SOURCE: “David Ignatow and the Dark City,” in American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity, Harper & Row, 1990, pp. 87-100.

In the following excerpt, Bly examines the themes that have typified Ignatow's work.

I

David Ignatow has broken free of a naïveté so typical of American poets. Whitman is his master, along with William Carlos Williams, but he sees that Whitman's insistence that we are all brothers, and friends, or should be, will lead directly to murder and insanity.

Let us be friends, said Walt … and cemeteries were laid out miles in all directions to fill the plots with the old and young, dead of murder, disease, rape, hatred, heartbreak and insanity … 

To feel powerful and alive, we may want to hurt someone, or have evidence that our society is hurting someone in our behalf.

How come nobody is being bombed today? I want to know, being a citizen of...