Robert Bly

This article is about the poet. For the business writer, seeRobert W. Bly.

Robert Bly
Bly at the "Poetry Out Loud" finals,Minnesota2009
Born	Robert Elwood Bly (1926-12-23)December 23, 1926 Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota,U.S.
Died	November 21, 2021(2021-11-21)(aged 94) Minneapolis,Minnesota, U.S.
Occupation	Poet activist
Period	1962–2018
Subjects	Masculinity
Literary movement	Deep image Mythopoetic Men's Movement
Notable works	Iron John: A Book About Men Silence in the Snowy Fields The Light Around the Body
Spouse	Carol McLean ​ ​ (m.1955;div.1979)​ Ruth Counsell ​ (m.1980)​
Children	4, includingMary Bly
Website
robertbly

Robert Elwood Bly(December 23, 1926 – November 21, 2021) was anAmericanpoet, essayist, activist and leader of themythopoetic men's movement.His best-known prose book isIron John: A Book About Men(1990),which spent 62 weeks onThe New York TimesBest Seller list,and is a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement. He won the 1968National Book Award for Poetryfor his bookThe Light Around the Body.

Early life and education

Bly was born inLac qui Parle County, Minnesota,the son of Alice Aws and Jacob Thomas Bly, who were ofNorwegianancestry.Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving two years. After one year atSt. Olaf CollegeinMinnesota,he transferred toHarvard University,joining other young persons who became known as writers:Donald Hall,Will Morgan,Adrienne Rich,Kenneth Koch,Frank O'Hara,John Ashbery,Harold Brodkey,George PlimptonandJohn Hawkes.He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York.

Beginning in 1954, Bly studied for two years at theUniversity of Iowaat theIowa Writers Workshop,completing a master's degree in fine arts, along withW. D. Snodgrass,Donald Justice,and others. In 1956, he received aFulbright Grantto travel toNorwayand translateNorwegian poetryinto English. While there, he became acquainted with the work of a number of major international poets whose work was barely known in the United States. These included both Norwegians and writers from Spain, Latin America and elsewhere, among themGunnar Ekelof,Harry Martinson,Georg Trakl,Antonio Machado,Pablo Neruda,Cesar Vallejo,Rumi,Hafez,Kabir,andMirabai.He also connected with some of his family's relations.

Personal life

Bly lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife Carol (née McLean), whom he married in 1955, and their four children.Carol Blywas also a writer, winning awards for her short stories and novels. Robert and Carol divorced in 1979. Their daughterMary Blyis a professor atFordham Universityand author of romance novels under thepseudonymEloisa James.In 1980, Robert Bly married Ruth Counselland became the stepfather to her two children. In 2012, his daughter Mary told Minnesota Public Radio that he had Alzheimer's disease.Bly died at his home in Minneapolis on November 21, 2021, at the age of 94.

Career

Bly's early collection of poems,Silence in the Snowy Fields,was published in 1962. Its plain, imagistic style had considerable influence on American verse of the next two decades.The following year, he published "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry",an essay in which he argued that the vast majority of American poetry from 1917 to 1963 was lacking in soul and" inwardness "as a result of a focus on impersonality and an objectifying, intellectual view of the world. Bly believed this approach was instigated by the Modernists and formed the aesthetic of most post-World War II American poetry. He criticized the influence of American-born Modernists such asT. S. Eliot,Ezra Pound,Marianne Moore,andWilliam Carlos Williams,and argued that American poetry needed to model itself on the more inward-looking work of European and South American poets likePablo Neruda,César Vallejo,Juan Ramón Jiménez,Antonio Machado,andRainer Maria Rilke.ASelected Poemstranslation of Rilke from the German, with Commentary by Bly, was published in 1981.Times Alone, Selected Poems of Antonio Machado,with facing page Spanish/English translation, was published in 1983.

In 1966, Bly co-foundedAmerican Writers Against the Vietnam Warand was among the leaders of the opposition to that war among writers. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest"pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war.In his speech accepting the 1968National Book AwardforThe Light Around the Body,he announced that he would be contributing the $1000 prize to draft resistance organizations.

During the sixties Bly aided the BengaliHungryalistpoets who faced anti-establishment trials atKolkata,India. Bly's 1970 poem "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last", later collected in his bookSleepers Joining Hands(1973), is a major contribution to anti-war poetry of the Vietnam War era. During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations. He celebrated the power of myth,Indianecstaticpoetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 1980s he publishedLoving a Woman in Two Worlds,The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns,andA Little Book on the Human Shadow.

Perhaps his most famous work isIron John: A Book About Men(1990). This became an international bestseller and has been translated into many languages; it is credited with inspiring theMythopoetic men's movementin the United States.

Bly frequently conducted workshops for men, together withJames Hillman,Michael J. Meade,and others, as well as workshops for men and women withMarion Woodman.He maintained a friendly correspondence withClarissa Pinkola Estés,author ofWomen Who Run with the Wolves.Bly wroteThe Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Femininewith Marion Woodman. He published a poetry anthology titledThe Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart(1992), with James Hillman and Michael Meade co-editing.

Great Mother Conference

In 1975, Bly organized aGreat Mother Conference.Throughout the nine-day event, poetry, music, and dance were practiced to examine human consciousness. The conference has been held annually; since 2003 inNobleboro, Maine.In the early years, one of its major themes was the goddess or "Great Mother",as she has been known throughout human history. Much of Bly's collectionSleepers Joining Hands(1973) is concerned with this theme. In the context of the Vietnam War, a focus on the divine feminine was seen as urgent and necessary. Since that time, the Conference has expanded its topics to consider a wide variety of poetic, mythological, and fairy tale traditions. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was much discussion among the conference community about the changes which contemporary men were going through, so "The New Father" was added to the Conference title.Bly stopped attending after 2010.

Awards and legacy

Bly was theUniversity of MinnesotaLibrary's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received theMcKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and theMaurice English Poetry Awardin 2002. He has published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from such languages asSwedish,Norwegian,German,Spanish,PersianandUrdu.His bookThe Night Abraham Called to the Starswas nominated for aMinnesota Book Award.He also edited the prestigiousBest American Poetry 1999(Scribners).

In 2006 theUniversity of Minnesotapurchased Bly's archive, which contained more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his "morning poems"; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such asJames Wright,Donald HallandJames Dickey.The archive is housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on theUniversity of Minnesotacampus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors.

In February 2008, Bly was named Minnesota's firstpoet laureate.In that year he also contributed a poem and an Afterword toFrom the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.In February 2013, he was awarded theRobert Frost Medal,a lifetime achievement recognition given by thePoetry Society of America.

Translation

Bly's willingness to collaborate with others is especially evident in his extensive translation work. Working with people knowledgeable about the poet's native language, Bly applies his craft as a poet to creating a non-literal, poetic translation. The poets that interest him most embody his idea of "Leaping Poetry", explained in 1972'sLeaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations Chosen by Robert Bly.The poets he chooses in the book as examples of this leaping poetry includedFederico García Lorca,Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke andTomas Tranströmer.He says:

My idea, then, is that a great work of art often has at its center a long floating leap, around which the work of art in ancient times used to gather itself like steel shavings around the magnet. But a work of art does not necessarily have at its center a single long floating leap. The work can have many leaps, perhaps shorter. The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem. A poet who is "leaping" makes a jump from an object soaked in unconscious psychic substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance. What is marvellous is to see this leaping return in poetry of this century.

News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousnessis a collection of poetry from around the world in 1995. In the introductory note Bly explains the book was requested by Sierra Club Books, and was to be poems relating to ecology. He begins the book with seven poems he calls "The Old Position", which are poems from the 18th century which "dismissed nature as defective because it lacks reason". The next part is the "Attack on the Old Position", followed by four more sections, and all non-English poets are translated by Bly.The Winged Energy of Delight, Selected Translations(2004) includes poets translated inLeaping Poetry,along with translations from Japanese, Spanish, Arabic and other world poets.

Bly's interest in Eastern ecstatic poetry flowered with the publication in 1971 ofThe Kabir Book, Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir.It was a compilation of poems previously published in a variety of journals, reviews, and magazines. In 1981, Yellow Moon Press publishedNight and Sleep,which contained translations of Rumi byColeman Barksand Robert Bly. Barks collaborated with John Moyne and his literal Persian translations.Bly worked with translations from thePersianoriginal byA.J. ArberryandReynold A. Nicholson.A book translatingMirabaifollowed in 2004, co-authored withJane Hirshfield,with an afterword by John Stratton Hawley. In 2001,The Night Abraham Called to the Starspublished Bly's celebration of theghazal,of which the cover flap says "Bly offers Western readers the opportunity to experience the thrilling leaps that the ghazal allows." In 2008,The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Doorgave us thirty poems by Hafez translated by Bly and noted Islamic scholarLeonard Lewisohn.

Thought and the Men's Movement

Much of Bly's prose writing focuses on what he saw as the particularly troubled situation in which many males find themselves today. He understood this to be a result of, among other things, the decline of traditional fathering which left young boys unguided through the stages of life leading to maturity. He claimed that in contrast with women who are better informed by their bodies (notably by the beginning and end of theirmenstrual cycle), men need to be actively guided out of boyhood and into manhood by their elders. Pre-modern cultures had elaborate myths, often enacted asrites of passage,as well as "men's societies" where older men would teach young boys about these gender-specific issues. As modern fathers have become increasingly absent, this knowledge is no longer being passed down the generations, resulting in what he referred to as a Sibling Society.The "Absence of the Father" is a recurrent theme in Bly's work and according to him, many of the phenomena of depression, juvenile delinquency and lack of leadership in business and politics are linked to it.

Bly therefore saw today's men as half-adults, trapped between boyhood and maturity, in a state where they find it hard to become responsible in their work as well as leaders in their communities. Eventually they might become weak or absent fathers themselves which will cause this behaviour to be passed down to their children. In his bookThe Sibling Society(1997), Bly argues that a society formed of such men is inherently problematic as it lacks creativity and a deep sense of empathy. The image of half-adults is further reinforced by popular culture which often portrays fathers as naive, overweight and almost always emotionally co-dependent. Historically this represents a recent shift from a traditional patriarchal model and Bly believes that women rushed to fill the gap that was formed through the variousyouth movements during the 1960s,enhancing men's emotional capacities and helping them to connect with women's age-old pain of repression. It has, however, also led to the creation of "soft males" who lack the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.

In Bly's view, a potential solution lay in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional myths and fairytales as well as works of poetry. He researched and collected myths that concern male maturity, often originating from theGrimms' Fairy Talesand published them in various books,Iron Johnbeing the best known example.In contrast to the continual pursuit of higher achievements that is constantly taught to young men today, the theme ofspiritual descent(often being referred to by its Greek termκατάβασις), which is to be found in many of these myths, is presented as a necessary step for coming in contact with the deeper aspects of the masculine self and achieving its full potential. This is often presented as hero, often during the middle of his quest, going underground to pass a period of solitude and sorrow in semi-bestial mode. Bly noticed that a cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a man's life, in the absence of which, many men today go into a depression and alcoholism as they subconsciously try to emulate this innate ritual.

Bly was influenced by the Swiss psychiatristCarl Jung,who developed the theory ofarchetypes,the discrete structures of thePsychewhich emerge as images in dreams, myths, and art. The Powerful King, the Evil Witch and the Beautiful Maiden are, according to Jung, some of the imprints of thecollective unconsciousand Bly wrote extensively about their meaning and relations to modern life. As an example and in accordance with Jung, he considered the Witch to be that part of the male psyche upon which the negative and destructive side of a woman is imprinted and which first developed during infancy to store the imperfections of one's own mother. As a consequence, the Witch's symbols are essentially inverted motherly symbols, where the loving act of cooking is transformed into the brewing of evil potions and knitting clothes takes the form of spider's web. The feeding process is also reversed, with the child now in danger of being eaten to feed the body of the Witch rather than being fed by the mother's own body. In that respect, the Witch is a mark ofarrested developmenton the part of the man as it guards against feminine realities that his psyche is not yet able to incorporate fully. Fairy tales according to this interpretation mostly describe internal battles played out externally, where the hero saves his future bride by killing a witch, as in "The Drummer" (Grimms tale 193). This particular concept is expanded in Bly's 1989 talk "The Human Shadow" and the book it presented.

Criticism

In an early essay,New FormalistandNew NarrativepoetDana Gioiaexamined the poetry career of Robert Bly, whom Gioia called "one of the most famous and most influential poets writing in America."While Gioia praised some of Bly's poetryattacking U.S. involvementin theVietnam War,he argued that Bly's success had more to do with self promotion than with literary talent. Gioia further called Bly's free verse translations of the work of formal poets "insensitive to both the sound and nuance of the originals", and accused Bly, by encouraging "this minimal kind of translation", of having "done immense damage toAmerican poetry."In conclusion, Gioia wrote," Bly insists on being judged as a major poet, but his verse cannot bear the weight of that demand. "

Works

Poetry collections

• Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life(White Pine Press, 2015)
• Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems, 1950–2013(W. W. Norton & Company, 2013)
• Talking into the Ear of a Donkey: Poems(W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)
• Reaching Out to the World: New & Selected Prose Poems(White Pine Press,2009)
• Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages(Eastern Washington University, 2007)
• The Urge to Travel Long Distances(Eastern Washington University Press, 2005)
• My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy(HarperCollins, 2005)
• Surprised by Evening(RealNewMusic, 2005)!
• The Night Abraham Called to the Stars(HarperCollins, 2001)
• Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems(1999)
• Snowbanks North of the House(1999)
• Morning Poems(1997)
• Meditations on the Insatiable Soul(1994)
• What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems(1992)
• Loving a Woman in Two Worlds(1985)
• Selected Poems(1986)
• Mirabai Versions(1984)
• The Man in the Black Coat Turns(1981)
• This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years(1979)
• This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood(1977)
• Old Man Rubbing His Eyes(1974)
• Jumping Out of Bed(1973)
• Sleepers Joining Hands(1973)
• The Light Around the Body(1967) —National Book Award
• The Lion's Tail and Eyes(1962)
• Silence in the Snowy Fields(1962)

Translations

• The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez(HarperCollins,2008), with Leonard Lewisohn
• The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge(Copper Canyon Press,2008), with Robert Hedin
• Peer Gynt(2008) — verse play byHenrik Ibsen
• Kabir: Ecstatic Poems(Beacon Press,2004)
• Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems,translators Bly and Jane Hirshfield (Beacon Press, 2004)
• The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations(HarperCollins, 2004)
• The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer(Graywolf Press,2001)
• The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib,with Sunil Dutta (1999)
• Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems(Beacon Press, 1997)
• Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly & Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge(1990)
• Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity: Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge(1987)
• Machado's Times Alone: Selected Poems(1983)
• Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke: A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly(1981)
• The Kabir Book(1977)
• Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets: Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer(1975)
• Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems(1971)
• Hunger(1967) — novel by Knut Hamsun

Anthologies (as editor)

• The Best American Poetry(1999)
• The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures,Ecco Press(1995)
• The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford(1993)
• The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for MenCo-edited with James Hillman and Michael Meade (1992)
• News of the Universe(1980)
• Leaping Poetry(1975)
• A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War(1967)
• The Sea and the Honeycomb(1966)

Nonfiction books

• More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales(Henry Holt & Co, 2018)
• Remembering James Wright(2005)
• The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine,Bly and Marion Woodman (Henry Holt & Co,1998)
• The Sibling Society(Addison-Wesley,1996)
• The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul(1994)
• American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity(1991)
• Iron John: A Book About Men(1990)
• A Little Book on the Human Shadow,Bly and William Booth (1988)
• Eight Stages of Translation(1983)
• Talking All Morning:

See also

• Religion and mythology
• Joseph Campbell
• Mythopoetic Men's Movement
• Deep image

External links

Official website

• Profile and poems of BlyatPoetry Foundation
• Robert Bly profileatAcademy of American Poets
• 2015 Documentary Film Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy
• Robert Blydiscography atDiscogs

Interviews

• Francis Quinn (Spring 2000)."Robert Bly, The Art of Poetry No. 79".Paris Review.Spring 2000 (154).
• Bill Moyers talks with Poet Robert BlyArchivedJune 10, 2011, at theWayback Machine(Transcript) atPBS
• MenWeb – Men's Issues Interview with Robert Bly
• Interview with Robert Bly,Northern Lights Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #64 (1989)
• Interview with Robert Bly(Part One), Northern Lights Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #483 (2002)
• Interview with Robert Bly(Part Two), Northern Lights Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #484 (2002)

Works

• "Robert Bly reads 'Loon's Cry'"for the WGBH series, New Television Workshop
• Robert BlyArchivedJanuary 30, 2013, atarchive.todayatThe New Yorker
• Modern American PoetryArchivedMay 21, 2019, at theWayback Machinecritical essays on Bly's works. University of Illinois
• The Human Shadowand other essays, articles and interviews by Robert Bly. Audio.
• Robert BlyatLibrary of CongressAuthorities — with 147 catalog records