We have a number of first rate living poets, still writing and publishing in the U.S. today, and in fact three of the very best, Jim Harrison, Robert Bly, and Franz Wright, just came out with superb new collections in the last couple of months. However, it would be absurd to suggest that this implies a strong and thriving culture that embraces poetry. In fact, the silence with which these new works have been met points out quite the opposite: poetry in our times has been marginalized to the point of invisibility. As far as mainstream media are concerned these books were never written. It makes me wonder how many great poets will never write their poems, and how many great poems will never be written, in the climate in which we live. But I am heartened by the words of Max Picard this morning:

"It often happens that a whole nation may not realize certain potentialities for a long period in its history. For instance, the gift of poetic creation may remain dormant. But the potentiality is not destroyed, it is simply not realized. It may be resting and recuperating in the silence. Yet there is beauty in such a silence, the beauty that comes from the all-permeating silence of unwritten poetry." -- The World of Silence (1948)

I have been reading Robert Bly's new book lately, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey and enjoying it very much. But I also found an old copy of Sleepers Joining Hands recently, first published in 1973, and enjoying it too. Here is a portion of "Six Winter Privacy Poems" that I found particularly striking:

4
Sitting Alone

There is a solitude like black mud!
Sitting in this darkness singing,
I can't tell if this joy
is from the body, or the soul, or a third place.