american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

EQUIVOCAL AGENCY 99
Vietnam War—the more visible forerunner to Sam Hamill’s Poets
against the War, which so angered Laura Bush—that organized
protest readings and public demonstrations. In 1968, Bly won a
National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, a volume replete
with poems critical of U.S. actions in Vietnam; he used his acceptance
speech to encourage draft resistance. Bly’s polemics led James F.
Mersmann to call him “one of the most annoying and most exciting
poets of his time” (113). Von Hallberg falls on the “annoying” side of
the critical fence, reserving his utmost scorn for “The Teeth Mother
Naked at Last” (1970), which he calls the most “ambitious” of
Vietnam-era “period poems” that are marked by an absence of
qualifications and “reasonable language” (American Poetry 142).
Mersmann also opines that Bly’s Vietnam magnum opus has “prose
opinions and not poetic insights,” a fact that has led critics to
“misread” his work (124).
In “Counting Small-Boned Bodies,” Bly’s political voice is on full
display. Though not lengthy and bombastic like “The Teeth Mother”
and not directly confrontational like “Somebody Blew up America,”
the poem’s staged, perverse, and disembodied speaker indirectly
challenges the official bureaucratic propaganda of the U.S. military.
Walter Kalaidjian calls the poem a “burlesque performance” and
suggests that the poem employs Bly’s surrealism in a “subversive
tone” that “flouts the half truths and windy abstractions of bureaucratic
propaganda.” There is a lot to discuss with regard to this poem,
but the best place to begin is with Kalaidjian’s note about its tone.
The poem obviously has a subversive tone and “black humor” (“From
Silence” 198–201), but stopping there is insufficient. How exactly
does that voice work? First, Bly’s much discussed use of the “deep
image,” which William V. Davis points out “has never been clearly or
fully defined” (7), is nonetheless helpful for understanding this poem.
Deep image poems generally employ images that work “below the
level” of “rational thought”; further, these poems generally have a
“fluid, dreamlike construction” and an “intense subjectivity”
(Mills 211–212, 217). In “Counting Small-Boned Bodies,” the
images are horridly dreamlike and irrational. The speaker imagines in
a strange progression all of the dead Vietnamese bodies first as the
“size of skulls,” then as small enough to fit “a whole year’s kill” on a
desk, and finally, as small enough to fit into a “finger ring” (Selected
Poems 73). The reader must forgo “rational thought” in order to
accept Bly’s parodic voice. The increasing smallness of the bodies
fluidly distills the perversity of daily body counts in the hundreds or
thousands into the size of a “finger ring.”