TOP33-DES31
This Old Poem #33:
Robert Bly’s The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 11/2/02
HE’S
BACK!!!! Poetry’s own court jester- Robert Bly. What more can be said about
him that has not already been debunked & destroyed in my previous essays?
The talent the man once had has been squandered for the quick fillip of fame.
I’ve detailed his slide from the dubious post as Deep Image poet to bad
translator to Dean of Tambourining to unwitting self-parody. His Morning
Poems of a few years back vied with Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters
as worst book of poetry by a ‘name poet’ in the last decade. Supposedly
cribbing the idea from the intellectually drained mind of William Stafford, RB
set out to write a whole book’s worth of clichéd, poorly wrought poems in
celebration of his early a.m. mind-farts. What to do for an encore?
Well, how
about keeping in touch with the great American poetic tradition of pillaging 3rd
World poetry? Recently RB has published bad poems supposedly utilizing the
Arabic poem form- the ghazal (pronounced guh-zahl, yet which RB comically calls
a guzzle). The titular poem is 1 such ghazal. The motif of the classical ghazal
is that each stanza ends with the same word & that each stanza is an entity
unto itself. Also, the whole poem has no defining theme, rather just arcs to
& fro. Rumi is considered the Classical Master of the form, but it has never
caught on in the West because it’s so free form that it’s barely a form- at
least not 1 that the West enjoys. Oddly enough, RB loosens the ‘form’ even
more. Check it out:
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,
He cried, "You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.
And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life
Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.
My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.
1 might ask why loosen this form any more? Especially after reading this. So many trite tropes, so many dull images. Technically not a bad poem, but a narcoleptic’s delight. It is a poor attempt at being ‘deep’- which happens to be RB’s specialty. Let’s look at the rewrite & scry the changes, simply by cutting the poem in ½. Gone are stanzas 2, 4 & 6. Looksy:
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,
We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.
Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.
Let’s see what was gained by being lost: stanza 2-
He cried, "You are my Lord!" How destroyed he
was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
Simply a re-phrasing of
stanza 1. Nothing added. Let’s go to stanza 4:
And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life
Not a rephrasing of stanza 3- but what does this add? We already get the ‘deep’ connection with the earth/nature, etc. How about stanza 6?
My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.
A really bad metaphor kicks
this off. Bathos takes over, then the faux probe into depth- as presented by the
query. To end the poem by having the speaker gaze up in silence at the night sky
says alot more then ending the poem by specifically stating the speaker’s love
for nature, which has already been established in the poem. So, even in a small
18 line poem we see RB is guilty of prolixity, again. Poetry, at its best,
thrives on concision. RB has always been oblivious to this. As usual, the
resultant poem is not a masterpiece, it merely heightens what is already there.
There would
be many ways to improve the piece- such as adding in a 3rd persona-
someone who could comment on both the speaker & Abraham. Now, not being a
Biblical expert, I do not know what specific part of the Abraham myth
references- but surely there is fodder to be exploited. & let’s return to
the issue of the ghazal form itself. Is the only reason for its use so that RB
can declaim his multicultural chops? Would the poem really lose a thing were it
re-rewritten into 1 stanza of 9 lines? I don’t think so. Granted, an infusion
of another element or 2 (such as I’ve suggested) is what’s really needed.
Better yet, RB should look at some of his better poems from the 1950s &
1960s. While not great, there was at least a real reason for them. It seems,
sometimes, that RB is merely living up to his contractual obligations- producing
poetry by the page, rather than poetry fit for the page. Ah, such the problems
of celebrity.
Final Score: (1-100):
Robert Bly’s The Night Abraham Called to the Stars:
60
TOP’s The Night Abraham Called to the Stars:
72
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