We note today the passing of another great poet, Robert Bly, eminent poet and activist.
He passed away yesterday (“Dad had no pain. … His whole family was around him”, reports his daughter, Mary Bly).
He was 94.
We wish his family and those who knew him (and most importantly, Robert himself), peace.
Peace and love – (not cliched, idle words) – were very much his life-time commitment, his motivation – (most notably, in his heroic ‘Sixties activism – in being one of the prominent figures (alongside Allen) reading and performing on the college campuses, drumming up support against the barbarities and iniquities of the Vietnam War)
In 1968 he won the National Book Award for his collection of protest-poems, The Light Around The Body.
He donated the entire $1,000 prize money to the draft resistance movement.
Allen and he can be heard reading here, (from 1969, along with poets Robert Sund and John Anderson) at Portland, Oregon, in a reading sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the New University Conference.
We’ll draw your attention also to the remarkable “The Teeth Mother Naked. At Last” (from 1970 – from City Lights)
Don’t miss also this – “Rays of Distant Bly Light From A Rare Stellar Convergence” by Mark Gustafson, focusing on this iconic photo, picking up the story and taking it up to 1995
and check out this previous posting from The Allen Ginsberg Project – (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s “crazy wisdom“?)
The later fame and notoriety that came with the monumental success of his prose meditation on male identity – Iron John complicates the picture a little.
As Robert D McFadden writes, (writing in the obituary notice in the New York Times):
“The book touched a nerve. It was on The New York Times’s best-seller list for 62 weeks, including 10 weeks as No. 1, and was translated into many languages.
Mr. Bly was profiled in newspapers, magazines and a 90-minute PBS special by Bill Moyers, who called him “the most influential poet writing today.” He became a cultural phenomenon, a father figure to millions. He held men-only seminars and weekend retreats, gatherings often in the woods with men around campfires thumping drums, making masks, hugging, dancing and reading poetry aloud.
He said his “mythopoetic men’s movement” was not intended to turn men against women. But many women called it a put-down, an atavistic reaction to the feminist movement. Cartoonists and talk-show hosts ridiculed it, dismissing it as tree-hugging self-indulgence by middle-class baby boomers. Mr. Bly, a shambling white-haired guru who strummed a bouzouki and wore colorful vests, was easily mocked as Iron John himself, a hairy wild man who, in the German myth, helped aimless princes in their quests”
Bly’s reputation as a poet (and it, should also be noted, as a translator) may well have been occluded but it certainly wasn’t eclipsed.
Laurie Hertzel writes at length on him in the Minnesota Star Tribune, his local paper – here (and (from back in 2009) here)
Read his obituary in the New York Times (in its entirety) – here
and in The Guardian – here
from NPR – here
Here‘s Steve Karnowski for the Associated Press
Gregg Pratt & Michael Hazard’s 1978 documentary, “A Man Writes To A Part of Himself” can be viewed – here
Another great poet passes on to join the immortals.
Is this site still online? I knew Robert. A very nurturing person. Allen an incredible writer. I guess Robert stayed with Bill and Dorothy Stafford when in Oregon.Also. Nice people I knew. Did he change Kim’s baby diapers? Our own oakie poet. Started a poem about Bill. Robert served proudly in USN did not desert his country to the enemy like Oregonians . All of their crooked phony evil cops.
Yes, a little bit of research will show that the site is most definitely still on-line – regular (near-daily) postings – allenginsberg.org
I have sent Testimony Expert Eye Witness Testimony that the United
States and its Police Force, FBI, National Library of Medicine
Education K-Graduate School has been Violently overthrown
by Ambrose and Lillian Duda and Barack Obama, Michelle Obama
Concolezza RIce, Daniel Bernstein to ATTACK ALL WRITERS
AND STEAL OUR WRITING AGAINST FEDERAL COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS
FOR THE ABSOLUTELY INDECENT PURPOSE TO BLACK RAPE
ANY WOMAN WE ARE WRITING TO OR TRYING TO DATE.
ABSOLUTELY INDECENT, SEDITIOUS, and SADISTIC
ESPIONAGE and Obama has committed the worst Treason in American
History, ATTACKING our 2 Major Weapon’ Systems s 1-Tomahawk.
2-Hellfire to DESTROY ALL OF EUROPE and our ALLIES>
America Itself has already been VIOLENTLY OVERTHROWN.
These PHONY COPS HAVE NEVER INVESTIGATED A THEFT
OF CRIME , JUST ATTACK ME TO RAPE AND MURDER YOUNG LADIES
THEMSELVES and COMMIT HIGH TREASON, TERRORISM.
They belong in MENTAL WARDS!
ALL PHARMACY DEALS WERE DESTROYED I HAD SET UP.
I had CURES FOR DOZENS OF DEADLY DISEASES, all these People
are DEAD and OBAMA,S, DUDA AND OREGON COPS KILLED
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE DOING THAT ATTACK ON MYSELF AND MY
PROPERTY AND POLITICAL RIGHTS. Photography has been DESTROYED AS AN ART FORM BY A SUBVERSIVE COLOR BLIND, JEALOUS PIMP
My Emails are being Spied Upon, Poetry Readings, for this VILE PURPOSE
the EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, ADVOCATES CANNIBALISM.
I should add to all good Americans, that ALL SLAVERY is CURRENTLY BEING
DONE BY BLACKS: Mark Nooth, with Colin Powell’s Blessing,
Snake RIver Corrections, Junkie Yoshidas, Prison Blues, OSSHE
ALl colleges and High Schools in Oregon.
Oregon Committee for the Humanities, and my Nephews Smoking Dope
with Japs who tried to kill me and Oregon Department of Revenue
with Japanese Double Agents from WII Rejected my Mastterpiece
in Cinema, :Grey Skeis: and the FBI Lied to Ron Wyden in Writing about that. I have their Letter to Wyden and my original letter to Frank Church/Jan Ziska
of 7/27/77, Spied upon and Stolen by Barack Obma in a speech at Notre Dame. and He spied upon other writers with Duda in Heppner where I was attacked by their dope addict phony cops so they could Murder a 21 Year Old Heppner Woman.
Duda’s response, “She probably deserved it because she was knocked up'”I think Cold cases still exist for murder by Oregon College Teachers, PHONY
TICKETS on YOUR SCIENTISTS FOR DOING ANY Science, by dope addict
mob women cops. Kathleen Flynn, Chapman. Big Billy D Elias Mob, Capo.
It is time to BOOT THE US OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS.
The US Has been VIOLENTLY OVERTHROWN.
Friends, This could also be the Origins of ISIS.
Same modus operandi young ladies and religious people are Raped
and Beheaded.
More wonderful things they have done to you: HIV and AIDS
did Not originate in the Human Species, but by Africans having
sex with Monkeys.
More wonderful things that have done to you: HIV and AIDS
did Not originate in the Human Species, but by Africans having
sex with Monkeys.