Tuesday, 9:00 a.m.
Bly strode in and immediately set people to rearranging tables and chairs. "Someone equally bossy will move them back.... Now that feels more like school, doesn't it...."
He watched people coming and sitting down: "Even the criminals are here...."
David Pichaske introduced Bly: "Let's start on time, huh? There were giants on the earth in those days. Two of them were named Robert and they lived in Minnesota...."
Pichaske thinks of Bly as "the three-letter athlete of poetry."
"It's ironic that it was a Lutheran from Minnesota who put soul back into American poetry," Pichaske said. Bly was a social conscience, protesting the war in Vietnam. And Bly led "Iron John" and the men's movement.... "He's got some kind of weird ideas...."
Bly moved back from New York to little Madison, Minnesota, Pichaske said, "and he turns out to be one of the big ones...."
Bly spoke on "The State of American Poetry Now," and discussed the best things about poetry in the past forty years.
1. Poetry workshops. "The writing of poetry now has a place in the university. Many poets make their livings in the university, which wasn't the case formerly."
2. "Women are taking a much larger part in American poetry now."
Quoting Mary Oliver: "I thought the earth remembered me. She took me back so tenderly...." "That's terrific," Bly said, "better than Thoreau actually...."
Of Sharon Olds: "This is a truth teller. She never heard of nature in her whole life; human beings, that's what she writes about.... Is that a truth teller, or what? She's really a vast, happy woman.... I like these poems that tell the truth about your father and everything else...."
Bly read the letter Olds had sent Laura Bush declining an invitation to the White House: "But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you...." "She's coming to the point here," Bly noted. The letter was published in The Nation.
"I don't suppose Laura Bush wrote back," Bill Holm called out from the audience.
Of Jane Hirschfield: "She was the first one to come out of all that Zen stuff in California with her mind still intact.... You know that bare wall stuff? How do you write about it?"
Bly read from Hirschfield: "One day in that room, a small rat. Two days later, a small snake...."
"There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing...."
"That's not appealing to anything magnificent or dramatic.... That's as good a poem as you're going to get out of the Zen people, I'll tell you that...."
"That's the incredible subtlety that women have.... If it were men, it would be all on the table.... I'm not saying all men are like that, just all the ones I know...."
3. "Poetry has a foundation in many places - San Francisco, Minnesota, Chicago, Iowa City, Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Alaska." Fairwater, Wisconsin, I might add.
4. Translations. "That's a good development."
Bly quoted Rumi: "If this is the cat, where's the meat? If this is the meat, where's the cat?"
5. "The prose poem has become established in the United States. Louis Jenkins, who is here, is the best one in the country at the prose poem.
Quoting Jenkins: "It was as if here were an agent of fate.... If only he could have been a Pony Express rider galloping into a prairie town with an empty bag...."
6. "The national Poet Laureate position has become more important."
"We've got a Poet Laureate from Nebraska. Unheard of!"
7. "A number of good anthologies have come out...."
Bly also listed the worst things about poetry in the past forty years.
1. Writing workshops. "Students become completely self-absorbed. They read only their own stuff."
"The emphasis should not be on yourself in poetry. That's not what it's about...."
2. "Too many books of poetry are published in this country, bad books...."
3. "People mistake APR (American Poetry Review) for a poetry magazine. If you've got three bad poems, they won't print them. If you've got fifteen bad poems, they'll print them...."
4. "The young ones are not passionate about what's great...."
"The American language is a glory and the English are trying to learn it. They're sending spies over here...."
"The young ones are not putting attention on the older generation.... they need to rebel...."
"People would send us really insulting letters and we'd print the letters. They were better than the poems...."
"You need to break away from your parents.... Snuggling up to your parents is destructive.... It's not only poetry I'm talking about, it's in the whole culture...."
"... a work of art is only as good as how difficult it was to get it...."
"There's a wonderful lot of black poetry, Etheridge Knight for instance...."
"That's it," Bly said. "That's all I have to say.... All right, so good night, good-bye...."
Comments