Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Poems.
Prose.
Time Line.
Books.
Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (1999)
A collection of 11 sections:
- Early Poems (1950-55)
- Silence in the Snowy Fields (1958-78)
- The Light Around the Body (1957-70)
- The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (1970-72)
- The Point Reyes Poems (1965-84)
- Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1973-81)
- This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1973-80)
- The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1980-84)
- Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1990-94)
- Morning Poems (1993-97)
- New Poems (1997-98)
Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (1972)
A small anthology of translated poetry interleaved by the author's essays.
The leaping poem ... gives off a constantly flashing light as it shifts
from light psyche to dark psyche, resembling the flashing lights of flying saucers.
... I am not saying that it is the only good kind of poetry. Far from it.
I like the poetry of steady light very much. Shakespeare's poets are often poetry of steady light,
as are some Wordsworth poems, and the poems of Robert Francis.
[p.46-47]
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Translated poets:
- Blas de Otero.
- Cesar Vallejo.
- Chu Yuan.
- Frederico Garcia Lorca.
- Gunnar Ekelöf.
- Pablo Neruda.
- Rainer Maria Rilke.
- Shinkichi Takahashi.
- Thomas Tranströmer.
Poems by Bly and a dozen "Home Grown" poets conclude the book.
My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005)
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My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy.
A collection of 48 poems, each of six 3-line stanzas.
Bly calls the form a
ghazal, and it is his second collection
of poems in this form.
In true Bly fashion, he does often (in about 17 poems or over a third)
include his name in the final stanza of each poem,
which is one of the signatures (as it were) of a ghazal.
Often he includes someone else's name instead!
However he uses the end-of-line phrase repetition of the traditional ghazal in fewer than
10% of these poems.
While each stanza does work independently (as in the ghazal)
that independence is also true of the
rengay,
which is also a 6-stanza form!
Blog entry.
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This Tree Will be Here for a Thousand Years (1979)
A very physical sixth collection. The poet walks at dawn. He fishes in the night.
He bends to touch things and pick them up.
Favorite poems include:
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"Out Picking Up Corn".
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"Black Pony Eating Grass" with its opening deep metaphor:
Near me a black and shaggy pony is eating grass,
that crunching is night being ripped away from days,
a crystal's sound when it regains its twelve sides.
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- "Fishing on a Lake at Night"
a song of praise to the quietness of lamplight and moonlight.
- "Women We Never See Again" with its piled-up metaphors.
- "Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning", a marvelous prose poem.
- "Amazed by an Accumulation of Snow"
where he leaps from one image to another, many immensely removed from snow:
It is a shock that snow fell over the whole farm
while the singer remained private and alone in his house.
It is as if the African heron carved of buffalo horn
suddenly would open his mounth and call,
or a bell from under glass would lift and ring.
The horse's hoof kicks up a seashell, and the farmer
finds an Indian stone with a hole all the way through.
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Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (2004)
A collection of 22 poets, which Bly sequences in the order that he came to love their work:
- Thomas Tranströmer (1931-?) b. Stockholm, Sweden.
- Mirabi (the only woman in the collection) (1498-1546) Rajasthan, India.
- Kabir (1398?-1527?) b. India
- Antonio Machado (1875-1939) b. Seville, Spain.
- Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) b. Andalusia.
- Francis Ponge (1899-1988) b. Montpellier, France.
- Pablo Neruda (1904-?) b. Chile.
- Georg Trakl (1887-1914) b. Salzburg.
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) b. Prague.
- Basho (1644-94) b. Ueno, Japan.
- Rolf Jacobsen (1907-94) b. Oslo, Norway.
- Gunnar Elkelöf (1907-68) b. Stockholm, Sweden.
- Issa (1763-1827) b. Japan.
- Frederico García Lorca (1898-1936) b. Andalusia.
- Olav H. Hauge (1908-?) b. Ulvik, Norway.
- Harry Martinson (1904-78) b. Sweden.
- César Vallejo (1892-1938) b. Santiago de Chuco, Peru.
- Miguel Hernandez (1910-42) b. Alicante Province, Spain.
- Rumi (1204-72) b. Balkh (now in Afghanistan).
- Horace (65-8 BCE) b. Apulia, Italy.
- Galib (1797-1869) b. Agra, India.
- Hafez (1320-89) b. Shiraz, s.w. of Tehran.
A Little Book on the Human Shadow (1988)
Five essays explore Bly's interpretation of the Jungian shadow and its value in our lives:
- Problems in the Ark
- The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us
- Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow.
- Honoring the Shadow: An Interview with William Booth.
- Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll.
Iron John (1990)
Bly's version of an old "Wild Man" folktale about a boy and his guide
through initiation toward manhood.
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1990)
Essays and interviews and strong opinions about other poets fill
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.
- 1926.
- Born December 23 in Madison, Minnesota to parents of Norwegian heritage.
- 1944.
- Enlisted in Navy for two years.
- 1946.
- At St. Olaf College in Minnesota.
- 1947.
- Transferred to Harvard University. His fellow undergraduate writers
included John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Kenneth Koch, George Plimpton, and Adrienne Rich.
- 1950.
- Graduated from Harvard.
- 1954.
- Began two years at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. His fellow student writers
included Donald Justice and W.D. Snodgrass.
- 1956.
- Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway in order to translate Norwegian poetry into English.
-
- Started The Fifties, a literary magazine, followed by
The Sixties,
and
The Seventies.
- 1966.
- Co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. Began to lead much
of the opposition among writers to the Vietnam War.
- 1967.
- Poems: The Light Around the Body; won National Book Award
- Edited anthology A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War.
- 1971.
- Translation (with James Wright and John Knoepfle):
Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems.
- 1975.
- Translation: Friends, You Drank Some Darkness:
Three Swedish Poets [Martinson, Ekeloef, and Tranströmer].
- Edited
Leaping Poetry:.
a small anthology of translated poetry interleaved by the author's essays.
- Poems in a chapbook, Old Man Rubbing His Eyes;
later printed in 1979 as the first section of
This Tree Will be Here for a Thousand Years.
- 1977.
- Poems: This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.
- Translation: The Kabir Book: 44 of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir.
- 1979.
- Poems:
This Tree Will be Here for a Thousand Years.
Includes many poems for Bly's 1975 chapbook, Old Man Rubbing His Eyes.
[Republished with extensive revisions in 1992, indicating that the Tree changes with time.]
- 1980.
- Edited News of the Universe,
an anthology of poetry from around the world and through the ages.
- Non-fiction: Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews.
- 1983.
- Translation: Machado's Times Alone: Selected Poems.
- 1984.
- Translation: Mirabai: Six Versions.
- 1987.
- Poems: Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.
- Translation: Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity:
Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge.
- 1988.
- Prose:
A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
- 1990.
- Non-fiction: Iron John: A Book about Men.
- Essays:
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.
- 1992.
- Poems: What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? (Collected Prose Poems).
- Edited: The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men,
an anthology of poetry.
- 1994.
- Non-fiction: The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul.
- 1995.
- Edited: The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures,
an anthology of poetry
- 1996.
- Non-fiction: The Sibling Society.
- 1999.
- Poems: Snowbanks North of the House.
Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected.
- Edited: Best American Poetry 1999.
- 2001.
- Poems: The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.
- 2004.
- Translations:
Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations.
- 2005.
- Poems: My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy.
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Links and Books.
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[Thanks for visiting.]
