Robert Bly
Distinguished Poet, Writer & Translator
"...such is Bly's guileless authority that you can take him any way you want and still come away learning something about imagination." —Kirkus Reviews
“Unique among all the poetry that is being published today. It is visionary.” —David Ignatow
“Robert Bly is today one of the leaders of poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community.” —Kenneth Rexroth
“Bly has an insured place as a major figure in American poetry.” —Library Journal
Robert Bly has changed the American literary landscape in numerous ways. He has published over a dozen highly-regarded volumes of poetry, including My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy; The Night Abraham Called to the Stars; Morning Poems; Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems; and The Light Around the Body, for which he won the National Book Award in 1968. His poems in My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, are written in his own adaptation of the Mideastern ghazal form in three-line stanzas. Bly has also established himself as one of the great translators of international poetry into English, with pioneering translations of Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomas Tranströmer, and Hafez, among many others. The best work of his long and varied translation career appeared recently in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations. In 2008 his translations of Hafez were published in a volume Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door.
Bly has introduced poets of many cultures to American audiences by way of his literary magazine, successively known as The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, and now The Thousands. As editor he has also produced the landmark anthologies News of the Universe, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (with James Hillman and Michael Meade), and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy. He has also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry of 1999. In his wide-ranging roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called "the expressive men’s movement," Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half-century. According to the Jungian psychologist Robert Moore, "When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution." And literary critic Charles Molesworth suggests that some of Bly’s importance and complication lies in the fact that he "writes religious meditations for a public that is no longer ostensibly religious."
Bly’s bestselling book-length essay, Iron John: A Book About Men, sparked the men’s movement of the early 1990s and defined a whole generation’s view of masculinity. His other influential books of social and psychological commentary include The Sibling Society and The Maiden King, the latter co-authored with Marion Woodman, with whom Bly co-leads workshops for women and men in the US and Canada. He frequently conducts seminars with Gioia Timpanelli on European fairy tales. His awards include two Guggenheims and the National Book Award. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife Ruth.
About My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy (2006)
As in his collection, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001), Bly explores the dynamics of the ghazal, a form established by Islamic poets and which he crafts in tercets. His newest ghazals are ecstatic and gorgeously associative lyrics that draw on the myths and sacred texts of many cultures, various works of art ranging from a Rembrandt drawing to a painting by Robert Motherwell, and striking personal reminiscences. Bly, as he always does, is seeking the universal even as he embraces the particulars of a practice, a place, a painting, or a musical tradition. He calls out to sitar and tabla players. He writes of Adam and angels, Plato and Andrew Marvell. These are prayers, koans, warnings, assurances, and revelations. But for all the art, philosophy, and literature Bly pays homage to, it is nature that holds the key, nature that is holy. Sweet and full of longing, these are enrapturing poems about death and rebirth, humankind's small place in the cosmos, and the great wheel of life. —Donna Seaman, Booklist
About IRON JOHN (2004)
Today's sensitized male may be in touch with his "feminine" side, but, writes poet Bly, this "soft male" possesses little vitality and is hobbled by grief and anguish. To achieve real masculinity, Bly argues, men must cultivate a fierce tenderness to be found neither in the macho/John Wayne model nor in the "interior feminine." Taking as his starting point the Grimm fairy tale "Iron John," the author sets forth an eight-stage initiatory path whose steps include remembering one's psychic wounds, communion with a mentor or "inner King," becoming a lover, reviving one's inner warriors and receiving a "second heart." Bly avoids cant as he ransacks Jung, Freud and Reich; referents include Greek, Egyptian and Celtic myths, the Parsifal legend, Blake and Amerindian ritual. A wise and healing book full of fresh insights, Bly's odyssey will help men grapple with identity, fatherhood, relationships and such crises as addiction and divorce.
To learn more about Robert Bly's Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, click here:
http://www.greatmotherconference.com/
