Air Mail

In 1964, Robert Bly was living in Madison, Minnesota, publishing poets from across the world. Tomas Tranströmer, a psychologist by training, was igniting Sweden with his poetic insights into the mind. The two men, destined to win a National Book Award (Bly in 1968) and a Nobel Prize (Tranströmer in 2011), began corresponding. Bly, in Minneapolis, is now 86 and dealing with Alzheimer’s. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. A new book, Airmail ($30, Graywolf), compiles nearly 300 of their letters. We asked Bly to reflect on the friendship.

What attracted you to Tomas’s work?
I loved the way he could speak so calmly, as if talking to a friend, and nevertheless put in his opinions about weighty subjects. He was (and is) a genius with the image and had a better friendship with it than any American poet I was acquainted with at that time.

Do you have a favorite poem of his?
My favorite poem of Tomas’s is, I think, “The Scattered Congregation.” The second stanza says, Inside the church, pillars and vaulting / white as plaster / like the cast around the broken arm of faith. Another stanza says, But the church bells have gone underground. / They’re hanging in the sewage pipes. / Whenever we take a step, they ring. That’s amazing; we all know that the church bells are not as much alive inside of us as they were, but he says they’re still there. It’s a brilliant metaphor.

Tomas has a background in psychology. How does this come through in his poetry?
He’s always ready to see a friend turn his back and disappear, so reading him is like listening to two people at once. One minute he’s there, the next minute he’s in Australia.

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