Robert Bly

October 18, 2018

“Lunacy” by Walter BargenPosted by

Walter Bargen

LUNACY

for Robert Bly

Decades ago he cried,
“No more poems about the moon!”

Torn from its branch,
the moon waned for a couple of weeks.

Summer nights, a magnesium-bright
flare troubled his memory.

No wished-on, bottom-of-the-sky, dreamy coin.
No lover’s mercurial suffering.

For years, he drank fifths of hard light
wrapped in brown bags.

Empties crowded the closet.
He staggered moonstruck across the page.

He’s at it again, declaring the stars a loss.
Chicken Little, he’s down on his knees.

He watches the tides trapped in a sidewalk.
He watches sand make a jailbreak to another universe.

He follows a nervous column of ants
along a crack to the next moon.

—from Rattle #20, Winter 2003

__________

Walter Bargen: “The unmatched pair of shoes next to my bed claim a glorious if not infamous lineage. The right shoe claims to belong to General Douglas MacArthur and keeps saying, ‘I shall return,’ as it fades away on dark shores. The left one was worn by Khrushchev and bangs on the worn oak floor, demanding attention. All night I lie awake dealing with international crises and Madonna still won’t speak to me.”

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January 5, 2013

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF THE DONKEY by Robert BlyPosted by

Reviewed by Gregg MossonTalking into the Ear of the Donkey by Robert Bly

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF THE DONKEY
by Robert Bly

W. W. Norton
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10110
ISBN 978-0-939-08022-3
2011, 107 pp., $24.95
www.wwnorton.com

In this age of electronic technological innovation—from electricity to the Internet—it’s good to know a mystic poet can still live on a farm in America and write about very simple things, in surprising ways.  That poet is Robert Bly.  He does it well in his latest book, Talking Into the Ear of the Donkey, published in his ninth decade.  The book adds to Bly’s oeuvre, especially the opening ghazal poems, as good as any he has written.  Bly’s latest will delight fans, like myself, who encounter this poet late in his life, and discover in fireside-chat language both a mystic and rewarding human perspective on the world and on living.

In “The Sympathies of the Long Married,” Bly combines experiential writing with the leaping imagery and logic long associated with his poetry.  Bly’s confessional work, more prevalent here than in prior collections, is enlarged with learning and references springing from Medieval and Eastern philosophies, mystic poets such as Rilke, Whitman, and Rumi, and to global poetic traditions.  Bly’s Americanized ghazal opens:

Oh well, let’s go on eating the grains of eternity.
What do we care about improvements in travel?
Angels sometimes cross the river on old turtles.

Here we see a poet talking about old age and how it has changed his perspective of time and space.  At the same time, sans biography, the lines above can stand for a statement in favor of the contemplative life over ‘progress’ (in line 2).  Like Blake who could see the world in a grain of sand and alluded to in line 1, Bly is content to travel through the eternities of daily life.  This constitutes a stoical triumph, considering that the poem by implication understands the passing of youth and its pleasures and strengths.  Unlike Blake who saw the world in a grain of sand, and “eternity in an hour,” Bly here is “eating” the grains of eternity.  This review would become a book if I tackled all aspects of this six stanza poem.

Bly’s ghazal offers a three-line stanza, with a repeating phrase often at the end of each stanza, a refrain.  Bly also combines Biblical, literary, and mythological references with casual diction, with questions, and with emotional utterances, all of which creates interesting viewpoints, counterpoints, and rhythms.  In the fifth stanza of the same poem, Bly exclaims:

It’s all right if we’re troubled by the night.
It’s all right if we can’t recall our own name.
It’s all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

In “Paying Attention to the Melody,” the ghazal opens:

All right.  I know each of us will die alone.
It does not matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

Bly poetry presents common wisdom in an inventive way.  Here, it plays with a cliché: Hear the music.  Yet Bly does not simply restate this metaphor.  For instance, the first line begins with a theatrical utterance, as in a play.  “All right,” the poet says, implying an off-stage preceding dialogue.  The in media res beginning creates a desire to know more.  Then Bly states, “I know each of us will die alone,” which is invested with energy here because the phrase is not some objective statement, but a stream-of-consciousness remark after the poet just made up his mind (“All right.”).  The speaker states, “I know,” and decides to believe it.  Thus, maybe there is doubt too.

Lines 2 & 3 then present a conflict that the poem tackles.  The “sitar” player is trying to play his or her own music, to also control music by making it more or less “loud or soft.”  However “[s]ooner or later,” the musician’s creation will express its own “melody” and story: human mortality.  If the opening stanza is interpreted to be about art itself, subjectivity becomes objectivity despite best intentions, and offers unintended and universal messages.  Wisdom, for Bly, is experience’s lesson which we do not always want to hear (“Sooner or later the melody will say it all.”).

Bly ends the poem in a self-knowing and charmingly candid manner:

Robert, don’t expect too much.  You’ve put yourself
Ahead of others for years, a hundred years.
It will take a long time for you to hear the melody.

Poetry readers who prefer the confused contemporary scene of American poetry, where poets use disjunctive language to recreate the experience of being overwhelmed by everything, should look for a different poet.  Readers who believe poetry should teach and delight should dwell here.  Bly’s Talking Into the Ear of the Donkey is only book-ended by ghazals.  There are a number of plain poems in the middle that offer ostensibly autobiographical snippets from the latter part of a long life, in simple elegant writing.  This sort of honest writing can also fall flat, and sometimes does here too.  For readers unfamiliar with Robert Bly, I recommend his first book Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) and the more recent and excellent My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005).  For poetry readers interested in Bly the poet at his most plainspoken and also in his leaping musical idiom, check out Talking Into the Ear of the Donkey (2011).

D.H Lawrence, in his poem “The Mystic,” defines the mystic as someone simply alive to experience.  Lawrence closes: “But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake./  Hogging it down like a pig, I call the feeding of corpses.”  Bly’s work embraces that sort of mystic naturalism of Lawrence and Lawrence’s precursor Walt Whitman.  Unlike them, Bly’s mysticism is also one of detachment from the moment.  Bly mixes the present with the historical and with archetypes.  Here, acrobatic knowledge and allusive, leaping imagery make hearty food.

__________

Gregg Mosson is the author of two books of poetry, Questions of Fire (Plain View, 2009) and Season of Flowers and Dust (Goose River, 2007).  His poetry, literary criticism, and reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Potomac Review, Smartish Pace, Unsplendid, and other journals. He lives in Maryland with his family.

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October 20, 2011

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY by Robert BlyPosted by

Review by A.P. MaddoxTalking into the Ear of a Donkey

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY
by Robert Bly

Norton
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10110
ISBN 978-0-939-08022-3
2011, 107 pp., $24.95
www.wwnorton.com

It is surprising to me, now I think of it, that there aren’t more Robert Blys walking around. All I mean is poets who throw themselves headlong into foreign poetry as a source for new ideas. Ezra Pound, of course, was one of these. But there really aren’t that many.

The juicy ideas are certainly out there for the grabbing. New forms, new openings on the chessboard. Also the poet can get permission to strike all kinds of attitudes he or she would ordinarily regard as illegal. (Take a look at Pound’s Cathay. The “illegal” attitude there was tenderness.)

The danger of taking Martian poetry (including English stuff from, like, the sixteenth century) as your model is that your poetry will end up sounding like a pastiche. You get all excited by Astrophil and Stella, for example, and then you write stuff that’s the poetic equivalent of going over to your friend’s house in an Elizabethan ruff. A certain kind of bright and promising undergraduate is compelled by the laws of physics to do this. Again: Pound was one of these.

The problem is it’s not easy to know precisely what you’re responding to, when you enjoy exotic poetry. Perhaps the poetry of the Mongolian yak herders is knocking you dead, not because it’s actually any good, but because you just like the idea of a little brown man making stuff up while milking a yak. So you wind up imitating the wrong thing.

Now, Bly is no fool, and definitely no beginner. He’s eighty-four, and he’s spent the last ten or twelve years steeped in Urdu and Persian ghazals. He’s been party to a couple of translations, one of Ghalib and one of Hafez. He’s also written three books of his own ghazal-like poems, each one worse than the last, but all three of ’em worth having and reading, at least for me.

I see these three books as a crazy mix of some of the most genuinely excellent stuff being done in American poetry, and some of the most affected and sickening. Let me explain.

The illegal attitude in these three books is that of the oracle. See, these old Muslim poets whom Bly is imitating were not at all shy about throwing down wisdom poetry. They thought the imparting of wisdom was at least half their job. And not just wisdom. Big, perverse, sexy wisdom. Cosmic wisdom.

This is not at all a common view among 21st-century American poets. Mostly what we do is dramatize more-or-less normal states of mind. Hafez and Ghalib do that too, of course, but they don’t like to carry on for more than, say, eight or ten lines without coining some bold paradox about the Universe . . . or Love . . . or God. They like large statements, and they like channeling superhuman authority.

Now, insofar as Bly really does have some genuinely nifty cosmic intuitions, he writes lines that are as bold and subversive and memorable as anything you’d find in an English translation of Hafez or Ghalib. But. He also insists on draping himself in gear out of National Geographic, and drawing up a stool so he can milk the yak. Very few of the poems are free from this oscillation between very good and very embarrassing. It is strange.

I keep going back to Pound. When you read the stuff from his first two or three books, you marvel at the relentless fakery, the Renaissance-Fair bric-a-brac—and then you marvel even more that, of all people, this guy was fated to snap out of it almost completely, and write all that good shit later. But at least that’s a linear narrative. With Bly, you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Send a helicopter over the following gallery of goodies. Every one of these passages is culled from The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001).

EXTRACTS: 1

•

It is the nature of shame to have many children.

•

Too many well-lit necks calls for the axe.

•

He’s baptized in water soaked in onions;

•

He rode all day with fire coming out of his ears […]

EXTRACTS: 2

•

Centuries later, the Mesopotamian gods,
All curls and ears, showed up;

•

Understand this. The journey was a three-day trip,
But it took Pitzeem thirty years.

•

How many boulders had to be ground down
To produce one square inch of the Sahara!

•

When I see a book written two thousand years
Ago, I check to see if my name is mentioned […]

EXTRACTS: 3

•

Swimmers, when they dive down to the pool floor,
Turn sometimes and look up toward the sky;
They see sunlight killing its bulls in the water.

•

I hope you’ve stopped saying that people
Are bad and animals good. Bees have their hives.
Every old frog is a son of Robespierre.

•

Naked men crawl into tunnels to retrieve the giant
Snakes. They don’t resist if pulled out backwards.
Ah, friends, the world pulls us out backwards […]

Right? So, to my mind, all that stuff is A#1. It threatens to suck sometimes, but it just doesn’t. That thing about “every old frog is a son of Robespierre”? C’mon: that’s awesome. But now watch what Bly does. Watch him say (over and over) that it’s all right, that it doesn’t matter, nothing to worry about, everything’s gonna be OK. (These passages are all from the more recent book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. I’m ignoring line breaks.)

All right. I know that each of us will die alone. It doesn’t matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.

It doesn’t matter if we say our prayers or not.

It’s all right if we do nothing tonight.

It’s all right if we’re troubled by the night. It’s all right if we can’t recall our own name. It’s all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

I’ve given up worrying about men living alone.

New people have taken over the motel. It’s all right.

The renegade minister—the one they all gossip about—would see those waves too, after throwing his Sunday hat out the window. He’ll be all right.

It’s all right if you walk down to the shore.

“Oh, never mind about all that,” the donkey says.

It’s all right if I go to college; most people don’t. It’s all right to end up bringing your own father home. Just be quiet.

Let’s not try to cheer each other up. It’s all right.

Go on, be cheerful in autumn, be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm […]

Don’t be afraid. The great lettuce of the world is all around us.

My mother was afraid—oh not of the things you imagine—just tuberculosis, death, and my father. She did all right.

It’s all right if we keep forgetting the way home. It’s all right if we don’t remember when we were born. It’s all right if we write the same poem over and over.

It means our old teacher is still all right.

It’s all right if this suffering goes on for years. It’s all right if the hawk never finds its 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 if we regret our crimes or not.

It’s all right if we can’t remain cheerful all day.

It’s all right if people think we are idiots. It’s all right if we lie face down on the earth. It’s all right if we open the coffin and climb in.

It’s all right if I forget my own brother […]

There is still time for the old days when the musician stayed inside his bubble of joy […]

No one minds if we are scruffy and badly dressed.

I mean, obviously he knows he’s doing this. My point is only that his satisfaction with his formula here seems radically out of proportion to its value. I just keep thinking: Two or three times, OK, but Jesus. . .

Speaking of formulae, watch how Bly handles the words “hundreds” and “thousands.” He knows these words have a yak-herder ring to ’em. So watch him milk the yak ’til it looks like a deflated soccer ball:

HUNDRED(S)

We lost hundreds during the forgetfulness of birth […]

[…] behind our house you’ll find a forest going on for hundreds of miles.

You’ve put yourself ahead of others for years, a hundred years.

Wherever he put his hands on earth the well water was sweet for a hundred miles.

The water of a hundred bowls is poured out on the ground.

A hundred boats are still looking for the shore.

It must be that we’ve already been grieving for a hundred years.

We can stay in grieving another hundred years.

It would be good to go back a hundred years, and recite some of Wordsworth’s sonnets to him.

And a hundred sufferings dissolve in a single chord.

He kept a hundred sorrows alive in him.

THOUSAND(S)

A thousand gifts were given to us in the womb.

[…] we are admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief.

[…] the cows will graze on a thousand acres of thought.

[…] but I believe a thousand pagan ministers will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.

A thousand acres are underwater.

This has been going on for thousands of years!

Perhaps monks a thousand years ago thought there.

You and I have tried in a thousand ingenious ways to keep up with the suffering expected of us.

Each day he fed a thousand Astrakhan lambs.

Do you see what I’m saying? I mean, it’s obvious Bly would look at these lists and say, “Yes, and?” He thinks it’s all pretty terrific. But to me it looks automatic, formulaic, uninspired, lazy as hell.

I’m going to go ahead and let all those empty hundreds and thousands stand for a lot. There are many, many moves in these books that are the same kind of thing. Poetry as conceived by a screenwriter for a Biblical blockbuster of the 1950s. Robe. Shepherd staff. Beard down to here.

Meanwhile, I just read in the latest American Poetry Review a longish interview with Bly. The level of self-approval was approximately infinite. I wondered what that conversation must look like to the dinosaurs who’ve been following Bly’s career ever since Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). That book’ll be fifty years old any minute. Today, the snowy fields are on the heads of Bly’s original readers . . .

I wonder if you’ve ever taken a look at that first book? It’s interesting. Written by this whole other centaur. I don’t know. Bly fascinates me. There’s not a single poem of his I want to type out and email to a friend, and yet he is a mighty deviser of lines and stanzas…

The case is complex, engaging.

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