BLY, Robert The Teeth Mother Naked at Last. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1978.
Small 4to. Original illustrated card wrappers; presentation copy signed with doodle on title page; pp. [2], 5-22; glue residue evident to the gutters; wrappers a little toned and shelf-worn; ink mark to lower margin of front cover, otherwise very good.
First edition signed and doodled by the author.
Hugh Kenner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, remarked that “Bly is attempting to write down what it’s like to be alive, a state in which, he implies, not all readers find themselves all the time.” The Teeth Mother Naked At Last is prasied as one of the most moving and noteworthy Anti-War poems at the time of Vietnam. The language Bly employs in the poem is creatively plagiarised from the rhetoric of the institutions Bly is challenging; the contrived language of politicians such as President Lyndon Johnson, the phrases of the military and the repetitive strains of an ever growing mass media.
The myth aligned with the poem's title is that of The Great Mother, which emphasises society's rejection of the 'female psyche' in favour of a spiritual estrangement; the psyche devoid of emotional propensity and the ability to engage with a creative consicous, exemplified by the dominant figure of The Teeth Mother. Bly makes the claim that Vietnam was the product of this disavowal of spirituality and the poem stands as one of the most powerful excavations of the betrayal of a crucial psychology which, in its famished state, has caused war and poverty.
In 1966 Robert Bly and David Ray founded American Writers Against The Vietnam War, which organised the first ever " read-ins" against the war.
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