Robert Bly

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Robert Bly (born December 23, 1926) is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.

Life
Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, people of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving two years. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard University, joining the later famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, including 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, Bly took two years at the University of Iowa at the Iowa Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956, he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there, he found not only his relatives, but became acquainted with the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson. Bly determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States. The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation. He also published essays on American poets.

During this time, Bly 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 Bly, a Literature Professor at Fordham University and also a best-selling novelist. Bly and Carol divorced in 1979; Bly has been married to the former Ruth Ray since 1980. and he has a stepdaughter this marriage. A stepson from the marriage died in a pedestrian-train incident while he attended private college in Minnesota.

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. The following year, he published "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry", an essay 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 of writers such as Pablo Neruda, CÃ©sar Vallejo, Juan RamÃ³n JimÃ©nez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War, and went on to lead much of the opposition to that war among writers. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 1980s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The WingÃ©d Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.During the sixties he was of great help to the Bengali Hungryalist poets who faced anti-establishment trial at Kolkata, India.

Among his most famous works is Iron John: A Book About Men, 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 conducts workshops for men with James Hillman, Michael J. Meade, and others, as well as workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He has taught at the annual Great Mother Conference since 1975. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola EstÃ©s, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Bly was the University of Minnesota Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received The McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2002. 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 contained 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 is housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors.

In February, 2008, Bly was named Minnesota's first poet laureate. In that year he also contributed a poem and an Afterword to From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.

Thought and the Men's Movement
Much of Bly's writings focus on what he saw as the troubled situation of men in today's world as a result of, among other things, the decline of the father's role in the modern family. He claimed that whereas women are helped by their own bodies along the stages of maturity, men are somewhat of an "experimental species" and have to be taught on what it is to be a man. Older cultures had elaborate myths, enacted through rites of passage, that helped men along this path as well as the concept of a "men's societie" as a place where older men would teach young boys on these gender specific issues. He argues that these rituals are as important to humans as instincts are to animals and as fathers became increasingly absent from the house during and after the industrial revolution, young males did not receive the teachings that they used to. According to Bly, many of the phenomena of depression, juvenile delinquency and lack of leadership in business and politics have their roots in these problems.

Bly therefore sees today's men as half adults, trapped somewhere between childhood and maturity, a state in which they find it hard to become responsible leaders, carers and fathers, which in turn leads to the passing down of that immaturity through the generations. In his book The Sibling Society (1997), Bly argues that a society formed mainly by half adults is extremely problematic as it lacks in leadership, daring initiative, creativity and a deep care about others. The image of weak men, he argues, is further enhanced by popular media and Hollywood films which often present fathers as overweight and emotionally co-dependent. Women, according to Bly, rushed to fill the gap during the 1960s, infusing men with an enhanced emotional sensitivity which in itself was good to the extent that it helped men to better understand women and start feeling their age old pain of repression, but also led to the creation of 'soft males' which lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.

In Bly's view, one solution lies in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional mythology that have hopefully been passed down to us but are in danger of being forgotten. He researched and collected myths he considered to focus on male maturity and published them in various books, Iron John being the most notable example, many, coming from the Grimm's fairytales. Descent is a common theme arising in these myths, variously presented as the hero going underground to pass a period of solitude in a somewhat bestial mode. He often used the Greek term for 'descent' (ÎºÎ±Ï„Î¬Î²Î±ÏƒÎ·Ï‚) to describe the maturing process for men, in contrast with the continuous achievements they have been taught to pursue by today's culture.

Bly was also strongly influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who developed the theory of the eternal images that exist within the Psyche which he called archetypes. The image of the powerful king, the evil witch and the beautiful maiden are, according to Jung, structures of the collective unconscious, and Robert Bly wrote extensively about their meanings. For example, Bly considered The Witch to be that part of the male psyche upon which the negative, destructive side of women is imprinted (first presented to him in the form of his own mother's imperfections) and not as yet realized in the Self. This is why the witch's symbols are inverted motherly symbols, as cooking becomes the brewing of evil potions and the act of feeding is reversed, to the demise of the child that is now in danger of being eaten rather than fed. Many fairytales describe this battle in physical terms with the hero saving the girl by killing a witch, as in the Grimm's story "The Drummer". These concepts are recounted in Bly's talk The Human Shadow (1989) and the book it was presenting.

Poetry

 * Talking into the Ear of a Donkey: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)
 * Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages (Eastern Washington University, 2007)
 * The Urge to Travel Long Distances (Eastern Washington University Press, 2005)
 * My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 2005)
 * Surprised by Evening (RealNewMusic, 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
 * The Lion's Tail and Eyes (1962)
 * Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962)

Translated

 * The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) (with Robert Hedin)
 * Peer Gynt (verse play) - by Henrik Ibsen (2008)
 * The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, HarperCollins (2004)
 * The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas TranstrÃ¶mer, Graywolf Press (2001)
 * The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib (with Sunil Dutta, 1999)
 * Lorca and JimÃ©nez: 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)
 * Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity: Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge (1987)
 * Machado's Times Alone: Selected Poems (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 (novel) - by Knut Hamsun (1967)

Edited

 * 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)

Nonfiction books

 * Remembering James Wright (2005)
 * The Maiden King : The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (with Marion Woodman), Henry Holt & Co (1998)
 * 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, (with William Booth, 1988)
 * Eight Stages of Translation (1983)
 * Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews (1980)