We Love you Robert Bly

Happy Birthday Robert Bly. I'll never forget the reading you gave in 1991. We were in the front row in Franklin at Dean College. All four of us cried as you read your father poems. Orion was in the sky that night. I dreamed of your father's bare white leg draped over a bail of hay. I sent you a letter and you wrote me back. A lovely correspondence. Happy Birthday.

from today's Writer's Almanac:


Three Kinds of Pleasures
by Robert Bly

I

Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin
Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles
One by one lift themselves out of the fence line
And slowly leap on the gray sky -
And past them, the snowy fields.

II

The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields
In Wisconsin: and on these black trees
Scattered, one by one,
Through the winter fields -
We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,
And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the
combine.

III

It is a pleasure, also, to be driving
Toward Chicago, near dark,
And see the lights in the barns.
The bare trees more dignified than ever,
Like a fierce man on his deathbed,
And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.

"Three Kinds of Pleasures" by Robert Bly, from Silence in the Snowy Fields. © Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

t's the birthday of poet Robert Bly (books by this author), born in Madison, Minnesota (1926). He grew up on a farm in the prairies of western Minnesota, and went to Harvard, where his classmates were poets like Donald Hall, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O'Hara. Those years were exciting and stimulating, but afterward, he said: "I had spent up my available capital for extroversion in college, and I had to be by myself." He decided that he would spend a year living alone and writing, but that one year stretched into four. First he lived in a cabin in northern Minnesota, where he made his money by hunting partridge. Then he moved to New York City, and to support himself he worked one day a week as a painter. His boss knew he wanted to be alone, so he gave Bly a job painting the interior of a giant warehouse by himself, a job that took him many weeks.

He didn't have enough money for a regular apartment, so he rented a studio from an artist during the week. She thought Bly was just using it to write in during the day, but actually he was sleeping there at night and sneaking out to use the bathroom. On Saturdays, when the artist was in her studio painting, Bly slept in Grand Central Station. He barely talked to anyone during that time. He said: "I lost something too. The poems I wrote at Harvard were not great, but they enjoyed some language that we inhabit together surreptitiously; people could hear what I was saying. [...] I could see myself losing the common language that we, as humans, have. Word after word had disappeared into some huge hole."

He visited one of his Harvard professors, who was worried about Bly, and sent him to Iowa City for a writing grant. He ended up teaching there, and he married Carol McLean, a woman he had met on a blind date when he was at Harvard. Together they moved to a farm just down the road from where Bly had grown up. The poems he wrote there became his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). He said, "I never would have written a book that interesting if I had not moved back to the country where I was a child."