Euan Kerr interviews Minnesota poet Robert Bly about his collection "Talking into the Ear of a Donkey." Bly reads from book. Segment also includes commentary about Bly from fellow poets Jim Lenfestey and Garrison Keillor, and wife Ruth.
Minnesota's Poet Laureate Robert Bly has enjoyed a contentious career. A winner of the National Book Award for poetry, he's internationally known. He's famed for his English translations of major poets from around the world. He's also infamous to some for his book "Iron John," published in 1990, which became the basis for a men's movement of sorts.
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EUAN KERR: In the cool shadows of his Minneapolis living room, blinds drawn against the summer heat, Robert Bly sits in a large armchair, his head haloed by a shock of white hair. He reaches for a copy of his new book.
ROBERT BLY: All right. What kind of a poem would you like?
EUAN KERR: It's an intimidating question, but one called Starting a Poem seems like a good choice.
ROBERT BLY: You're alone. Then there's a knock on the door. It's a word. You bring it in. Things go OK for a while, but this word has relatives. Soon they turn up. None of them work. They sleep on the floor, and they steal your tennis shoes.
You started it; you weren't content to leave things alone. Now the den is a mess, and the remote is gone. That's what being married is like. You never receive your wife only, but the madness of a family. Now you see what's happened? Where's your car? You haven't been able to find the keys for a week.
EUAN KERR: Bly smiles broadly.
ROBERT BLY: That's kind of cute.
EUAN KERR: Can I ask you where that one came from?
ROBERT BLY: I haven't any idea. I haven't any idea where this came from. I look at it with amazement myself. Yeah.
EUAN KERR: With more than 40 books of poetry and prose to his name already, perhaps that isn't surprising. After decades of writing, Robert Bly still describes it as an adventure.
ROBERT BLY: A poem is always like going downhill in a sled. And you just hope that it'll gain some speed and that you won't crash at the end, and that you'll say, Oh wow, that's amazing.
EUAN KERR: But it's never a sure thing. Robert Bly discards a lot of what he writes.
ROBERT BLY: Either I'm lying about myself or lying about someone else, or simply my imagination fails and it's stupid. So there's a lot of throwing out that happens when you're doing a book of poems.
EUAN KERR: Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey is filled with images from the modern world and the ancient, the sacred and the profane. In one, the Super Bowl rub shoulders with Longinus, the Roman soldier said to have speared Christ on the cross.
A reader will find a strong undercurrent of longing and grief in some of the new poems. In others, those emotions break the surface.
ROBERT BLY: It's hard to grasp how much generosity is involved in letting us go on breathing when we contribute nothing valuable but our grief. Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat when so many have gone down in the storm.
That's what it feels like when you get to be my age. Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat when so many have gone down in the storm.
EUAN KERR: Robert Bly has a reputation for fierceness at times, often railing against what he saw as wrong with the world. In his book Iron John urged men to be more self-aware and assert the positives of manhood. It attracted international attention and a huge backlash.
ROBERT BLY: Well, that's an interesting. I don't remember all that exactly, but I do remember people wanting to kill me. But that's not unusual.
EUAN KERR: And says he's glad he raised the subject. Now his ferocity seems to be turned inwards. Robert Bly has never spared himself from introspection and rigorous self-criticism, and this appears in the new poems.
ROBERT BLY: It's hard to go through life without realizing how many of your old friends are gone and how many disasters have taken place. So it's hard to live without a little bit of grief. Probably grief for your own idiocy would be a part of that.
EUAN KERR: However, Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey is far from glum. It's filled with poems that are refreshing, energizing, and even laugh out loud funny.
JIM LENFESTY: Metaphor is the great fuel of poetry, and most poets are quite lucky if they get off one in a poem if any. these days, Robert gets off one a line.
EUAN KERR: Jim Lenfesty, a former editorial writer for the star tribune, writes and teaches poetry. He organized a conference last year, which was the basis for a new book from the University of Minnesota Press called Robert Bly in the World. Lenfesty says real poetic geniuses are rare. He points to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the 19th century.
JIM LENFESTY: In the 20th, who do we have? We had Ezra Pound and TS Eliot at the beginning, and we got-- I firmly believe Robert Bly was the great genius of our last half of the 20th century. And so he can do things that nobody else can do.
EUAN KERR: Lenfesty talks about Bly's championing of the ghazal, an ancient Persian form which Bly has made his own, and his invention of the Ramage, a style of poem which depends more on sound than on meter and rhyme.
JIM LENFESTY: It's really a sort of an exercise in the dance of short vowels. And they do dance. They just dance right along.
EUAN KERR: Lenfesty also notes how Bly translated 28 poets into English from 10 different languages. That in itself, he says, is an incredible contribution to modern American poetry. Bly has another friend and fan in Garrison Keillor. He describes Bly as a mystical, lyrical poet.
GARRISON KEILLOR: He has written some of his best poems past the age of 70, and 75, and 80. He's been a daring and productive writer in his old age. And to me, this is brave and elegant and just completely admirable.
EUAN KERR: Back in his Minneapolis living room, Robert Bly launches into another poem from the new collection. As has long been his practice, he comments as he reads.
ROBERT BLY: It's all right if this suffering goes on for years. That's a good beginning. It's all right if the hawk never finds his own nest. It's all right if we never receive the love we want.
It's all right if we listen to the sitar for hours. It doesn't matter how softly the musician plays. Sooner or later, the melody will say it all.
It doesn't matter-- it's getting a little deeper here. It doesn't matter if we regret our crimes or not. The mice will carry out defeats into Asia. And the Tuva throat-singers will tell the whole story.
It's all right if we can't remain cheerful all day. That task we have accepted is to go down. To renew our friendship with the ruined things.
It's all right if people think we are idiots. It's all right if we lie face down in the earth. It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in.
It's not our fault that things have gone wrong. Let's agree it was Satan and the other old men who have arranged this series of defeats for us.
EUAN KERR: Robert Bly still writes almost every day. He's also working on a book of his selected poems. His wife Ruth acts as a sounding board for him.
RUTH: I'll tell you a little secret, though. I have never seen him working on poems when he wasn't smiling at what he was doing. It looks so good to him, I think. Even the old ones, he smiles when he's looking at them.
EUAN KERR: Bly nods in agreement and quietly says, they are my children. Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio news, Minneapolis.