Going Against The Dragon

An Interview With Robert Bly

Some poets call from on high. Too high for most of us: the thin air of mind leaves us dizzy — what are they saying?

Robert Bly takes us down to the valley, and gets down with us in the dirt, and shows us this is where it starts —here in flesh, here in grief, here in memories we deny. His arms wave like big branches, as he tells us to face the dark in ourselves. His language runs like water over the dry bed, whether he’s talking about what it means to be a man or a woman, or acknowledging the pain of childhood, or warning against the siren call of Eastern mysticism. Full of eloquence and extraordinary energy, Bly is one of the most respected and widely read poets of the age, as fully human as anyone I’ve met.

Born fifty-seven years ago in Minnesota — not far from where he still lives with his wife and three children (three older children are in college) — Bly has written nine books of poems, including The Light Around The Body, which won the National Book Award, and is the author of eleven translations. His magazine, The Sixties, brought into English the work of many previously unknown writers from other countries.

I interviewed Bly last February, when he was in Chapel Hill to give a poetry reading at the University of North Carolina. The reading was rousing, Bly’s voice an instrument he has fully mastered, ranging through subtleties of volume and pitch from roar to whisper. His poetry readings are works of art. He threads together the arrangement of poems, the jokes, the asides, the curiously light movements of his big body, the seeming lack of self-consciousness, as he reaches out with his poems, known by heart, to touch other hearts.

We talked the next morning. He asked for the chance to revise and expand his answers. I’m glad he did, although he ended up omitting some of the spontaneity, such as him scolding me for asking him how peaceful he was, saying that was a “Barbara Walters question.” Other times, too, he drew the line around “the private.” I was disappointed at first, then I thought of him shuffling around his writing shack in Minnesota, alone for days on end, giving away, with each line, what is most private.

Safransky: In one of the poems you read last night, you talk about longing for “the cheerful noises to end.” You said, “When I’m too public, I’m a wind chime ringing to cheer up the black angel.” What do you do to get away from other people’s noises and your own?

Bly: Well, I can’t get away from them when I’m giving poetry readings, but when I’m home I spend time by myself. Every once in a while a short time completely alone . . . three or four days in a woods cabin I have.

Safransky: Do you do any meditation?

Bly: Yes, I’ve done meditation for ten or twelve years.

Safransky: What do you do?

Bly: That’s something that belongs in the private (laughs).

Safransky: You talked last night about the difference between doing and talking. What do you do besides write? What are your days made of?

Bly: I consider writing to be an intense form of doing, especially when one is writing on a blank page. I usually spend six or seven hours a day at my desk, in the morning and early afternoon, and that concentration includes an hour working with a new stringed instrument I have, a kind of old European lute, called in Greek a bouzouki. I’ll sometimes compose to that. I want to learn music. For the past few years I’ve been struggling with the help of music to find out how to measure time in language.

I have three boys still in school, and when they come home about four, we may do some physical labor together, or, occasionally, hunt. Matthew, who is a sophomore, and I have been remodelling the sauna this month; after school we’ll work on that an hour or two. I believe a lot in what Scott and Helen Nearing say about everyone doing two hours of physical work a day, just to thank the planet for being on it. It’s a good idea, though often we’re too lazy to carry it through.

Safransky: Do you watch television?

Bly: An hour a week. Television is the most disgusting form of not doing that we have. How can we have art if entertainment is everywhere?

Safransky: How long have you been married?

Bly: I married in 1955, and that ended in 1980. Then, two years ago, I married once more.

Safransky: How much at peace are you?

Bly: That’s a new age phrase, at peace. What does it mean? I’m not sure it should be thought of as a goal. If I were at peace, I wouldn’t be in this room.

Safransky: Last night, you referred to Jack Kerouac as a wonderful writer and an idiot. Why was he an idiot? What was idiotic — and what wasn’t — about the beats and the hippies?

Bly: What was very strong was their desire and knowledge of how to escape from the conventional opinions and the collective stiffness that dominated the Fifties. Ginsberg and Kerouac and Kenneth Rexroth before them — they were all children of Rexroth — understood that by going into the more spontaneous parts of the personality, parts that Blake, Wilheim Reich and Jung had already described, a certain freshness would come, a certain joy would come, feeling would return. That happened, but looking back one would say that the error of ignorance lay in falsifying the nature of Dionysus.

The ancient Greeks portrayed Dionysus as a being with his head slightly turned to the side and down, a lot of grief in the face, and a thin line of silence all the way down his body. When one centered “person” is present, others, they found, can be spontaneous without damaging themselves. But in America we often use Dionysus without his permission as a saintly cover for our childish, chaotic and destructive behavior. Kerouac participated in that deception.

Moreover, a compulsive cheerfulness accompanied the whole movement. When I went to Russia this last year, I experienced each day the perception that the door to feeling is grief. Russia accepts grief and is still grieving over the Second World War. The lack of grief in the whole American Sixties movement may be one reason why it petered out. It’s as if grief is an adult emotion, and limitless good cheer and longing for chaos are childish emotions.

I don’t believe people have thought enough about what it means that Kerouac lived so long in his mother’s house. Long after On The Road, a writer went to see him and said, “Let’s have a drink.” He said, “Well, my mother doesn’t like to have beer in the house.” So they had to go out in the garage and drink. What I’m implying is that below the pose of independence many of the cultural radicals were mama’s boys. Some sort of failure in male initiation was going on.

I have the sense that the writers in this movement did not answer the question: what is true masculine behavior? Is leaving people and rushing about the country masculine? Is drug-taking masculine? The result of the confusion the movement had about this matter is that many men left over from the Sixties are being dominated now by women. How often one meets a spontaneous new age man living with a fierce angry woman, whom he can’t stand up to.

There’s a longing in the culture now for that imbalance to end. I don’t know if it will happen. Does that answer your question?

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE