I mentioned this book during last week's salon and thought a link to where you can pick up a copy might be of interest. So, here it is American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, on Amazon. There's something ironic about ordering a book of this title & subject from the global ameba-cite, but if you follow the irony, maybe that's instructive in and of itself.
Anyway, it's now a venerably older book on contemporary American poets and poetry, published in 1990. Bly gathers together under this title a lifetime of writing about King Culture and the resistance to it. One half of the book is devoted to his many essays on the art and its place in American society & culture. The "old King" is his term for "the conservative mind-set inherited from Eliot and Pound and the triumphant flatness inherited from Descartes and Locke." By 1990, this "inheritance," and the rejection of it, was a subject of retrospective, career-lookback books like American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity. So just remember if you get a copy, that was 30 years ago!
The other half of the book is a selection of essays Bly had written by 1990 about various poets whose work either represented the essential wildness of his title (true American poetry) or the inheritance from the old King.
Well, I've forgotten the discussion last week that led me to recommend this book. But it can't hurt your general poetic education to pick up a copy and read it.
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