Robert Bly, the poet and translator, was in Chapel Hill last March to give a poetry reading. Bly’s enormous energy, his eloquence and warmth, made it a special evening. Bly has kindly given us permission to print some of his remarks (selected by Bly from a transcript) and several of his poems. Also, some translations he’s done of Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet (Bly ended the reading by singing some of Kabir’s poems, accompanying himself on the dulcimer).
Jeffery Beame offers an appreciation of the poet and Betsy Campbell Blackwell writes about the reading. Judy Hogan offers her ideas on “What Is a Poet?”
When I got out of college, I decided against going to graduate school. I already knew enough literary references. I was also shallow enough. There’s a difference between talking all the time, happily, and trying to live. There’s a difference. Living was beyond me. But being alone was possible. So I went and lived alone in a little room in New York for about three years. That was wonderful for me. I had nowhere to go. I had no money. The only thing I could do was to be alone.
When I was in college I was taught that primarily, poetry was made of John Donne and a few other people. John Donne is all right. But he doesn’t fit with a farm life from Minnesota. Neither does Milton. Milton in fact is insane. I read his book the other day. I said, “I’m going to try to read Paradise Lost.” So I tried for about a half hour every day and my wife said, “I don’t think you’ll make it.” But I tried it. And what he does with the English language is exactly what the English did with the Indians. English was not good enough for him. He wanted Latin. That attitude is the opposite of Whitman’s and of what William Carlos Williams said. They said, “Stop being arrogant towards language.” If you’re an American stop writing like an Englishman. That will be a help. Your own language is good enough for you. And it’s very gentle and it’s very soft and it moves.
Every poet, when he grows up in this country, has to face that issue. Is he going to go with the English or is he going to go against them? It takes a long time to fight that out. I, myself, was with the English three or four years after I got out of college. I was writing sonnets. I didn’t think Whitman was right. I thought Henry James was right. I’d just taken too many English courses. That was my problem. Besides, we always respect the colonizing country. We’re colonized by England the same way South Africa is.
Poem Against The British
I The wind through the box-elder trees Is like rides at dusk on a white horse, Wars for your country, and fighting the British. II I wonder if Washington listened to the trees. All morning I have been sitting in grass. Higher than my eyes, beneath trees, And listening upward, to the wind in leaves. Suddenly I realize there is one thing more: There is also the wind through the high grass. III There are palaces, boats, silence among white buildings, Iced drinks on marble tops, among cool rooms; It is good also to be poor, and listen to the wind.
The moment when you are amazed is the moment when you write a poem. The Chinese say, “Don’t wait til you get home,” because you no longer have it once you get home. You pick up a piece of paper and write it right then. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and you throw it over the side.
I’d been living in New York for two or three years and I wasn’t writing much poetry; what I wrote was no good. I decided I would probably never publish a book.
On The Ferry Across Chesapeake Bay
On the orchard of the sea, far out are whitecaps, Water that answers questions no one has asked, Silent speakers of the grave’s rejoinders; Having accomplished nothing, I am travelling somewhere else; O deep green sea, it is not for you This smoking body ploughs toward death; It is not for the strange blossoms of the sea I drag my thin legs across the Chesapeake Bay; Though perhaps by your motions the body heals; For though on its road the body cannot march With golden trumpets — it must march — And the sea gives up its answer as it falls into itself.
Sometimes, maybe not until you’re 27, 28, or 29, when all at once you realize the point of the whole thing is not to be successful, you fall into yourself.
Well, one also discovers the more you try to let yourself fall into yourself, you find it’s as if there is inside of you a being who already knows what is going to happen to you. He knows a lot of other things. Whether it’s a he or a she, I don’t know. It’s a migratory thing . . .
. . . I’d been working on some poems and I came into the house and I went upstairs to a room that had a big window and I looked and suddenly the whole room was full of moonlight. I was amazed. A room full of moonlight is amazing if you’re not prepared for it . . .
. . . The one inside you who knows a lot about you doesn’t have any way of communicating to you, so if you agree to do art, poetry, or painting, (it) often finds a way to do that. I received a message one day that I was blind.
Snowfall In The Afternoon
I The grass is half-covered with snow. It was the sort of snowfall that starts in late afternoon, And now the little houses of the grass are growing dark. II If I reached my hands down, near the earth, I could take handfuls of darkness! A darkness was always there, which we never noticed. III As the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away, And the barn moves nearer to the house. The barn moves all alone in the growing storm. IV The barn is full of corn, and moving towards us now, Like a hulk blown toward us in a storm at sea; All the sailors on deck have been blind for many years.
Along about ’62, ’63, you could feel the darkness in the country increasing. Growing deeper, stronger. That’s the force of unconsciousness, when the country doesn’t know what it is doing . . .
We’re probably eating 85% of our people now. To keep the thing going. Do you think those people in Detroit making cars, do you think they have a life? They are sacrificed like the Incas. Course they got hobbies in the basement, right?
Those Being Eaten By America
The cry of those being eaten by America, Others pale and soft being stored for later eating And Jefferson Who saw hope in new oats The wild houses go on With long hair growing from between their toes The feet at night get up And run down the long white roads by themselves The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert Ministers who dive headfirst into the earth The pale flesh Spreading guiltily into new literatures That is why these poems are so sad The long dead running over the fields The mass sinking down The light in children’s faces fading at six or seven The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved
. . . We’re in a situation now like the Roman Empire. End of the Roman Empire. . . . Pornography. Violence on the television is very like their stuff in the amphitheaters. One of the things they did in Rome was, what they liked to do was to get the Christians, the men and women out there and then they liked to have them make love and then be killed instantly by a lion or by a gladiator and the result was that you got such a disgust for sexual energy, that you didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That’s why the early monks said, “Let’s just forget it. Let’s just try to be friends with each other.” Well, we’re doing the same thing now, with the violence on television. The average American child fourteen years old has now seen 10,000 murders on television. And pornography. That’s meant to make you so disgusted with sexual energy that you’ll stay out of it completely, and just watch television for the rest of your life . . .
You don’t have to sink down if you don’t want to, if you don’t want to sink down with the mass of the United States, you don’t have to sink the way it’s sinking, you don’t have to. But if you don’t want to do that, you have to live your own life separately. Do you understand what I mean? You have to find people like Jung, he helped me a lot, someone you find privately, and you read him, and you don’t hate the United States, you don’t do that . . . Most human beings through history have lived their own lives. Saved themselves if they wanted to, not gone down.
One thing you can say, is that this negative energy rising in the United States, in the 70’s, producing depression in varying areas, is at the same time a kind of sense of reality that the 60’s didn’t have. But this negative energy is transforming into some kind of resistance energy. These days, if you make a vow, you forget it in three days. Every time you decide to quit smoking, you can’t do it, despite what it says on the cigarette package. . . . The resistance energy gets in between you and your will.
I don’t know how to explain this consciousness, but it’s loose. America is one of the places that exports it. You can say that energy is a form of unconsciousness. We have a little bit of it in us and we’re not aware of it. Whatever you’re not aware of controls you. So, therefore, the aim of life . . . is to try to gain some consciousness. One of the strangest things is, that when you begin to gain consciousness, one of the first things you become aware of is old people. Well, I’m going to read you a poem by Rolf Jacobsen . . . a Norwegian poet, about old people.
I put a lot of stock in the old. They have enough with their own, And they hardly see us. They are like fishermen along big rivers. I put a lot of stock in fishermen along big rivers, And old people. They have a look in their eyes that you hardly see anymore. The old. As if they were just recovering from a big fever. The old, who so gradually become themselves. Once more, And so gradually break up Like smoke. No one notices it. They are gone Into sleep And light.
I interviewed Pablo Neruda once. And I asked him, “How come you people have learned so much more from Walt Whitman than our poets have?” He said, “I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because you had T. S. Eliot. Maybe Eliot is too elegant for us . . . Another possibility is that, after all, America is a place where new things appear and there’s a sense of brotherhood and we have that sense of brotherhood in South America; we love Whitman, he’s our poet.” Then he said a very interesting thing, he said, “You know, there is such a thing as a poetry of closed rooms. There’s this great French poet, Mallarme, he’s a great poet, but his poetry is a poetry of closed rooms . . . I think our thing as Americans is not only to not be in closed rooms but to go out through the windows, go all the way out . . . I never tire of my place by the ocean.”
One of the things you can say is that one of the problems in dealing with poetry is that after you leave the English discipline and the English iambic meter, what are you going to do then? Are you just going to write free verse forever? It’s a problem, we’ve been able to dismantle the iam and now we’re down to free verse in the prose poem, then what? The poetry in this country in the magazines is so bad you can’t even read it. Jim Wright once said that after reading American magazines of poetry you want to lay down on the ground with your face in the dirt for half an hour. So what is the reason for this? I don’t know but one of the reasons is that the idea after we dismantle the iam, you’ve lost. The only discipline and work of that sort that we know how to do. And now what we have to do is find discipline inside our own free verse to build up again, do you understand me? Why is it that the painters can work all day in the studio and the poet writes fifteen minutes? Cause he can’t think of anything to do except write poems! We don’t know how to do sketches. We don’t know how to do charcoal drawings as preparation for ink. Do you understand what I’m saying? So that whole area there is very important.
I met a young man — I was out at the Lindesfarne Foundation last spring, and I met a young man, he came up to me and he said, “I’m a poet, and I want to ask you something,” and I said, “Yes, what is it?” and he said, “You know, what happens to me is I go some place like Naropa, and I want to study poetry, and you know what they tell me? They tell me, ‘Go down to the supermarket and listen to what everybody says in the aisles for an hour and write it down and come back and write a poem about it.’ And I don’t want to do that.”
And he tells me, “If I meet a Buddhist, he tells me where his lineage is, it goes right back to the Buddha.”
The young poet said, “I want to know, where is my lineage?” He says, “Where’s your lineage? Does your lineage go back to Rilke? Who does it go back to?”
Well, you hear what he’s saying — he wants to be a part of a flow of serious artists who worked hard and had discipline, and . . . that’s what he wants to be. And that’s a good part of the seventies, hm?
Poem Against the British, On a Ferry Across Chesapeake Bay, and Snowfall in the Afternoon are from Silence in the Snowy Field by Robert Bly. Copyright Robert Bly, 1962.
Those Being Eaten by America is from Light Around the Body by Robert Bly. Copyright Robert Bly, 1968.
