POETS Day! Robert Bly

Bly looked the stereotypical new ager: mid-life clinging longish gray hair, loosely knotted tie peeking out from under his sarape, and surety smile.

Illustration by Rene Sears

The last time I had a flat tire, I took a picture. It’s still in my phone ready to be deployed should I be disastrously running late for something I can’t be understandable tardy for.

Years ago my wife got a call from work on a morning we’d forgotten to set the alarm. She darted awake and off the cuff railed about an Alabama Power truck blocking our drive. She’d be there as soon as possible, she said, and I heard sympathetic sounds from the other end. I’m not that quick. I need a plan. You should have a plan too.

It’s a close up shot showing only the tire and the road without any seasonal flourishes like golden leaves, sleet, or sandaled feet. Next time you get a flat, take a picture. Heck, if you see a stranded motorist, pull over and take one. Everybody has a phone and will have called a friend or relative so you’re in little danger of getting roped into actually helping. For POETS Day, an excuse to be late doesn’t help much. You want out for the day and a flat tire just means you won’t be back in from lunch or whatever for a few more minutes. Also, sending a picture unprompted is suspicious. It’s better attributed to another.

Pull up the picture when the time is right and tell your boss a daughter/neice/grandmother just sent it and needs help. They’re a ways out, but sitting safe in a diner or something. You can just make it out but by the time you get back… “I’ll make it up Monday. You’re great for understanding,” and out. Matinee, ball game, bar? Up to you. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, a little verse.

***

I hadn’t thought of Robert Bly since college. I took an honors English seminar led by a New Aging professor focused on his manhood reclamation manifesto, Iron John: A Book about Men. I can’t remember the professor’s name, she taught non-fiction creative writing and I suppose the thinking went that as a renowned poet, Bly would serve up examples of poetic sensibilities pressed into argumentative prose service.

Bly looked the stereotypical new ager: mid-life clinging longish gray hair, loosely knotted tie peeking out from under his sarape, and surety smile. The professor not at all. She sat bolt upright in her chair and wore a rotation of primary colored vests and waistcoats over white crisp shirts with doilies coming off the collar and wrists. In her class I was Mr. Sears. She was very proper. That made it all the funnier when she spoke stiffly about Bly’s insistence that men spend time with men and reclaim a savage passion. She was a believer, though you’d never know it to look at her.

I thought the book was claptrap. She was fine with that. For all that seems funny or ridiculous in retrospect, it was a pretty good class with lively discussion. There were only six students in the seminar, so you couldn’t hide and after the first class it was clear that she wanted opposing opinions going at one another.

I got an easy A in that class because the professor, and I really wish I could remember her name, fancied herself a matchmaker. She got it in her head that Ms. Allison – it was a running joke that Ms. Allison was ruining the formality of the classroom by having a Christian name for a surname even though it was a non-Christian surname used commonly as a Christian name – and I should see each other.

Ms. Allison was shockingly attractive; a lithe, kinky-haired dance major with all the tone a young man might imagine goes with the discipline. She was also a lesbian. The professor’s scheming began as little teases that we were flirting and doing a poor job of hiding it. We weren’t, but denials fanned the flame. As the semester went on, she took to pairing students off on assignments. This meant that I spent a good deal of time with the dancer at her dorm or her girlfriend’s apartment writing papers that neither I nor they could explain why required two authors. We all got to be pretty good friends.

Playing along was to our advantage so we always sat next to each other and lingered when the other had an after class question. Ms. Allison and I weren’t stupid. Professor red-vest loved it.

At one point we got into a class discussion about the paranormal and what a ripe subject it was for writing. We should all get out and ask people about paranormal experiences, go to places with spooky atmosphere, and such. Long story short, I found myself at midnight in a beat-up Buick LaSabre, a luxury minded mid-eighties model where on a clear day you can see the passenger side door from the driver’s seat and no middle console to obstruct whatnot, parked outside an abandoned and supposedly haunted insane asylum with a well toned lovely and a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best and it was completely innocent; got her home to her girlfriend like a gentleman.

That’s what I think about when Robert Bly comes up. That happened the other day. Walter Kirn mentioned him in a tweet and got me reminiscing.

I had a goofy picture of Bly, but I respect Kirn and so took another look.

His great famous poetic essay is “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry.” I found a free-to-read copy here at Internet Archive and as always with Internet Archive, I suspect they have necessary permissions to offer what they do mainly because they’ve been served to hell and back on occasions when they haven’t. Ease your own conscience by looking into it if need be.

In “A Wrong Turning,” Bly decries the direction American poetry took as influenced by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, among others. He dubs them the “1917 generation,” a very useful phrase I intend to borrow going forward. It’s his contention that they focused on objects and the outside world of things at the expense of the inward world and poisoned subsequent generations from whose members he singles out Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz.

He wants an internalized poetry and prizes immediacy and vibrancy. All well and good, but he also preaches personal mythology and association. I’m wary. Poetry is communication. Sometimes it can be dense and hard to understand, but it is a reaching out in an attempt to connect. To paraphrase James Matthew Wilson from Poetry in an Age of Unmaking, writing has to be more than a satisfaction of the faddish urge to express yourself. Dogs yelping are expressing themselves.

I don’t believe Bly is advocating primal yell poetry. I don’t believe he’s suggesting in his calls for immediacy and passion that poets don’t edit or perform rewrites; work until it’s right. But he sets himself up for such accusations with rigged comparison (he admits as much in the essay) of Lowell, et al passages and decries them as learned and practiced and so lifeless next to lively and passionate translations of Rilke or Neruda or one of the many European poets he thinks we’d do better to emulate. He knows well that passion can stand a rewrite.

That makes it sound like I’m not a fan. I am, and not just because he has a pirate name. He is lively. There is immediacy. He does communicate.

I can’t say for certain, but I assume “Waking from Sleep” is one of his “Morning Poems.” Bly took up the practice of his friend William Stafford and wrote a poem on rising every day. He didn’t publish them all, suggesting my suspicion that he valued editing and rewrites in addition to immediacy.

Waking from Sleep
Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the water lines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from the bed, and eat breakfast! —
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.

The poem provides a good example of what is meant when free verse poems have musicality. The outward looking Pound wrote in his rules for Imagistes, “3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” To realise what he meant, a reader has to read in breaths, look for natural pauses, and not count syllables but time as is read.

Reconsider the foot as a measuring unit. Take the first line. In it, as in most all of the lines, there are four definite stresses with a possibility of five depending on how you read it. With capitals as stress:

InSIDE the VEINS there are NAVies SETTing FORTH,

though you can glide along the end and mute “setting” to leave it at four stresses. I prefer the fifth because there are iambs ending each line in the first stanza. That aside, we read with natural breaks, places where we inflect, pause, or exhale at a different pace. In short, reading changes subtly.

I read “Inside the veins” with emphasis to if establish the setting before an almost imperceptible shift to explanation in “there are navies.” After the “s” sound in “navies” I reset for the “s” sound in “setting” forming another natural break. So:

Inside the veins / there are navies / setting forth,

The line is broken into three units. The next line has two.

Tiny explosions / at the water lines,

followed by three in the last.

And seagulls/ weaving in the wind/of salty blood.

The next two stanzas vary the units with 4/4/4 and 3/3/4 with the final returning to 3/2/3. It’s a very pretty melody, but subjective. That’s my reading based on where I find pauses and shifts. It may not be yours. Neither of us can be sure short of being told what Bly’s reading sounded like.

There are other poetic techniques at work. He begins with repetition of v and w to more w, c, and h. O sounds out throughout. This is more than prose, but lacks the definition and precision I prefer.

The final line struck me as one easily fixed to my preferences. It’s clumsy read alone.

We KNOW that our MASTer has LEFT us FOR the DAY.

The “that our” and “-er has” are dead spots. A quick rewrite by me; nearly the same but metered:

We KNOW our MASTer LEFT us FOR the DAY.

It’s iambic and measured, but he’s got us rising and falling at a different pace. His is a parallel in timing and expression, from my reading, of the line before it and the last line of the first stanza. As such, it’s wonderful.

I like that there are those following the course Pound, Eliot, and the rest of the 1917 generation set. I’m glad not everyone is. Things would get boring quickly if that were the case. I get the sense that Bly disagrees. He has a lot of “must”s in his essay. At one point he questions if those not heeding the example of his select European and South American exemplars are writing poetry at all. Pretty bold for a free verse guy.

He wrote a lot of political poetry, mostly about Vietnam. On the surface that seems to fly in the face of his espousals, but they’re passionate in line with most of what he has to say about poetry, at least what I’ve read, if not inward looking.

Dana Gioia writes “Bly insists on being judged as a major poet, but his verse cannot bear the weight of that demand.” That’s not as damning as it might initially sound. Major poets are few and far between; one every generation or two. Bly was famous for his poetry, rightly so. He was also famous for his protests and New Age men stuff. One fed the other fed the other. He was a very famous poet, and pretty good.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]