No.54 - March 2022
Bio Note: When I was a young poet the elder poets I most adored tended to be my parents’ age, that is to say, born in the 1920s or 30s. The survivors among these beloved elders, now in their eighties or nineties, have naturally been dying at a great rate in recent years. For my next three Poetic License columns I decided to pay homage to one of them. Robert Bly, who passed away last November, was one of my own earliest influences. As always, more detail on me and my doings is available on my website: www.davidgrahampoet.com
Robert Bly’s passing in November of 2021 naturally prompted me to pull his books off the shelf for a nostalgic tour. That’s always a bittersweet pleasure, savoring favorite poems and pondering the legacy of another poet who will write no more. Moreover, for me Bly was not just a notable poet but one of my earliest, most formative influences. I fell in love with his work half a century ago, when I happened upon The Light Around the Body and Silence in the Snowy Fields in the Poetry Room at my college.
Nostalgic sidebar: whoever dreamed up the Poetry Room deserves my eternal gratitude. In addition to a nice little collection of books and journals, the Poetry Room was the site of occasional readings as well as “Thursday Poets,” an informal, instructorless weekly workshop open to anyone on campus. I probably learned as much about poetry in those sessions as I did in my classes. The room was also tucked away in a quiet corner of a busy campus: perfect place for an aspiring poet to read, write, and dream.
Back to Bly. By the time I arrived as a freshman in 1971, Bly was already in his mid-forties and hardly unknown. He’d won the National Book Award in 1967 for The Light Around the Body, for one thing. But he was not on any curriculum that I knew of, and failed to appear in many of the usual anthologies. You weren’t likely to find his poetry in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Stumbling upon his work at my small, academically conservative college in rural New England felt like a personal discovery—a secret pleasure, and therefore a delicious one.
I’ve never stopped reading him. And as it happens, I had the chance to spend a chunk of time with Bly back in the late Seventies (about which more in Part 2 of this series of columns, forthcoming in May); and in 2015 I sat in a packed Minneapolis auditorium for one of his last public readings, when even Alzheimer’s did not prevent him from giving a moving if subdued performance. Poetically, I can still feel his influence, too. One of my favorite poems in The Honey of Earth, my most recent collection, is built around a line in what turned out to be Bly’s final book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, from 2011. My title is “Most of the Time, We Live Through the Night,” a line lifted from Bly’s quirky paean to old age, “The Sympathies of the Long Married.”
This will be a personal reminiscence and reflection, then, more than a deep dive into his poetry or a systematic survey. (I do hope to dive deep into a single poem in a later column, Part 3 of this series.) There are few other poets whose careers I have tracked so faithfully for so long. All his major poetry collections sit on my shelves, along with a goodly number of his numerous chapbooks and other rarities, not to mention anthologies, essay collections, and translations. If you called me a fan you would not be wrong. But that doesn’t mean I have loved everything he wrote, or that my affection for his work didn’t have its ups and downs, as I’ll get to. To steal a phrase from Frost, I like to think that I have had a long “lover’s quarrel” with Bly, both personality and poet. This series of columns will be my effort to sort through some of my feelings about his potent impact.
I’m not alone in experiencing a sometimes rocky relationship to him or his work. From the start Bly was a polarizing figure in contemporary American poetry. Quite deliberately, from all appearances. For one thing, there was his role as editor (along with his friend William Duffy) of the homespun but globally aimed journal The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies). In this position he did his best to slay sacred cows, puncture pretense, and in general upset the apple cart of contemporary poetry, especially the academic variety. They regularly mocked prestigious poets of the day. For instance, the Spring 1962 issue of The Sixties features a section of parodies, including one sending up the then-trendy “My Guggenheim to Italy” poem. Its author is listed as “I. M. Baroque,” and a note explains that “definitive work in the field” of the My Guggenheim poem “has been done by Jean Garrigue, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht.” Ouch.
A copy of The Seventies in my collection features on its back cover something called “The Wisdom of the Old,” which simply transcribes some fatuous dialogue between James Dickey and Carolyn Kizer. I believe “Wisdom of the Old” was a regular feature. I never submitted, but their rejection slips were famously snotty as well as funny. Ted Kooser reported that after he submitted an early poem, Bly’s note simply read, “You’re making this up.” I gather that was one of the tamer rejections. Later in life, Bly often bragged about the vicious ones Bill Duffy would come up with, such as “these poems remind me of dentures,” or “these poems are a bit like a salad that’s been in the fridge for too long.”
In his provocative 1963 essay, “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” Bly likewise went after some of the biggest names at the time, calling the language in Howard Nemerov’s and Randall Jarrell’s poetry “inexpressibly dull,” for instance, and commenting on Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” that her “. . . lines become inflexible. The poem becomes heavy and stolid, like a toad that has eaten ball bearings.” About Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, that pathbreaking work by perhaps the most highly revered poet of the period, Bly complained that it illustrated how poetry can surrender its inner soul and turn into mere “sociology.” Naturally, such brash attitudes did not endear him to the established gatekeepers of poetry. In the minds of many poets and editors he was seen as an immature, self-promoting huckster.
I picked up on all this early on, and not simply because his work mostly went unmentioned by my college professors or taught in class. One time, while taking a poetry workshop, I was invited to have breakfast with a visiting poet, which was a nice gesture by my professor. I won’t name him, but this visitor was a younger poet of rising reputation in establishment circles, the sort of urbane, witty formalist who might appear in the New Yorker or The Hudson Review in that era. In other words, exactly the kind of academic poet that Bly liked to make fun of.
Turns out the feeling was mutual. Attempting to make conversation with his introverted breakfast companion, this fellow dutifully asked me to name some of my favorite contemporary poets. Bly was first on my list, followed, as I recall, by Denise Levertov, James Wright, and Galway Kinnell, or maybe it was Gary Snyder. (I still love all these poets.) We never got to Levertov et al. At the mention of Bly’s name, the visitor launched an archly sarcastic riff lampooning Bly. It was over the top, rather like one of Bly’s own satiric jabs in The Sixties, I now realize. I suppose this response was intended to set me straight; but of course it had the opposite effect. I thought the man was an idiot. These days I wouldn’t go so far. He was, to put it more charitably, a bit narrow in his taste. (And yes, he was personally an ass: I’ve never been able to abide teachers who mock and put down student writers, which was exactly what he was doing, given the question he’d asked me.)
My professor at the time was Richard Eberhart, a renowned elder poet of high reputation, but he did not attend that breakfast. And he turned out to be kinder, though not much more positive, when for class he asked each of us to bring in for discussion a poem we admired. Naturally I selected one by Bly. I don’t now remember which one, but probably something from Silence in the Snowy Fields. I didn’t get to say much about it, because Eberhart interrupted to deliver what seemed meant as a generous capsule assessment of Bly’s work, but which even at that age I recognized was actually a dismissal. It was that staple of academic rhetoric, damnation with faint praise. He made it clear he saw Bly as a rather minor figure, admittedly with some talent for quiet, unambitious poems about hayfields and horse manure. As he went on I wondered if it were possible he’d never read beyond Bly’s first book. For even a glance at Bly’s fiery and surreal The Light Around the Body, Bly’s second collection, would belie his summary. Likewise “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” which had appeared in 1971 from City Lights (later included in Sleepers Joining Hands). I don’t know; maybe he just found the newer work baffling or annoying. Perhaps he hadn’t read it. Looking back, I puzzle a little over his reaction: after all, Eberhart was one of the first establishment poets who took Allen Ginsberg and the Beats seriously; so why not the upstart gadfly Bly? And though Eberhart was a formalist in technique, he was in his way a wild-eyed Romantic, which is why I assume he recognized Ginsberg’s Blakean genius. Ah, well, maybe Robert had parodied him. . . .
In any event, I learned early on how “triggering,” as we say today, the very name of Bly could be to mainstream poets. And in the decades since, I’m not sure that’s changed as much as one would hope. For one notable example, there is Dana Gioia’s suavely condescending essay from 1987, whose title perhaps tells you all you need to know: “The Successful Career of Robert Bly.” In it he essentially writes a more nuanced version of Eberhart’s summary, while his real focus is on Bly as a self-promoting careerist. Meanwhile, the language-centered poets were allergic to Bly’s unabashed romanticism and aesthetic of sincerity, while the academic formalists looked askance at his frequent bashing of their aesthetic. And, I would add, coastal snobbery about writers from “flyover country” has always been a factor in the formation of national reputations.
To be sure, Bly’s in all the anthologies today, and has a large and devoted audience. Countless critical articles and books have been devoted to his work, films have been made about him, and of course Iron John and the men’s movement gained him a measure of fame beyond what poets usually can hope for. Yet in my experience it’s still not uncommon to find his name sparking dismissive reactions among poets of many different aesthetics. For example, Bly’s obituary in Britain’s The Guardian essentially dismissed most of his poetry after Silence in the Snowy Fields by confidently asserting that “his early poetry in the 60s was his best” and that he “may be remembered” not primarily for his poetry but for “other facets of his work.” I suppose that such opinions are only fair payback for all the times Bly castigated contemporary British poetry as stiff and sterile.
Admittedly, Bly often did deserve a little pushback. (At times he seems to have relished it.) As noted, particularly in his early career, he went out of his way to ridicule poets and poetry he found unworthy. He named names and, as he did throughout his life, tended to indulge in broad, not entirely fair generalizations. Brash and cocky, with his own proclivity for sarcasm, he generally was allergic to the kind of polite, ironic, hair-splitting, and understated rhetoric that was seen as the norm in academic circles. And, of course, as Gioia detailed and I was to learn after graduating from college, he was able to draw and hold a large audience with his public performances. There are few things more disdained by academics than writers who become genuinely popular. But while the poetry of someone like Rod McKuen may have deserved disdain, Bly’s didn’t.
For despite his unabashed showmanship, despite his rudeness as editor, Bly was, and remained, an utterly serious, ambitious, provocative, protean, and influential poet, as well as an important translator and critic. Later in life, of course, he became a bestselling author with Iron John, which I confess I’ve never read. That book made him the punch line for many jokesters and journalists who seemed not to have read the book either. He also became a target, more seriously, for feminist critics who found aspects of his “men’s movement” deeply problematic. I have little to say about the latter, since as I say, I never read Iron John; nor did I ever participate in any of his conferences.
But, book after book, I did read the poems, translations, critical essays, and anthologies he produced. It’s a prodigious body of work. He opened many doors for me and for so many younger poets. His translations and promotion of so many European, South American, and Asian poets will be a lasting legacy. I owe him a great debt for turning me on to poets as diverse as Pablo Neruda, Georg Trakl, Rolf Jacobsen, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Cesar Vallejo, and Tomas Tranströmer. But apart from his other achievements, the best of his poetry, I am convinced, can stand beside anyone’s from that amazing generation of American poets born in the 1920s. That’s the decade that gave us, among many others: Robert Creeley, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, James Wright, Donald Hall, Carolyn Kizer, Donald Justice, Adrienne Rich, Gerald Stern, Maxine Kumin, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Philip Levine, Maya Angelou, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Richard Wilbur, and Richard Hugo. Just to list that sampling of names suggests how difficult it was for individual poets to stand out from such a crowd. Bly managed to stand out, remaining vital and often controversial as long as he lived, though dementia silenced him for his final dozen-plus years.
I mentioned at the start my “lover’s quarrel” with Bly and his work, and in Part 2 of this essay I’ll have a lot more to say about that. For this month, let me conclude with a brief scattering of quite personal thoughts about what “the best of his work” might consist of, at least in my own writing and reading life.
Rereading Silence in the Snowy Field recently, I decided it holds up rather well, not only as a collection of miscellaneous poems, but as a sort of sideways introduction to a tradition very different from the British and American literature that formed the core of my schooling. It was ideal for a young poet such as I was when I first encountered it, alongside somewhat similar work by Gary Snyder in Riprap and Kenneth Rexroth’s famous translations of classic Chinese poets. Bly wasn’t translating, of course, but he filtered his own rural and Midwestern experiences through something like the lens of that plainspoken poetry rooted in everyday experience.
The same year Silence appeared, Bly published, via his The Sixties Press, a fascinating book called The Lion’s Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence; it collected poems by Bill Duffy and James Wright, along with poems of Bly, including some that would reappear in Silence. Characteristically, Bly claimed he was doing something completely different from what Pound and the other Imagists did as they imitated Asian poetry during the heyday of modernism. He called their efforts “outward” poetry. Whereas he was interested, as always, in “inward” poetry. (See Bly’s introduction to The Lion’s Tail for his full explanation: much of his later career is encapsulated in this early statement.) To my eyes today, many of Bly’s poems, both in form and in their embrace of “laziness and silence,” definitely put me in mind of the poems of Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, or Po Chü-I, with their Buddhist/Taoist quietude and air of leisurely contemplation. With, of course, his own “inward,” often surreal twists.
Later in his life some casual readers tended to speak of his “snowy fields” poetry as an remnant of his early years, superseded by his other modes of surrealism, political poetry, and psychological explorations of myth, fairy tale, and gender. But in fact Bly never stopped writing poems of quiet attentiveness to ordinary life. To my mind, some of his better work appears in this mode in later books, such as Jumping Out of Bed in 1973, Old Man Rubbing His Eyes (1975), This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), and The Urge to Travel Long Distances (2005), plus The Loon (1977), Gratitude to Old Teachers (1993), and other chapbooks. For reasons I never understood, Bly downplayed this mode, though, in some of his collected works, and poems from several of the above books aren’t even included in his massive 2018 Collected Poems. But happily, White Pine Press collected a large number of them in their 2015 book, Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life, edited by Dennis Maloney.
As refreshing as the best of Bly’s snowy fields poems were and are, it has to be said that his first book also displays one of his main poetic limitations. As many critics have noted, in many poems his language can be a bit prosy, his syntax lacking in tension, his understated tone flat sometimes to the point of monotony. “Late at Night During a Visit of Friends,” a poem from The Lion’s Tail that he reprinted in Silence, is characteristic of this tendency. The third section of this four-part poem is spare to the point, one could say, of triviality, and composed in the flattest language and simplest diction imaginable. Here it is in its entirety:
It is very late. I am the only one awake. Men and women I love are sleeping nearby.It seems clear here that Bly has been heavily influenced by English translations of Chinese poetry (it is said one of his favorite books was Robert Payne’s anthology, The White Pony). But the critics were right on one point: the syntax and thought here are lacking in tension, nor do such lines offer much in the way of mouth-music, imagery, or even metaphor, usually one of his strengths. The linebreaks are all end-stopped, too, which deprives a reader of a lot of the rhythmic complexities possible in free verse.
Personally, I don’t dislike this style at all, and in fact often find it cleansing. It was especially refreshing to a young student who had been laboring hard in his classes to decipher convoluted Elizabethan syntax, symbolism in Yeats, and the metaphorical extravagance of poets like Dylan Thomas. But critics who called this mode of Bly’s a plain, flat style were right. To his credit, Bly was aware of this tendency in his work which many consider a weakness. He even published (in The Sixties) an apt parody by Henry Taylor titled “And Robert Bly Says Something, Too.” Taylor lampoons his early style well, including brief numbered stanzas, generic nature images, simple declarative sentences, end-stopped lines, flat tone, and of course the single exclamation point at the end:
I I wake to find myself lying in an open field. About my head the ends of grasses Wave softly in the wind. II I raise my head and turn on my side And see a horse’s tail swishing at flies. It is attached to the end of a horse. III In my way I love to consider things I love— Oh, often even in summer in this kind of field I think I should be covered up with snow!As some critics and obituary writers failed to note, however, Bly did recognize this limitation and later in his career devoted a lot of energy to addressing it. His later books show a lot more sparkle and variety in his language, and he developed a refreshed interest in form after spending many years stressing other elements of poetry. He invented his own form (called a “ramage”), an eight-line poem based on what he called “sound particles,” repeating vowel-consonant elements uniting an otherwise loose, associative series of images or statements. I find many of these ramages beautiful sonically as well as thematically. (Likewise with his adaptation of the ancient Persian ghazal form in his last few books.)
Here’s one of his ramages, published in 2007 in a chapbook, but not collected in his Collected:
The Old Stone on the Mountain Grief lies close to the roots of laughter. Both love the cabin open to the traveler, The ocean apple wrapped in its own leaves. How can I be close to you if I’m not sad? The animal pads where no one walks. There is a gladness in the not-caring Of the bear’s cabin; and in the gravity That makes the stone laugh down the mountain.Thematically, that’s recognizably Bly. But all you have to do is read it aloud, and you’ll hear how different it is from most of Bly’s poems in his snowy fields mode. He’s loading his lines with assonance, consonance, alliteration, and even rhyme, both slant and full (laughter/traveler; sad/pads). Curiously, like Whitman, Bly is still relying heavily on end-stopped lines, seeing what music he can wring from his “sound particles” without the rhythmic complexities of enjambment.
So any full accounting of Bly’s career needs to take into account the many modes he wrote in over time, his frequent experimentation. For instance, I haven’t even mentioned his deep devotion to the prose poem form, or one of my favorite books, Morning Poems (1997) in which he was inspired by William Stafford to compose a spontaneous poem every morning on any subject that occurred to him. That book contains some of his most interesting, and personal poems, and often challenges the image that casual readers have of Bly’s style and themes. Since this is Robert Bly’s mind we are peering into, the subjects are widely varied. Along with more expected Bly themes, there are poems on viewing an eclipse, clothespins, the face of a passing stranger, a dog’s ears, Wallace Stevens, a family photograph, Hawthorne, and even re-reading his own early poems. He thinks about Mozart, buttocks, mice, Pasternak, and “What Bill Stafford Was Like.” Ever alert to the common complaints about his flashy live performances, he also includes a self-critical poem titled “Wanting More Applause at a Conference.”
In short, it is no longer feasible, if it ever was, to summarize Bly’s work in a nutshell. Whether you loved or hated him, he was vast, and contained multitudes, over a career stretching from the 1950s well into the current century. He’s like the snake in Dickinson’s “A narrow fellow in the grass,” a poem I’ll bet Bly loved. Every time you try to pin him down, he “wrinkle[s], and [is] gone.”
In my next column I’d like to tell the story of how I met Robert Bly, and how that changed my image of him, as well as how my relationship with his work has evolved over the years. Stay tuned.
© 2022 David Graham
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