Wandering But Not Lost: Bly Pens Poetry

Robert Bly '50 is an unassuming literary revolutionary.

Bly, as an Advocate member during his Harvard years, socialized and philosophized with current and future poetic giants.

But instead of immediately becoming a poetic icon, he toiled in anonymity for over 17 years, before seeing the light of the literary landscape.

And in the years since then he hardly followed the traditional literary high road.

He is spiritual--he says he believes his best work focuses on an obscure 13th century religious poet. He is passionate--he learned Spanish to read Pablo Neruda in his native language. And he is, for lack of a better word, simply odd. He plays cymbals during poetry readings. He wears bright multi-colored vests. He has lead groups of men into the woods for 10 days to get 'in touch' with their emotions.

But, ultimately, Bly, who originally worshipped William Butler Yeats, remains one of the top poetic talents of the last half century exactly because he does not mimic a past master or brainstorm with a fellow Harvard literary acquaintance--he lives and writes to a world of his own rhythm.

A Community of Poets

Before transferring to Harvard as a sophomore, Bly served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 and then spent a year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.

At Harvard, he says he found himself in a group of classmates with astonishing literary talent, including John Ashbery '49, Kenneth Coch '48 , George Plimpton '48 and Adrienne Rich '51, who turned to be the first person Bly asked to a Radcliffe dance.

"It was an intense class," he says. "Many of us had incredible, complicated experiences before coming to school, and we brought those experiences with us."

Many of Bly's classmates were World War II veterans whose memories of the war fueled their artistic creativity, Bly says.

Bly says his two years in the Navy allowed him to mature, leading him to take better take advantage of the opportunities Harvard had to offer.

"People are too young to go to college directly after high school. They waste the first two years," he says. "I always told my kids to do something else for a couple of years--to travel around the world, to become a painter. It's a wonderful thing to be able to do."

Once Bly entered Harvard, his experiences were shaped by the lingering effects of the war.

"After all the destruction of the war, we felt it was our job to keep the standards of literature up," he says. "[And] after winning the war, we felt as though it was up to us to keep the culture together, and it was possible."

Yet, this was never too imposing a responsibility.

"It was a playful thing, we looked upon it with optimism," Bly says. "This was different than the mood of people coming out of the Vietnam War."

This victory lent a sort of heroic quality to the class.

"There is a certain mystery about that group, and that time," he says. "Many of us have had numerous different careers, for instance."

Like many aspiring writers who have since become household names, Bly says he "bluffed his way onto the Advocate, and never regretted it."

"We'd sit up half the night arguing about which poems would go into the magazine," Bly remembers. "Then, T.S. Eliot [Class of 1910] would come by and we'd all get drunk."

One month, Bly recalls, the magazine was low on funding, so he decided to print unpublished poems Eliot had written as an undergraduate. When the issue came out, he says, he received a letter from Eliot telling him that if he had wanted the poems printed, he would have printed them himself.

"It was a firm rebuke, but affectionately said," Bly remembers.

Many of the aspiring writers in the Class were members of Archibald MacLeish's first creative writing class, Bly writes in an entry in the 35th reunion book for the class.

"To him, Ezra Pound was literally a fallible but admirable friend," Bly writes.

This sort of casual contact with literary legends is "the advantage of going to a place like Harvard," Bly says.

Bly and the plethora of other aspiring poets who wrote for the Advocate also spent much of their time in the Grolier Bookstore, a place he describes as "our real home."

The bookstore's owner would often recommend new books of poetry to Bly. Sometimes, Robert Frost would even come into the store to browse.

"It was a real community for poets," Bly says. "I don't know if that still exists."

Poetry on Lake Wobegon

Five years after his graduation, Bly married and moved back to an abandoned farm in Minnesota, far from the Minneapolis suburbs where he was raised.

"In return for the boredom of country life...we received solitude, free time, the night stars and a certain clarity that comes when you feel abandoned," he writes in his 35th reunion note.

After trying unsuccessfully for years to imitate his hero, William Butler Yeats, Bly published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, in 1962.

For this and future work, Bly is credited with helping to introduce into poetry a fresh voice that celebrates the lyricism of Midwestern vernacular.

He started his own magazine in the late 1950s, which was first called The Fifties, then The Sixties and finally The Seventies. The magazine aimed to introduce South American and European poets to readers in the U.S. In fact, Bly learned Spanish in order to translate Pablo Neruda, whose poetry he loves for its "passion and fire."

"His magazines are one of his greatest contributions," says Porter University Professor Helen Vendler. "They were a powerful avenue for new writing."

A Rolling Stone...

Without the influence of new writing, Bly says, poetry will stagnate, which has led him to constantly mine for undiscovered talent.

Bly's most recent passion is the 13th century Persian poetry of Rumi.

"His poetry is a great blessing," Bly says. "It's a religious poetry without the heavy, hierarchical structure. It's ecstatic, treating God as if he were a lover."

Rumi's work has inspired Bly's recent poetry, which is based on the Islamic ghazal form.

It is this poetry, written in the last five years, that Bly says he thinks is his best work.

While Bly defines himself as a poet, he is perhaps most widely known not for his poetry but for his controversial 1989 book, Iron John: A Book About Men, which used a fairy tale to urge men to get in touch with their masculine, tribal nature.

But Bly says the book's success was a fluke.

"When my children were born [in the 1960s], I had to support them," he remembers. "I began to organize several conferences using fairy stories as a way to discuss the relations between men and women."

After searching through the tales collected by the Grimm Brothers for fairy tales about men, Bly began to "recognize in them remnants of ancient initiation rites for men in northern Europe, and male stages of growth imagined in the most ingenious way," he writes in the 35th reunion note.

His interpretation of these fairy tales was so popular with the men at his conference that they urged him to write a book.

"And then something strange happened," he remembers. "People actually started reading the thing. The book just ran away and became my illegitimate child."

Bly then began to organize 10 day conferences for men, often held in the woods, "in which the main study is mythology, and the light it sheds on relationships with women, and with fathers," he writes. "It's just older men talking to younger men and by the middle of the week everyone's crying."

And while Bly takes his work seriously, these conferences have often been the targets of ridicule.

Bly defends his work by explaining his theory on the two kinds of men: corporate men and human men. The corporate men fear change and were threatened by the idea of exposing emotion, so they were unable to take the idea of a men's movement seriously.

"It's not the women who were the enemy of the men's movement--it was the corporate men," he says.

Despite the criticism, Bly says, the book holds lessons that can even apply to college-age men.

"The young man simply won't make it without a father or an older male to look up to," he says.

He encourages students, then, to find mentors in their professors or older students.

"One good thing is that in college you have a chance to find a mentor. The older men and the veterans were the mentors who shaped my college experience," he says.

Vendler explains Bly's involvement in the so-called "men's movement" as a natural outgrowth of his career as a writer.

"It comes from the introspection every poet engages in," she says. "[Bly] is interested in the soul and the balance between different aspects of the soul."

Sartorial Style

In addition to men's conferences, Bly, now in his early seventies, still gives frequent poetry readings. His poetry readings are a performance, as Bly often brings along masks or finger cymbals.

"He wants to bring back the aspects of chanting and ritual into poetry reading," Vendler says.

And Bly adds not only acoustic style to his readings, but sartorial flair as well.

"I'm best known for vests," he says. "You can get a lot of different colors in vests that you can't in a suit," he says.

For Bly, even his varied wardrobe choice reflects his particular worldview--one needs to constantly be changing.

"The road to being a poet is a very long one," he says. "As a writer, new things need to come along all the time."

And, more playfully, he concludes that poets--and men, for that matter--should not be constrained by traditional boundaries.

"After all, I ask myself, why shouldn't men be a little more colorful?"