Robert Bly

This article is about the poet. For the business writer, see Robert W. Bly.

Bly at the Great Mother - New Father Conference in Maine, June 2004.

Robert Bly (born December 23, 1926 in Madison, Minnesota) is a poet, author, and leader of the mythopoetic Men's Movement in the United States.

Life

Robert Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. After graduating from Madison High School in 1944, he enlisted in the Navy, serving two years. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard University and joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Harold Brodkey, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York.

Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1952 he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.

His first marriage was to award winning short story novelist Carol Bly. They had four children, including Mary J. Bly, a Literature Professor at Fordham University and also a best-selling novelist. Bly and Carol divorced in 1979; he has been married to the former Ruth Ray since 1980.^[1] He has a stepdaughter from his marriage to Ruth Bly.

Career

Bly's early collection of poems Silence in the Snowy Fields was published in 1962, and its plain imagistic style had considerable influence on American verse of the next two decades.^[2] The following year his essay 'A Wrong Turning in American Poetry' was published in which he made a case against the influences of Eliot, Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, in favour of the more direct work by writers such as Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

In 1966 Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.

Among his most famous works is Iron John: A Book About Men (1990 ISBN 0-201-51720-5), an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. The book is credited with starting the Mythopoetic Men's Movement in the United States. Bly frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman, Michael J. Meade, and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman, and has taught at the annual Great Mother Conference since 1975. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estés author of Women Who Run With the Wolves. (ISBN 0-345-37744-3)

Bly was the University of Minnesota Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received The McKnight Foundation's Distinquished Artist Award in 2000. He has published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from such languages as Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. His book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners).

In 2006 the University of Minnesota purchased Bly's archive which contains more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his "morning poems"; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such as James Wright, Donald Hall and James Dickey. The archive will be housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota Campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors.

Bibliography

Poetry

My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 2005)
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001)
Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (1999)
Snowbanks North of the House (1999)
Morning Poems (1997)
Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994)
What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems (1992)
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985)
Selected Poems (1986)
Mirabai Versions (1984)
The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981)
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979)
This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977)
Old Man Rubbing His Eyes (1974)
Jumping Out of Bed (1973)
Sleepers Joining Hands (1973)
The Light Around the Body (1967)- won National Book Award
Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962)

Anthologies

The Best American Poetry (1999)
The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (Ecco Press, 1995)
The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford (1993)
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (1992)
News of the Universe (1980)
Leaping Poetry (1975)
A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1967).

Translations

The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (HarperCollins, 2004)
The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib. Selected Poems of Ghalib (1999) with Sunil Dutta.
Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1997)
Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly & Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge (1990)
Machado's Times Alone: Selected Poems (1983)
Eight Stages of Translation (1983)
The Kabir Book (1977)
Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets---Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (1975)
Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1971)
Hunger -- by Knut Hamsun (1967)

Nonfiction

Remembering James Wright (2005)
The Sibling Society (Addison-Wesley, 1996)
The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul (1994)
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1991)
Iron John: A Book about Men (1990)
A Little Book on the Human Shadow (1988, with William Booth)
Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews (1980).

Footnotes

^ Johnsen, Bill (June 2004). "The Natural World is a Spiritual House" (PDF). Colloquium on Violence and Religion Annual Conference 2004. Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary. Retrieved 2007-04-30. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
^ Gioia, Mason, Schoerke (editors) Twentieth-Century American Poetics,page 260

External links

[johnsen-1] Johnsen, Bill (June 2004). "The Natural World is a Spiritual House" (PDF). Colloquium on Violence and Religion Annual Conference 2004. Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary. Retrieved 2007-04-30. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

[2] Gioia, Mason, Schoerke (editors) Twentieth-Century American Poetics,page 260

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