In a decade marked by Watergate disillusionment, glam rock, political activism, civil liberties, hippies, Vietnam, stagflation, and Sonny and Cher, the American 1970's has been referred to, by Tom Wolfe, as the "me decade." Contrary to the decadent decade, Galway Kinnell fashions a concise and brutal poetry centered on the short, brutal, and ordinary experience of life. A bear on a mountainside, a pair of old shoes, a butchered hen, a sleeping child, a corpse that will not stop burning: these are the images that Kinnell dwells on to both extract meaning from and too give meaning to. Kinnell is creating his own network of symbols that are both private yet public. He is, in terms of Joseph Campbell, actually engaging in "creative mythology." The speaker of the poems has had a powerful experience that needs to be communicated through symbols. While Kinnell's symbols are derived from the individual experience, of which only he may know the full significance, they are also explained enough so that they have meaning outside of personal experience. Yet knowing the power of symbols, and distrusting them, Kinnell both creates and interrogates these symbols. In adopting such a conflicted attitude in the poems, Kinnell essentially creates a mythology that is, paradoxically, antagonistic with itself as both a characterization and warning for the coming decade.