american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

100 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Victoria Frenkel Harris claims that the tone of this poem can
“never be confused.” Despite its “sarcastic presentation,” she writes
that Bly “exudes naked emotion, rage” (22). However, the tone can
be confused, and Harris herself misreads it. The poem does not have
a trace of emotion or rage; the voice is calm, cool, calculated, and
slow. The first line is matter-of-fact, distant: “Let’s count the bodies
over again.” Of the poem’s seventy-four words, fifty-six are monosyllables.
These monosyllables greatly slow down the lines. As in Pound’s
“In a Station of the Metro,” the second and final line of which ends
with three consecutive stressed monosyllabics—“petals on a wet,
black bough”—that stand in stark contrast to the first iambic line,
Bly’s poem relies on monosyllables both for sound and sense, with the
former echoing the latter. When the speaker says “we could fit / a
whole year’s kill in front of us on a desk,” the tone is slow, measured,
and, most of all, deadpan. There is no melody or rhythm or rage. The
parodic voice would not work if it were not detached and emotionless,
dystopian rather than enraged. This is not a protest poem with
authoritative agency; it is a satiric poem with a disengaged voice.
Further, Bly’s poem, the previous lines especially, proliferates
prepositions. In his assessment of his own political poetry, 12 he
explains that he uses a “Smart-Blake-Whitman” line, which is “additive”
and “monotonous” with an abundance of prepositions, often
becoming “swollen by them” (Selected Poems 196). Not only do these
prepositions extend lines while slowing them, they add to the absurdity
of the speaker’s vision. With each additional prepositional phrase,
the image grows more preposterous. The final line would be sufficient
with the image of fitting “a body into a finger ring,” but the addition
of “for a keepsake forever” makes it doubly absurd and stinging.
Similarly, the image of making a “whole plain white with skulls”
becomes more depraved with the consciously poetic phrase “in the
moonlight” added gratuitously.
In much the same way, Bly’s heavy use of repetition and conditional
statements, which grammatically signal the hypothetical, make
the tone calmer, more measured. “If we could only make the bodies
smaller” is repeated three times in the brief poem; this perverse desire
is nonetheless expressed in a hypothetical, betraying the speaker’s
rationality in the face of such absurdity. He knows that it is impossible
to fit a year of dead Vietnamese on a desk. As such, it is not the vision
itself that is grotesque, but the speaker’s wish that such a world were
possible. This twist is Bly’s brilliant move in the poem. It is relatively
simple to create a grotesque vision of a brutal war; it is another thing
altogether to get into the psyche and hopes of a military machine.