Robert Bly Documentary

Film: A Thousand Years of Joy

Legacy film ‘Robert Bly’ is a visual poem

By Pamela Espeland | 04/13/2016
Courtesy of Haydn Reiss
A still from “Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy”

In 2011, when poet Robert Bly was turning 85, California-based filmmaker Haydn Reiss decided to make him a gift. “I said to myself, ‘I have a lot of footage from over the years. I’ve had him in three other documentaries. Maybe I’ll put together a little 10-minute piece for his birthday and send it on to the family and they can look at it.’”

This week we can all see how that turned out, when Reiss’ 81-minute documentary film “Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy” screens at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. And it only took four years, 25 interviews in five states and two countries, and a lot of what documentary filmmakers do: research, reading, raising money.

With “Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy,” Reiss has created a legacy film – the only one so far – about a great Minnesota poet whose passion, politics, ecstatic spiritualism, earthiness and image-filled yet plainspoken language have influenced countless writers, including Louise Erdrich and Tracy K. Smith. He has also created a beautiful film, a visual poem to and about Bly, dusted with snow, filled with poetry, stories and music.

Reiss first encountered Bly at a men’s event in Ojai, California, in 1990 or 1991. (Those were the “Iron John” years, and whatever you may think of Bly’s time as a pop phenom, that best-selling book and Bly’s gatherings meant a lot to many men, including actor Mark Rylance, who appears in the film.) “I get there,” Reiss said in conversation, “and there are 300 men, including Martin Sheen and his boys. I was still a naïve, immature man. My immaturity about where I was in my life was revealed to me. … I wish I could have made a time machine to send everybody back 20 years to one of those events, where Robert is in full power and form and brilliance, and have you taste that, because it’s life-changing.”

The film follows Bly’s life from his boyhood on a farm near Madison, Minnesota, where he memorized Omar Khayyam as he plowed the fields, to the Navy, then Harvard, where he worked on the literary magazine and thought about poetry as a profession. Offered a scholarship to graduate school, he turned it down “on the grounds that I was already too intellectual and told enough lies.” He went to New York, as aspiring artists of all kinds did (and still do), and had some tough years there. He returned to Minnesota and a house on his father’s farm.

“He felt defeated,” Reiss said. “Thinking through everything he learned at Harvard, [he realized] that language wasn’t his. He knew that from childhood a few words were real to him – snow, dust. That was the building of the vocabulary of his poetic words, and with that, he found his own path into his own writing.”

Bly married his first wife, Carol McLean (Carol Bly became an award-winning author in her own right), started a family, and launched a magazine called The Fifties, which proudly proclaimed, “The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned.” He critiqued other writers (they all critiqued each other), wrote books and spoke out – eloquently, vociferously, in poetry and in person – against the Vietnam War. “Being a poet does not excuse you from taking part in the national debate,” he has said.

Through his many translations, Bly introduced English-speaking readers to other great poets of the world: Chile’s Neruda, Peru’s Vallejo, Spain’s Machado, Lorca and Jiménez, the 15th-century Sufi poet Kabir, Norway’s Jacobsen and Hauge, Sweden’s Tranströmer, the 19th-century Urdu poet Ghalib, the medieval Persian mystic poet Hafez. “He’s extremely hard-working,” Reiss said. “[Poet] is not just some hip name you give yourself and you write some boring, self-centered, trite stuff and call it a poem.”

Reiss’ own love of poetry shines through his film. “The magic of poems is alchemical,” he said. “Suddenly your soul, your heart, everything is dragged out of you into this gift of language that can help us. [Bly] showed me what poetry could be.”

Many creatives and thinkers talk about Bly’s importance to them, including Erdrich, Smith, Donald Hall, Philip Levine (who passed away in 2015), Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, Lewis Hyde, Thomas R. Smith, Edward Hirsch, Michael Meade, Cornelius Eady and John Densmore, drummer for the Doors (who met Bly through “Iron John”).

Watch for appearances by Minneapolis poet (and former Star Tribune editorial writer) James Lenfestey, a longtime Bly booster, friend and across-the-street neighbor. Lenfestey supported the making of this film. In 2009, when Bly was turning 83, he organized a major conference at the University of Minnesota, “Robert Bly in This World,” to celebrate the acquisition of Bly’s papers by the Elmer L. Andersen Library, an effort he led. If you want to learn more about Bly after seeing the film, you can go to the Andersen and dig in. Bly turns 90 in December.

“Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy” screens twice at the St. Anthony Main Theatre during MSPIFF: tomorrow (Thursday, April 14) at 7:05 p.m. and Sunday at 6:15 p.m. Director Haydn Reiss will attend both screenings. FMI and tickets ($13-$7). Portions of this piece are from a lengthy conversation that took place on April 6.