美国国家公共电台 NPR The Poet Of Minnesota, Vietnam And Mythical Men

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Nature, mysticism and political protest - those are the themes that have dominated the work of poet Robert Bly for more than 60 years. His two dozen collections have garnered 1 many prizes, including a National Book Award. Now, all of Bly's poems have been reissued in a single volume. Reporter Tom Vitale has the story.

TOM VITALE, BYLINE 2: Robert Bly lived in rural Minnesota much of his life. And many of his collected poems focus on the nature in that region.

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ROBERT BLY: (Reading) The sage 3 root and the river lives and breathes. And blackbirds join in flock. Their duty's through. And now at last, a tumbling freedom comes. And some grow to acorns 4 dropped. Sun pushed his plums - to half-wild hogs 5 in Carolina trees.

VITALE: As a young poet, Bly wrote rhyme verse like this in iambic pentameter - five beats to the line, in the centuries-old tradition of the English poets. Bly will turn 92 next week, and he doesn't do interviews anymore. But in 1986, he told me he came to feel that the melodic 6 style of his early work was fine for a Shakespeare or Milton but wrong for the world we live in.

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BLY: Now, Robert Frost was able to do it, but he was born in 1875. And so it just isn't clear if these wonderful melodies of iambic can be adapted to American material. I don't know. I'm interested in form now. But I'm not so interested in repeating English form.

VITALE: In the 1960s, Bly changed the form of his poetry. He began to write unrhymed free verse. He also changed his subject - writing about the grief of the nation at a time of tumultuous antiwar and civil rights protests. His 1967 collection "The Light Around The Body" won the National Book Award. Critic James Longenbach calls it Bly's most important book.

JAMES LONGENBACH: You feel him trying to use those words in a way that evokes 7 something much larger and more mysterious or mythic than their literal meanings suggest.

VITALE: Longenbach is the author of "How Poems Get Made." He says Bly will forever be associated with organizing the music of the English language in a way called deep image.

LONGENBACH: What that phrase refers to was a way of writing poems that came in the early '60s, late '50s, out of Bly and a few other people, that tried to reduce poetry to images that were deeply redolent of deep psychic 8 or cultural power.

VITALE: Robert Bly's most emotionally charged work was written in response to the Vietnam War.

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BLY: (Reading) Artillery 9 shells explode. Napalm canisters roll, end over end. Eight-hundred steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls. The 6-hour-old infant puts his fist instinctively 10 to his eyes to keep out the light.

VITALE: After the war ended, Bly's poetry shifted inward from the political to the personal.

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BLY: I became in touch with my own anger, in a way, through doing the Vietnam poems, which I never expressed my anger privately 11. And it really wasn't done in my family.

VITALE: Robert Bly grew up in western Minnesota in a family descended 12 from stoic 13 Norwegian immigrant farmers. Bly says he experienced a recovery of feeling.

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BLY: Certain emotions are coming forward that maybe I have kept in - my father being an alcoholic 14. From an alcoholic family, we tend to repress a lot. I see this stuff coming out, and it helps me tremendously.

VITALE: That introspection led to Bly's most famous book - a nonfiction work called "Iron John," a book about men. Published in 1990, it became an international bestseller and sparked what became known as the men's movement, based on the idea that men need to be more sensitive.

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BLY: I mean, when I saw the Republican senators up there attacking Anita Hill in that insane, bitter, heartless way, I said, man, that's the greatest argument for the men's movement I've ever seen.

VITALE: But James Longenbach says Bly's role as a founder 15 of the men's movement hurt his reputation as a poet.

LONGENBACH: Because it allowed people who found that distasteful to dismiss him rather easily.

VITALE: But Bly continued to write. Sensitivity is a big factor in his later work - poems that feature a zen-like focus on an object in nature, with what Bly calls the intensity 16 of being right there.

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BLY: I'm doing one for example on opening an orange - what's it like when the ten fingers meet and decide to open an orange. And the two thumbs go in first and start to break it. Then the other fingers hover 17 around and wonder if they can help with this. And pretty soon, the whole orange is lying there naked and scarred - naked. And then it's a little embarrassing. So therefore, they think the best thing to do for the modesty 18 of the orange really is to eat it.

VITALE: Robert Bly says it's a disaster in our culture that poetry is taught on the page when it needs to be spoken aloud to, in his words, run through the brain and down into the heart. For NPR News, I'm Tom Vitale in New York.

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