Robert Bly won the National Book Award in 1968. Pictured above is him in 2008.
Jim Mone / AP
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Jim Mone / AP
Robert Bly won the National Book Award in 1968. Pictured above is him in 2008.
Jim Mone / AP
The poet Robert Bly, a tireless advocate of his art form who for half a century transformed American poetry and was also at the center of the controversial men’s movement, is over. life on Sunday. He was 94 years old.
Bly’s death was confirmed on Monday by his friend, neighbor and colleague, James Lenfestey. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Bly, who lived in Minneapolis, was out of public attention for nearly a decade before her death.
Bly argued in her 1990 book, Iron John: A Book About Men, that society made men disconnected from their emotions, and he knew he could rub people the wrong way. “I remember people wanting to kill me, but that’s not unusual,” he say in 2010.
He was a sly farm boy from southern Minnesota who served in the Navy, then went to Harvard with poet Donald Hall and author George Plimpton. After graduating in 1950, he grew tired of life on the East Coast and moved West. He received his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and later returned to farm life in the town of Madison, Minn.
In 1958, Bly launched a literary magazine called The fifties with his friend William Duffy. In the first issue, they stated their point of view: “The editors of this journal think that most poems published in America today are too old-fashioned.” The fifties has become a must-read for American poetry.
Bly said they received entries from some of the most famous poets of the time, but most of them turned them down. “Bill [Duffy] He recalls in 1999 being a genius during these rejections. “He would say things like, ‘Dear Mr. Jones, These poems remind me of dentures. Best regards, William Duffy. ‘ Or, “Dear Mr. Jones, These poems are like lettuce that’s been left out in the fridge for too long.” And then we’ll get those offensive letters back and we’ll print those letters because they have more interest and energy than the poem. “
Journal do prints poems by Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and James Wright, as well as Bly’s translations of poets unknown to most American audiences – poets such as Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado.
The fifties also published Bly’s own poems. Daughter Mary Bly recalls her father’s lengthy writing process: “You write a poem, you put it in a box; you take it out a year later, you rewrite it intensely in two weeks; you put it back in the crate; pulling it back happens. You’re bringing along months and years of your life to execute an idea that turns into 16 lines.”
Bly won the National Book Award in 1968 and became a very public advocate of poetry. In 2009, Lenfestey organized a conference to explore the poet’s influence. At the time, he said that Bly had “really changed the way poetry is read and heard in America. He’s going to draw huge crowds of, in some cases, you know, thousands of people spread across the globe. hillsides in California.”
Iron John
Books about men
In the mid-60s, Bly co-founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War, and some have speculated his activism was the reason he never became an American poet.
Bly is particularly interested in the deeper meaning of fairy tales and the origins of gender roles in modern society. The two have come together in Iron John: A Book About Men, in which the poet used a story in the Brothers Grimm to argue that society leaves men without their feelings and deep affections, and that causes problems for everyone.
He said in an interview in the mid-1990s: “There is a lot of disrespect for men that has been going on for a long time in our culture.
The book, which focuses on making men more sensitive, took 62 weeks to New York Times bestseller lists and became the focal point of the fledgling men’s movement. It attracted great media attention, but was also seen as anti-women. Bly and his supporters denied this, and he continued to write into his 80s.
Admirers consider Bly’s later poems some of his finest. Bly herself cited the 2011 poem “Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat” to describe his feelings about growing old: “Each of us deserves forgiveness,” he said, ” If only / Our perseverance in keeping our little boat afloat / Then many people died in the storm.”
Bly can seem just as confusing at times, his second wife, Ruth, once said that whenever he writes poetry, he always smiles.
