After Long Busyness

In the mid-1990s, at my first corporate job, I pinned a copy of the poem “After Long Busyness” to my cubicle wall. One morning, an older coworker strolled by and read it aloud. “What does that mean?!” she exclaimed, and walked off.

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars; not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?
Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.

In only four lines, Bly captures the experience -- after work, after chores and homework and putting the kids to bed -- of solitude and of being connected to something outside one’s daily life. In this way, it’s an example of why I read poetry. I’m able to take a moment and read four lines that transport me to the eternal.  

Upcoming Events - 2010

Robert Bly is scheduled for two events in 2010:

1) 36th Annual Great Mother and New Father Conference
Camp Kieve, Nobleboro, Maine | May 29th-June 6th
More info: http://greatmotherconference.com

2) 26th Annual Minnesota Men's Conference
Camp Miller,Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota | September 14th-19th
More info: http://www.hiddenwine.com

Online Resources about Robert Bly

For those interested in learning about Robert Bly's life, career, and more, here are three useful online resources:

• Robert Bly's official website: Includes a bio and list of published books.
  
• Poetry Foundation: Includes a bio and extensive list of publications.
• Academy of American Poets: Short bio

The Origin of the Praise of God

Robert Bly began publishing prose poems in the 1970s. Several have become well-regarded. One of my favorites is “The Origin of the Praise of God,” from the book This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. The poem is dedicated to Lewis Thomas, who wrote the influential book, The Lives of the Cell.

"My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa! And it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Vergil who burn up the whole room; the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment; this is the body …"

To borrow terms from Bly, the poem moves “swiftly and heatedly.” The voice is exuberant. The poem roots itself in longstanding intellectual tradition—represented by Erasmus, Virgil, and the Arab scientist. It attests to the interconnectedness, the unity, of all people across time and place—and our connection with the divine.

"The cells dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them. To them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the throat of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says: 'Now do you still say you cannot choose the Road?'"

.............

This poem bears the hallmarks of Bly's style, including, for example, his exuberance and mystical strain. If the poet Mirabai (whom Bly translated into English and popularized in the U.S.) had written prose poems, they would sound like this!

"The Executive’s Death"

The opening title sequence of Mad Men features a business executive—that is, a man in a business suit carrying a briefcase—falling from a height, past skyscrapers and billboards. The executive is presumably Don Draper (the main character), though it could apply to a range of men at Sterling Cooper.

This image reminds me of one of Bly's early, and most compelling, poems. “The Executive's Death” was written in the same time period that Mad Men takes place. In his poem, Bly addresses some of the same issues that the show does. The act of falling is a key ingredient in the poem; in Bly’s piece, the executive dies.

Here is a portion of the poem:

Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day;
The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.
The crane handler dies; the taxi driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile high in the air an executive
Walks on cool floors, and suddenly falls.
Dying, he dreams he is lost in a snowbound mountain
On which he crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus ...

- The Light Around the Body (Harper & Row: New York, 1967), pg. 3.

Inspired Drunkenness: The Poetry of Hafez

Since the 1960s, Robert Bly has helped introduce many foreign language poets to American readers. These have included Rumi, Kabir, and other poets from the ecstatic Islamic tradition. In The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, Bly and Leonard Lewisohn (a noted scholar of Sufism and Islam) offer thirty translations from Hafez.

Last night I heard angels pounding on the door
Of the tavern. They had kneaded the clay of Adam,
And they threw the clay in the shape of a wine cup.

Bly describes Hafez’s poems as moving “in a jagged manner.” Hafez’s poems are ghazals: comprised of rhyming couplets, each stanza can substantively stand on its own (Bly and Lewisohn don’t adhere strictly to the form in these translations). Bly playfully warns that “one has to be light on one’s feet to read a Hafez poem all the way through. A poem of his might begin in some pre-historical time, before the creation of human beings, and that would lead directly to a description of Muhammad as a fisherman with a net or to a complaint that Hafez is wasting his life.”

Whether linear or “jagged,” Hafez’s poems are energetic and unrestrained, and move quickly. Topics range from resisting the clerical hierarchy to getting drunk.

Don’t expect obedience, promise keeping, or rectitude
From me; I’m drunk. I’ve been famous for carrying
A wine pitcher around since the First Covenant with Adam.

Hafez’s ecstatic approach to life, including drinking and carousing, is grounded in the Sufi tradition, especially in the ideal of the rind – the “inspired libertine.” According to Lewisohn, the rind is “a righteous sinner, a blessed reprobate, a pious rake, a holy renegade from the faith …” The rind’s lifestyle is in part based on the rejection of the material world and an understanding that the world to come is the true one. Ultimately, the goal of approaching the divine underpins much of Hafez’s poetry.

Purely because of his love for you, Hafez became
As rich as Solomon; and from his longing for union with you,
Like Solomon, he has nothing but wind in his hands.

Bly and Lewishohn’s translations are buoyant and rich – a consistent pleasure to read. However, Bly’s translations of different poets have been criticized for sounding the same. For example, in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Dana Gioia writes, “In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale and Machado, not only all sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly … ” (p. 153).

A perusal will reveal that these translations of Hafez do indeed share key similarities with Bly’s translations of other mystic poets. The rhythm and cadence of the lines are similar. They share a colloquial, idiomatic language, too. For instance, here is an excerpt from a translation of Rumi:

My poems resemble the bread of Egypt – one night
Passes over the bread, and you can’t eat it anymore.

So gobble my poems down now, while they’re still fresh,
Before the dust of the world settles on them.2

When the topics are similar, it becomes even more difficult to distinguish the authors of the poems. In the following example, the poet Ghalib mentions wine drinking. The poem sounds like it could have been written by Hafez:

Just put a wineglass and some wine in front of me;
Words will fall out of my mouth like apple blossoms.

People imagine that I hate, but it’s merely jealously.
That’s why I scream, “Don’t say her name in my presence!”3

Despite the similarities, however, a distinct voice does emerge in Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door. After just a few readings, the reader is able to discern and appreciate Hafez’s unique personality, likes and dislikes, and set of concerns.

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door provides a tantalizing taste of Hafez. Hafez’s poetry offers so much – from relevant responses to contemporary religious questions to a model of vigorous living. Most fundamentally, the poetry is a blast.

New Poem - "I Have Daughters and I Have Sons"

Robert Bly has published a new poem in the April 19, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. Entitled "I Have Daughters and I Have Sons," the poem is comprised of seven numbered, unrhymed quatrains. Here is the first:

Who is out there at 6 A.M.? The man
Throwing newspapers onto the porch,
And the roaming souls suddenly
Drawn down into their sleeping bodies.

I'm a longtime subscriber of The New Yorker, and I read the poems in most issues. What strikes me about Bly's poem is how it stands in contrast to much of the other poetry in the magazine. The poem is vivid and "alive." It not only has a strong and distinctive voice; it possesses -- to use a general word -- "personality." In this, it achieves the quality that Bly values in other poetry, what he has sometimes termed "liveliness."

Bly is sometimes looked down upon, or criticized, for his forays into the worlds beyond poetry: his involvement in the men's movement, his politics, even his persona. A poem like Daughters and Sons reminds us how much the senior poet has to offer -- and what's missing from much contemporary poetry.

I've always loved Yeats's fierceness
As he jumped into a poem,
And that lovely calm in my father's
Hands as he buttoned his coat.