities. One of his ground-breaking achievements is that, through his The Fifties Press, subsequently The Sixties Press and The Seventies Press, he translated poets such as Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Tomas Transtromer, and Georg Trakl, and later he used these poets -- mainly Spanish surrealists -- to call for writing a new kind of American poetry, a poetry that is directly against Ezra Pound’s imagist poetry and that is more rooted in the surrealist tradition.

In his most anthologized essay entitled A Wrong Turning in American Poetry, by making the comparative reading of the poems by European and South American poets and also some medieval Arabic poets against those of contemporary and recent American counterparts, Bly criticizes his fellow American poets that "these men have more trust in the objective, outer world than in the inner world," and quotes Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet as a forceful suggestion: “You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. There is only one single way. Go into yourself." He proceeds to enhance his argument by continuingly juxtaposing passages from both camps of poetry for comparison, showing a stark distinction between American-centred conventional narrative verse and a European- and Latin American-dominated daring imagistic style.

Like Pound, Bly is highly interested in turning poetry away from a narrative style to one infused with evocative images, which would elicit a strikingly profound effect in the mind and heart of the reader. He firmly asserts that "the poetry we have now is a poetry without the image" by which he means deep image. He attacks Pound’s imagist approach to the “image”, which is, in his view, merely a “picture:”

“The only movement in American poetry which concentrated on the image was Imagism, in 1911-13. But ‘Imagism’ was largely ‘Picturism.’ An image and a picture differ in that the image, being the natural speech of the imagination, can not be drawn from or inserted back into the real world. It is an animal native to the imagination. Like Bonnefoy's ‘interior sea lighted by turning eagles,’ it cannot be seen in real life. A picture, on the other hand, is drawn from the objective ‘real’ world. ‘Petals on a wet black bough’ can actually be seen.”

(“Petals on a wet black bough” is taken from Pound’s iconic imagistic poem entitled In a Station of the Metro, he demonstrates his imagistic characteristics in two lines: precision of imagery, clear, sharp language, and experimenting with non-traditional poetic forms. I wrote a review essay on how to read his poem in a contextualized setting, an essay which stirred up a series of lengthy discussions with my newly acquainted friend, Emusing, who read his poem from the perspective of an American poet who is deeply rooted in the poetic tradition of Leaping Poetry. For anyone who is interested in our discussions, please read my essay entitled How to Write a New Kind of Poetry: The Ideogrammic Poetics)

Bly writes against the imagist tendency to abstraction and objectivity, seeing it as "merely another form of the flight from inwardness." The poetic image he has learned from the masters of European and Latin American poets and advocated for involves psychic energy and movement, and he clearly states that:

“Let's imagine a poem as if it were an animal. When animals run, they have considerable flowing rhythms. Also they have bodies. An image is simply a body where psychic energy is free to move around. Psychic energy can't move well in a non-image statement.”

In his ground-breaking 1975 book entitled Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations, Bly offers a different version/vision of a poetics of the image, a poetics of leaping between the consciousness and the unconsciousness, and he makes his assertion about psychic energy, a concept that is deeply rooted in the psychoanalytically influenced surrealist poetic tradition and that deepens and broadens the range of association in the poem.

“Freud pointed out that the dream still retained the fantastic freedom of association known to us before only from ancient art. By the end of the nineteenth century both the poem and the dream had been set free… The poets then began to devote their lives to deepening the range of association in the poem… It is this movement that has given such fantastic energy to ‘modern poetry'… In ancient times, in the ‘time of inspiration’, the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons’.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke.... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.”

In his book, Bly argues that after Pound and Eliot, American poetry slipped back into the English tradition of the iamb, a shift which he firmly claims that the conscious mind leads in the poetry. Now, he eagerly suggests instead a more passionate, getting in touch with the human unconsciousness, irrational style of writing modeled after the above-mentioned European and Latin American surrealist poets.

Now, let’s look at how Bly applies his notion of “leaping” – fast association of images operated through psychic energy -- to the practice of poetry writing. The following example is taken from the eighth in a series of poems entitled It’s As If Someone Else Is With Me. The first stanza reads:

The dawn comes. Leaves feel it’s time
To say something, and I feel myself drawn
To You. I know this is wrong”

The leap implied here is a small and personal one from the objective view of the leaves to the subjective desire of the speaker, jumping from the outer world to the inner one. Where the poet sees this leap as one of psychic association, the reader may view this as a juxtaposition of images. , Nevertheless, this association is valid for the interested reader.

Another example comes from one stanza of his famous anti-Vietnam War poem entitled Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings,

Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!

The leap suggested here is a huge and politically-charged one from the domestic image of drinking coffee in America to the combating image of Black Starfighters dropping bombs in Asia, from the kitchens of individual Americans to the battlefields of the American fighting troops, and from the homely image of safety to the war-torn image of atrocity. The fighting image of Black Starfighters reflected in the coffee cup directly and psychologically connects the war fought outside the American soil with the mind and heart of the individual reader, hinting at an unavoidable relationship between the gaiety of Americans and their capacity for destructing their own lives and those of other people. This intervowen relationship between the American people and the Vietnamese people is initially implied in the title of the poem.

The nest example is Bly’s most anthologized poem entitled In Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River:

I

I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.
The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.
The soybeans are breathing on all sides.
Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats
In the small towns. I am happy,
The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

II

The small world of the car
Plunges through the deep fields of the night,
On the road from Willmar to Milan.
This solitude covered in iron
Moves through the fields of night
Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

III

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,
And water kneeling in the moonlight.
In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;
The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass.
When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.
A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

The description of landscape has a significant role in understanding the poem. However, the images employed to portray the landscape are not intended to be objectively accurate. On the contrary, the images employed here are “The stubble field catches the last growth of sun / The soybeans are breathing on all sides,” “The small world of the car / Plunges through the deep fields of the night/ … / This solitude covered in iron / Moves through the fields of night / Penetrated by the noise of crickets,” and “water kneeling in the moonlight/ … / The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass,” revealing the emotional state of mood of the speaker. This description of landscape is, one way or another, like a mirror of emotion upon which the speaker projects his feelings. It has gradually become laden with emotional weight as the poem proceeds to arrive at the end of the second stanza, from the objective recounting of fact, “I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota,” to the emotion-laden imagery of the mind of speaker, “This solitude covered in iron / Moves through the fields of night / Penetrated by the noise of crickets.”

In the concluding stanza, the attentive reader would sense a shift in the mood of the speaker through the images, in which considerable effort is made to blur the boundary between the objective and the subjective. A slow, psychic leap is made to descend into an inner landscape of the mind of the speaker, a landscape where the ordinary-turned-defamiliarized things populate and are perceived from a meditative eye: “water kneeling in the moonlight,” “The lamplight fall[ing] on all fours on the grass,” the full moon cover[ing] [the river], and “A few people talking, low, in a boat.”

Yes, as attentive readers, “we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” In his poem quoted above, Robert Bly proves to make a hung heap from the “objective and abstract” description of images to the “emotion-infused and leaping association” of images. And he has infused contemporary American poetry more with emotionalism and spontaneity achieved through his wild association of deep images, and that he has put more effort to focalize the movement towards an increase in speed and range of association, which “gives such fantastic energy and excitement to ‘modern poetry’”.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Poetic Lens

Leaping Poetry: More Than a Leap from One Image to Another (The First Draft)

(This introductory essay on Robert Bly’s “Leaping Poetry” grew out of my passionate and most satisfactory discussions on the differing poetic notions of the “image” conceived by Ezra Pound and Robert Bly with my newly acquainted American poet Emusing, published poet and editor of Word Walker Press; Moonday Poetry; Kyoto Journal. For anyone who is interested in our discussions, please read my essay entitled How to Write a New Kind of Poetry: The Ideogrammic Poetics

The following piece is the first draft outlining the summary of the main topics on an essay in process; I’ll come back to flesh it out later. I am open to any and all suggestions. Constructive critiques are more than welcome)


In ancient times, in the ‘time of inspiration’, the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons’.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke.... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. -- Robert Bly



As an internationally acclaimed poet, critic, essayist, and translator, Robert Bly has had a profound impact on the shape of Contemporary American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry; more importantly, he has introduced to American readers numerous European and Latin American poets who possess different literary voices and visions. In doing so, he has helped enrich and broaden the American poetic sensibilities. One of his ground-breaking achievements is that, through his The Fifties Press, subsequently The Sixties Press and The Seventies Press, he translated poets such as Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Tomas Transtromer, and Georg Trakl, and later he used these poets -- mainly Spanish surrealists -- to call for writing a new kind of American poetry, a poetry that is directly against Ezra Pound’s imagist poetry and that is more rooted in the surrealist tradition.

In his most anthologized essay entitled A Wrong Turning in American Poetry, by making the comparative reading of the poems by European and South American poets and also some medieval Arabic poets against those of contemporary and recent American counterparts, Bly criticizes his fellow American poets that "these men have more trust in the objective, outer world than in the inner world," and quotes Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet as a forceful suggestion: “You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. There is only one single way. Go into yourself." He proceeds to enhance his argument by continuingly juxtaposing passages from both camps of poetry for comparison, showing a stark distinction between American-centred conventional narrative verse and a European- and Latin American-dominated daring imagistic style.

Like Pound, Bly is highly interested in turning poetry away from a narrative style to one infused with evocative images, which would elicit a strikingly profound effect in the mind and heart of the reader. He firmly asserts that "the poetry we have now is a poetry without the image" by which he means deep image. He attacks Pound’s imagist approach to the “image”, which is, in his view, merely a “picture:”

“The only movement in American poetry which concentrated on the image was Imagism, in 1911-13. But ‘Imagism’ was largely ‘Picturism.’ An image and a picture differ in that the image, being the natural speech of the imagination, can not be drawn from or inserted back into the real world. It is an animal native to the imagination. Like Bonnefoy's ‘interior sea lighted by turning eagles,’ it cannot be seen in real life. A picture, on the other hand, is drawn from the objective ‘real’ world. ‘Petals on a wet black bough’ can actually be seen.”

(“Petals on a wet black bough” is taken from Pound’s iconic imagistic poem entitled In a Station of the Metro, he demonstrates his imagistic characteristics in two lines: precision of imagery, clear, sharp language, and experimenting with non-traditional poetic forms. I wrote a review essay on how to read his poem in a contextualized setting, an essay which stirred up a series of lengthy discussions with my newly acquainted friend, Emusing, who read his poem from the perspective of an American poet who is deeply rooted in the poetic tradition of Leaping Poetry. For anyone who is interested in our discussions, please read my essay entitled How to Write a New Kind of Poetry: The Ideogrammic Poetics)

Bly writes against the imagist tendency to abstraction and objectivity, seeing it as "merely another form of the flight from inwardness." The poetic image he has learned from the masters of European and Latin American poets and advocated for involves psychic energy and movement, and he clearly states that:

“Let's imagine a poem as if it were an animal. When animals run, they have considerable flowing rhythms. Also they have bodies. An image is simply a body where psychic energy is free to move around. Psychic energy can't move well in a non-image statement.”

In his ground-breaking 1975 book entitled Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations, Bly offers a different version/vision of a poetics of the image, a poetics of leaping between the consciousness and the unconsciousness, and he makes his assertion about psychic energy, a concept that is deeply rooted in the psychoanalytically influenced surrealist poetic tradition and that deepens and broadens the range of association in the poem.

“Freud pointed out that the dream still retained the fantastic freedom of association known to us before only from ancient art. By the end of the nineteenth century both the poem and the dream had been set free… The poets then began to devote their lives to deepening the range of association in the poem… It is this movement that has given such fantastic energy to ‘modern poetry'… In ancient times, in the ‘time of inspiration’, the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons’.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke.... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.”

In his book, Bly argues that after Pound and Eliot, American poetry slipped back into the English tradition of the iamb, a shift which he firmly claims that the conscious mind leads in the poetry. Now, he eagerly suggests instead a more passionate, getting in touch with the human unconsciousness, irrational style of writing modeled after the above-mentioned European and Latin American surrealist poets.

Now, let’s look at how Bly applies his notion of “leaping” – fast association of images operated through psychic energy -- to the practice of poetry writing. The following example is taken from the eighth in a series of poems entitled It’s As If Someone Else Is With Me. The first stanza reads:

The dawn comes. Leaves feel it’s time
To say something, and I feel myself drawn
To You. I know this is wrong”

The leap implied here is a small and personal one from the objective view of the leaves to the subjective desire of the speaker, jumping from the outer world to the inner one. Where the poet sees this leap as one of psychic association, the reader may view this as a juxtaposition of images. , Nevertheless, this association is valid for the interested reader.

Another example comes from one stanza of his famous anti-Vietnam War poem entitled Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings,

Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!

The leap suggested here is a huge and politically-charged one from the domestic image of drinking coffee in America to the combating image of Black Starfighters dropping bombs in Asia, from the kitchens of individual Americans to the battlefields of the American fighting troops, and from the homely image of safety to the war-torn image of atrocity. The fighting image of Black Starfighters reflected in the coffee cup directly and psychologically connects the war fought outside the American soil with the mind and heart of the individual reader, hinting at an unavoidable relationship between the gaiety of Americans and their capacity for destructing their own lives and those of other people. This intervowen relationship between the American people and the Vietnamese people is initially implied in the title of the poem.

The nest example is Bly’s most anthologized poem entitled In Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River:

I

I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.
The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.
The soybeans are breathing on all sides.
Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats
In the small towns. I am happy,
The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

II

The small world of the car
Plunges through the deep fields of the night,
On the road from Willmar to Milan.
This solitude covered in iron
Moves through the fields of night
Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

III

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,
And water kneeling in the moonlight.
In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;
The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass.
When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.
A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

The description of landscape has a significant role in understanding the poem. However, the images employed to portray the landscape are not intended to be objectively accurate. On the contrary, the images employed here are “The stubble field catches the last growth of sun / The soybeans are breathing on all sides,” “The small world of the car / Plunges through the deep fields of the night/ … / This solitude covered in iron / Moves through the fields of night / Penetrated by the noise of crickets,” and “water kneeling in the moonlight/ … / The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass,” revealing the emotional state of mood of the speaker. This description of landscape is, one way or another, like a mirror of emotion upon which the speaker projects his feelings. It has gradually become laden with emotional weight as the poem proceeds to arrive at the end of the second stanza, from the objective recounting of fact, “I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota,” to the emotion-laden imagery of the mind of speaker, “This solitude covered in iron / Moves through the fields of night / Penetrated by the noise of crickets.”

In the concluding stanza, the attentive reader would sense a shift in the mood of the speaker through the images, in which considerable effort is made to blur the boundary between the objective and the subjective. A slow, psychic leap is made to descend into an inner landscape of the mind of the speaker, a landscape where the ordinary-turned-defamiliarized things populate and are perceived from a meditative eye: “water kneeling in the moonlight,” “The lamplight fall[ing] on all fours on the grass,” the full moon cover[ing] [the river], and “A few people talking, low, in a boat.”

Yes, as attentive readers, “we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” In his poem quoted above, Robert Bly proves to make a hung heap from the “objective and abstract” description of images to the “emotion-infused and leaping association” of images. And he has infused contemporary American poetry more with emotionalism and spontaneity achieved through his wild association of deep images, and that he has put more effort to focalize the movement towards an increase in speed and range of association, which “gives such fantastic energy and excitement to ‘modern poetry’”.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[christine]

[[christine]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[川生]

Bly speaks in metaphors in an attempt to evoke an imaginative and emotional response from the reader through leaping association of deep images.

Your "essay" is too long and I only read the first half of it.

I'll come back to it later.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Bly's leaping poetry.
_________________
Lines go off in all directions.

[[川生]]

Bly speaks in metaphors in an attempt to evoke an imaginative and emotional response from the reader through leaping association of deep images.

Your "essay" is too long and I only read the first half of it.

I'll come back to it later.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Bly's leaping poetry.
_________________
Lines go off in all directions.

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[dundas]

[[dundas]]

[ericcoliu]

Yes, his political poem is intended to link the socio-political context to the individual psychology through the deep images, attempting to mobilize the reader to think differently and thus act responsibly.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Yes, his political poem is intended to link the socio-political context to the individual psychology through the deep images, attempting to mobilize the reader to think differently and thus act responsibly.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul