Robert Bly, poet and translator, has devoted his life to deepening the range and increasing the speed of association in modern poetry. He lives on a farm near Madison, Minnesota in the region where he was born. Some of his books are Silence in the Snowy Fields, Jumping Out of Bed, The Morning Glory, Sleepers Joining Hands and This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. In 1968, The Light Around the Body won the National Book Award. Through his translations of Neruda, Rilke, Kabir, Hamsun, Tranströmer, Jacobsen, and others, he has brought to American readers some of the world’s best non-English poets.
He is a poet of immediacy, of the nearness of all things to us in the inner and outer worlds, and of those things we bury, by our blindness, in the rich compost of our lives. When I experience a Bly poem, I enter the miraculous energy of life and the awesome closeness and beauty of death. And to see and hear him recite his poems and the poems of others: the energy strides into the room with open arms and becomes the paint on the wall, the wood of the floors, the expansive clutter of women’s pocketbooks, and the delicate faces of enraptured admirers.
Robert Bly is a shaman. Language and image are his robe and medicine bag. I sense a determination and intensity in this poetry of snow and transformation, of “a darkness . . . always there, which we never noticed.” Before us he puts on many masks, at ease as the solitary, the wanderer, the revolutionary, the psychologist, the clown, the bombast, the teacher and the visionary. And yet, these are more than masks, they are the workings of a soul in love with itself, the workings of the human spirit of no masks, the endless possibilities of the creative life.
If he revels in this clear vibrating joy, he insists also, possibly primarily, that we face the dark side of ourselves — our collective and individual cruelties, guilts and desires. All the monsters that, when denied, grow more and more dangerous, that become fiery grotesque beings capable of tearing us apart as individuals and as a culture. Presently our culture is at odds with this darkness. It is inside our supermarkets and elementary schools, in our television sets and in the skyscrapers of our golden cities. Its image is horrible, gross, ghoulish. It is the Death Mother and Father Un-consciousness. Its food is our own energy and un-awareness. In his reading, the shaman transforms from the sensitive loving poet, by way of actual masks, into insatiable loveless images of scorn and impotence, “drawn to the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zeros.”
It was not a beautiful image, nor a serene one. But it was a true image. The very part of myself, ourselves, which is unleashed among us every time we refuse to love, and always when we refuse to recognize our destructive potential. It is Life’s divine body unanswered, the flesh repelled by other flesh, Bly’s “we are the ones we intended to bomb!”
So Bly carried me from joy to depression and back to joy. For the life of the spirit embraces all energy, the inner and outer selves, the destructive and creative principles. It is the world of Blake and the Sufis, of Kabir and Whitman, of Boehme and Lao Tzu. The world of the farmer and the bricklayer at ease with their labor.
In Bly’s newest volume, This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (such a sensuous and loving title!), Bly approaches ecstasy and intensity with the gentleness and humor of the mystic. One of my favorites is “Wings Folding Up,” in which he says:
Is this world animal or vegetable? Others love us, the cabbages love the earth, the earth is fond of the heavens — a new age comes close through the dark, an elephant’s trunk waves in the darkness, so much is passing away, so many disciplines already gone, but the energy in the double flower does not falter, the wings fold up around the sitting man’s face. And these cucumber leaves are my body, and my thighs, and my toes stretched out in the wind . . . Well, waterer, how will you get through this night without water?
Intensity and ecstasy are synonyms for Robert Bly, best illuminated by his translations of Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet. Here is an excerpt from one of his poems:
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten — that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire. So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound! Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work. Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
I grow more and more thankful for Bly’s work every day. He travels out to the dark edges of the psyche, where “Inside us there is some secret. We are following a narrow ledge around a mountain, we are sailing on skeletal eerie craft over the buoyant ocean.”
