Friday, January 15, 2016

Legendary Poet Robert Bly and his most recent collection "LIKE THE NEW MOON, I WILL LIVE MY LIFE"



Christal Cooper

Excerpts granted copyright privilege by Robert Bly and White Pine Press.

Article – 1,976 Words


Legendary Poet Robert Bly:
The Chinese Connection
Like The New Moon, I Will Live My Life


       Robert Bly’s 23rd poetry collection Like The New Moon, I Will Live My Life was published on March 24, 2015 by White Pine Press.



       Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life is 218 pages of 171 poems divided into fifteen sections from Bly’s fifteen out-of-print books, chapbooks, and uncollected work spanning 53 years:

       A Private Fall 1995
       Angels of Pompeii (with Stephen Brigidi) 1991


       Gratitude to Old Teachers 1993


       Holes the Crickets Have Eaten in Blankets 1997

       In The Month of May 1984


Jumping Out Of Bed 1973


       Old Man Rubbing His Eyes 1975


       Out of the Rolling Ocean 1984


       The Apple Found in the Plowing 1989


       The Lion’s Tail and Eyes:  Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence 1962


       The Loon 1977


       The Moon on a Fencepost 1988


The Urge to Travel Long Distances 2005


       This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years 1979


       Turkish Pears in August and other Ramages 2007



Robert Bly has sixteen additional poetry collections not included in Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life:

Silence in the Snowy Fields


       The Light Around The Body


       Sleepers Joining Hands


       This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopher Wood


       The Man in the Black Coat Turns


       Loving a Woman in Two Worlds


       Selected Poems 1986


       What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems


       Meditations on the Insatiable Soul


       Morning Poems


       Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems


       The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War.


       The Night Abraham Called To The Stars


       My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy


       Talking into the Ear of a Donkey


       Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems 1950-2013.      



Robert Bly first came on the poetry scene in 1956 when he won a Fulbright scholarship that allowed him to travel to Norway to translate Norwegian poetry. 


                                Robert Bly at Harvard in 1951 

While there in Norway, he discovered Pablo Neruda, and was influenced by Neruda’s protean poetry. 

                                          Pablo Neruda in 1963.

The protean poetry’s definition is a mixture of scientific and poetic meanings – it is usually an ameba (an eukaryotic organism) having the ability to change in shape, form, or characters.  An example of an eukaryotic organism is the mushroom, which is the focus of Bly’s below poem:

Mushroom Painting by Jan Voerman Jr Russula in 1952
                                
Picking Mushrooms in Late Summer in the Western
Half of the Island of Runmaro with Tomas Transtromer

The mushrooms loom in the grass like extremely stupid    
             thoughts.
They are skies from which parachutes never fall.
From us, too, sometimes a poem falls, sometimes not.
Delighted to be together, we are out in the summer woods,
          picking mushrooms.

Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer


       “Picking Mushrooms” meets the criteria of a protean poem in many ways:  mushrooms change personalities – first it is an individual’s stupid faults, then it is the skies that prevent the parachutes (in the form of poems) to fall, only to change back to the literal mushroom – where two poets pick mushrooms not only to eat, but a symbolic act of their friendship. 

Tomas Transtromer and Robert Bly 

The poem exemplifies the elements of protean poetry by combining the humor and the serious without diminishing the quality of the other.  The humor is that even though these two poets have stupid thoughts in the form of skies that prevents poetry from being birthed, they are still able to write poetry, allowing the poetry to fall like seed in the woods, where the seeds represent their friendship, which is expressed by the intimate act of picking mushrooms in the summer woods.

                                 
Robert Bly in the 1970s 

       Bly’s most dominant influences as a poet are the Chinese poets that he encountered in the 1960s:  through the translations of Arthur Waley, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robert Payne’s anthology on Chinese poets.  

Arthur Waley 

Kenneth Roxroth

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne 


This discovery was so prevalent in Robert Bly’s life that he stated in a 1968 interview:  “The ancient Chinese poetry still seems to me the greatest poetry ever written.”

Robert Bly and his two daughters Bridget and Mary in the 1960s.

       Thomas Smith wrote the introduction to Like The New Moon, I Will Live My Life. 

Thomas Smith 

In the introduction, “Robert Bly’s Less-Traveled Road”, Smith describes two-thirds of the 171 poems as having the same elements as the great Chinese poets that Bly so aptly admires and adheres to:  freedom in spaciousness, space around the words, space making it possible for the reader to read the poem and inhabit that space, phenomena being observed both outside and inside the poet, and the informality and spontaneity of the Chinese-influenced style.

"Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain" by Emperor Gaczong.
Part of the John B Elliot Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
given to the Museum as a bequest of John M. Crawford Jr in 1988

       “In Bly’s Chinese-style poems, an essentially meditative consciousness affirms the importance of work, solitude, and acceptance of grief and suffering to spiritual well being.  These poems collectively suggest a practice for maintaining spiritual wholes in physically dismembering times when wide-spread “death-mother” energy claims many victims.”

                                            Robert Bly 

       Ancient Chinese poets express their emotions by fusing their feelings into external objects, which could be described as imagery, but not image.   Image refers to concrete physical objects where as imagery refers to the fusion of the poets’ subjective feelings with objective scenes.  In ancient Chinese poetry, a poem is usually composed of several imageries, which the poet uses to arouse emotional associations and, at the same time, to enrich their poetic context.

                     15th Century Painting inspired by Daoism "Poetry On a Mountaintop"

       In most of Robert Bly’s poems there is the imagery of birds, water, trees, snow, bones, and rocks.  It is through these imageries that Bly is able to encounter isolation, solitude, the acceptance of grief and suffering while at the same time experience some form of spiritual well-being even if it is in the simple recognition of sorrow and unwanted change.

                                Robert Bly 

       An example of this sorrow and unwanted change while at the same time appreciation for humanity is Bly’s “Poem for James Wright” dedicated to James Wright, a fellow poet who was also influenced by the Chinese poets.

James Wright 

Poem for James Wright

When I read your lines
I sometimes see, like
Hair on the back of hands,
Suffering
Grown out from between words.
Whole companies,
Battalions, died
In Guam.  The surviving
Brothers drift on rafts
Scattered on the ocean,
Like the ocean-
People, going with the currents,
Sheltered
By one or two palm leaves
Shaped like ears.
You put your elegant
Language skiff into the brine,
As if to say, The octopus
Living in the grenade shell
Is still beautiful.

                               James Wright and Robert Bly 

       Moon and insects are perhaps the most popular symbolisms used in Chinese poetry and Bly uses them expertly in “Night Farmyard” where horses and chickens and perhaps humanity are symbolized by the bark of a cottonwood tree on a journey that ends at the moon.

                               Painting "Moonlight Sonata" by R.A. Blakelock in 1892

Night Farmyard

The horse lay on his knees sleeping,
A rat hopped across the scattered hay
And disappeared under the henhouse.
There the chickens sat in a stiff darkness.

Asleep they are like the bark fallen from an old cottonwood.
Yet we know their soul is gone, risen
Far into the upper air above the moon.

Bly continues the connection between death and the moon and newness in “For My Brother, a Year After His Death.”

                     "Two Men Contemplating The Moon" by  Caspar David Friedrich

For My Brother, a Year After His Death

Last night, full moon, I walked the roads
              where we played-
Walking between the plowed fields, silent and alone.
I thought of you, seeing black earth
Show clear above the new fallen snow.
Like riverbanks, above water, or the chest of
              graves.

       In “Insect Heads” insects experience death but their final destination is not the moon but another life through reincarnation. 

Adult female Iris Oratoria performs a fluffing threat display, rearing 
back with the forelegs or wings spread and mouth opened

Insect Heads

These insects, golden
And Arabic, sailing in the husks of galleons,
Their octagonal heads also
Hold sand paintings of the next life.

In “Silence” the insect this time a bug takes on the same quest as humans – that of the continuous search.

                     Adult Box Elder Bug.  Attributed to Bruce Martin  CCASA 2.5 Generic 

Something homeless is looking on the long roads-
A dog lost since midnight, a small duck
Among the odorous reeds,
Or a tiny box-elder bug searching for the windowpane.

Excerpt, Page 27

       In “Wind” the grasshopper takes on the persona of an individual that either commits suicide or takes a big risk in life in order to live to the fullest, depending on the reader’s interpretation.

                       Grasshopper flying.


Wind

The grasshopper on the cliff
Leaps about
Recklessly, two hundred feet above the water!

       Insects take on the form of life in “Women We Never See Again.”

Moths hatched in winter disappear behind books.

Excerpt, Page 85

       In “Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning” crickets exemplify being at peace, something us humans have been trying to do since the beginning of time. 

                      cricket

                                                                           There is a hum-ming in my body, it is jealous of no one.  The cricket lays its wings one   over  the   other,   a  faint  whispery   sound    rises   up  to its  head . . . which it hears . . . and disregards . . . listening for the next sound. . .

Excerpt, Page 93

       In “Gnats”, the insect gnat takes on a ghost like identity constantly in the state of change.


Gnats

This cloud of gnats resembles
Ghost substance-
It changes
Shape, lifts or sinks.

They are too excited –
They can’t be feeding.
So few days to live
And they spend it this way!

       Bly, in his poem “A Moth with Black Eyes”, depicts the moth as having the capability of incest, which can be jarring for the reader, until the reader learns about the Navajo legend, a departure from the Chinese connection, that helps explain the poem’s meaning. 

                      
The Navajo legend tells the story of the male butterfly god Begochidi, who leads the butterfly people and has sexual relations with both the males and females.  Soon Begochidi leaves the country and the butterfly people decide to commit incest instead of have sex with outsiders to produce.  This causes the butterfly people to go insane, which explains, why moths have the tendencies to rush into flames. 


       “A Moth with Black Eyes” could also refer to the Chinese folklore of moths – that the moth or butterfly is actually the souls of loved ones who have died coming to visit those that still live.  The soul of the individual who has died is not ready to move onto the next world, which explains their restlessness and why the moth flies in a hesitant manner, particularly in fire.


       It is the speaker of the poem, a writer, telling of his experience of the moth climbing up his left arm, left hand, thumb, and finally his chest.  The moth becomes a great many of things:  a messenger for the other world, a human in disguise, simply an insect communicating with another species.   However one interprets this poem, one thing cannot be denied: the sense of humanness in everything.


                                 Robert Bly 


A Moth with Black Eyes

         A moth climbs down the sleeve of my sweater onto my left hand, as I write with the other.  He waits there, among all the lamplit hairs.  Then his antennae begin to move, as if a band were starting down the street, and he moves swiftly up my thumb – reaching the end, he turns around and goes back, and up the chest of my brown sweater.
         Lamplight falls on his compressed, intense body, so self-contained, free of the longing for incest.  How far he is out on the plain!  His head is a haystack of brown fur, a hatrack with two mad gleaming eyes in front, and witchlike wands going out to either side, to poke into the other world, and see what the eyes cannot see.
         And my big moving chest, what is it!  I scratch the side of my nose, and a shadow falls across the chest. Outside the night goes on, on all sides into November, children are sitting near each other, on sofas, waiting for supper . . .

To order Like The New Moon, I Will Live My Life from Amazon click on the below link:



       To order Like The New Moon, I Will Live My Life from White Pine Press click on the below link:

                                Robert Bly at a book singing for LTNM,IWLML on April 15, 2015


1 comment:

  1. This is lovely, thank you for sharing these thoughts and pictures. Robert Bly has been my favorite poet since I read his first three books in the 60's and 70's. I danced with him once, in awe, at Centrum. I saw him read in Missoula at a time of his full power and energy, with his masks, in full voice. All that stays with me. The moon on the fencepost to me signifies the essence of him. I think that Teeth Mother Naked at Last is a poem of such power and passion and truth and sheer poetic mastery and skill that it ranks with the very best poems of the last 2 centuries, yet so few people know it. But those who do, cherish poems like this, and him. --Leslie McClintock

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