Monday, 7:00 p.m.
Poet Robert Bly needs no introduction. Bill Holm introduced him anyway. "It simply would not be the Writers Festival without Robert's presence," Holm said. When Bly's first book came out, he said, "we suddenly realized you didn't have to go to other places to make metaphors and to write poems."
Recalling a visit with Bly, Holm said "as always when you went to that farm you came away with a pile of books by poets they didn't teach in school."
"There's nobody quite like Robert," he said. "He's embarrassed by praise but he's Norwegian so there's nothing we can do about it."
"Thank you for being here and so on," Bly said as he stepped to the podium.
The last time I'd heard Bly read was in 1968. He had been electric and I could have fallen under his sway. It was as if I'd stuck my finger in a light socket. "No," I said. "If I get too close to this bolt of lightning I shall never find my voice." Ever since I have held his books at arms' length when I read them; I have had to read his poems upside down. His magic was insidious.
Yet hearing Bly now I found he was not so much lightning bolt as favorite uncle, eccentric but charming. And he is still a tremendous influence in American poetry.
Bly started by reading poems written about the same time that his first book came out; these were recently published as The Urge to Travel Long Distances.
"You're supposed to be able to compare the pretty girls to the farm equipment," he said after reading one of the poems. "I like them both."
Of a cloud of gnats: "So few days to live and they spend it this way."
Referring to this gathering of poets and writers, he added: "Some might say of us, so few days to live and they spent it this way."
"Sometimes when I'm doing poetry workshops," Bly said, "I won't let them keep a line unless they can do a water color of it."
"Here's one for Jim Wright," he said. "He was the worst fisherman in the world."
"By the house of great light I meant the sun. Did I make that clear?" Bly said.
"Whitman is brilliant beyond brilliant," he said, "but you can't just scrape his hide.... You need people who aren't Lutherans, who aren't Republicans."
Of a Neruda poem: "That's so great - did you hear how he finished that?"
"There are so many things to praise," he said, "why don't we do that?"
"I want you to clap your hands for Pablo," he said.
"To go to the opposite of Neruda we should probably have a Norwegian," Bly said. "Only one person laughs...."
"That's what it is like when you live on a tiny bit...."
"All right, enough of that, hmmmm."
"If you want to understand poetry, you have to read more than American poetry."
"Now I'm going to read some of my poems, whether you like it or not."
"That's why you write poems," Bly said. "What's in your dark spot, hmmmm?"
"Your whole life's like some drunkard's dream," he read. "You haven't combed your hair for a whole month."
He shuffled through the pages of a book, looking: "There are so many poems. You can't read them all...."
Of his father: "I do not want or need to be shamed by him any longer.... He never phrased what he desired, and I am his son...."
"Are you okay with another poem about my father? Are you okay?"
"How can you be standing side by side with him and also be looking directly at his chest?" a reader had asked Bly. "You're right, I said, I made a mistake...."
Of his father again: "Look at me when we talk. I should have said that when he was living."
Bly described the ghaizal: "You have 36 syllables and then you have to change the subject.... They don't rhyme, but every stanza ends with the same word.... You mention your own name in the last stanza. I have to use Robert. It's a little embarrassing...."
"Do you feel it?" Bly asked after reading a poem. "If not, you need to listen to more Bach...."
"There's a lake up there. I walked on it one winter. I tried it in the summer, but it didn't work."
Bly is translating Peer Gynt for the Gutherie Theater: "We will have to call especially loud to reach our angels...."
"Have we agreed to so many wars that we cannot lift our voices?" Bly wondered.
"It isn't in that book. It's in some book...."
"It's unbelieveable that it would be a Republican who broke the bank...."
"In Guatemala, they say when you take something out of the earth and shape it into a weapon, you owe the earth a lot, and we're not paying...."
"Many people were disappointed when the bombing was cancelled...."
About the burning of the bodies of Taliban dead in Afghanistan: "That's what the Nazis used to do. For the first time, I feel shame for this country...."
"I want to read two more poems," Bly said. "Are you okay with that? I'll quit if you want me to.... Just kidding...."
"There's no remedy for deep water but listening...."
"I say to parents, if you let your children watch three hours of TV a night, why don't you just take a gun and shoot them," Robert said.
"The only way through the world is to learn the arts and double the madness. Are you listening?"
"People say 'You're getting old, Robert.'"
"I showed my callused hands in court," he read. "My sentence was a thousand years of joy."
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