Robert Bly and the poetry of 1999

As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1999, Robert Bly tells that the poems in the collection display many different kinds of heat. He says:

"Heat in itself has been disappearing for some years from our English. It is said that in a single day in the United States more words appear on computer screens than are secreted in all the books in the Library of Congress. But as these words stream across our screens, freed from doubt or elegance, we can see that computer verbiage has become the model of cool and empty language. I'm not making an original claim here; we all agree that the language of the chat rooms is empty. It's as if some worldwide force were trying to free us all from literary style, and is succeeding. Many contemporary writers persuade themselves it is good not to have inwardness, not to have intensity, not to engage layers of meaning, not to have pungent phrasings, not to allow the heat of that sort of language that springs from the fight between God and donkey. It's possible that the particular heat which we call style amounts to recognizing and remembering the flavor of the decade in which one became an adult. We more and more have English now no longer stung by the mood of an Oklahoma afternoon in the thirties, or the flavor of an Illinois dusk in the forties. Hardy's language we recognize to be blessedly imprisoned in the mood of Sussex in 1880. When the irreplaceable flavor of a given decade disappears, our language loses its vigor and becomes merely useful. Sven Birkerts, in his new book of essays Readings, points directly to the decline of intensity that results from the shift from the page to the screen. "We are losing our grip, collectively, on the logic of complex utterance, on syntax; we are abandoning the rhythmic, poetic undercurrents of expression." He suggests that "postmodern" merely means the destruction of all style. Postmodern novelists have fallen headfirst into this release from period style, producing novels that contain only the melancholy emptiness that follows from the longing to become universal. When language cools, it becomes a corpse.

"American poets are fighting against this cooling in several ingenious ways. Not all poets, of course. One group of poets who call themselves "Language" poets work very hard to drain all the meaning out of the words they use, and in this way resemble those eighteenth-century doctors who treated all problems by bleeding, occasionally failing to notice that the patient had died from loss of blood. All of us, poets, essayists, and fiction writers alike, are being pressured by example to remove flavor from our work, along with our idiosyncrasies. We are fighting a front-line action against the cooling of language..."

Bly's introduction was written 11 years ago, yet I suspect we have not been able to abandon the front-line position. Considering his observation that we are "...recognizing and remembering the flavor of the decade in which we became an adult," I know the reading which brought me to that decade, the sixties, stretched back to earlier times. I carry the influence of that Oklahoma afternoon in the thirties followed by eavesdropping outside the walk-up office where an idealistic detective was hired but never told the whole story. From South Pacific battles of the forties to the beats or post-apocalyptic predictions of the fifties, this is some of the language I absorbed.

I am not sure what all this means since, at the moment, I write for pleasure. There is no editor, no publisher, no one to bully me into using English in any way other than the one I know. The word "postmodern" confuses me. It didn't come up all that often in the newsroom at my first daily writing job where words were called copy and the demand for them was immediate and insistent. I hope language is regaining heat. Judging by the writers whose blogs I follow, I know there are subversive pockets, muy caliente, where it scorches.