SOURCE: Kalaidjian, Walter. “From Silence to Subversion: Robert Bly's Political Surrealism.” In Critical Essays on Robert Bly, edited by William V. Davis, pp. 194-211. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1992.

In the following essay, originally published in 1989, Kalaidjian probes Bly's subversive poetics—including his imagistic “repression of history” and his critique of American consumer culture and foreign policy—and concludes by assessing Bly's “woefully lacking” theory of matriarchy.

Working with long, encyclopedic verse forms, Charles Olson and James Merrill at once depart from James Wright's lyric subjectivity and project Merwin's more discursive lyricism into extraliterary registers. Their dialogic negotiations with popular culture and other fields of writing on the one hand question the “literary” status of the American verse canon and, on the other hand, render social history susceptible to poetry's own linguistic powers of cultural critique. Thus, in Olson's and Merrill's textual practice, the contemporary verse epic...