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Morton Marcus: Good evening everybody this is Morton Marcus and this is The Poetry Show and tonight a rather different show and one I really urge you to stay tuned for. So go out and get yourself your diet Coke, or lemonade, or whatever you're

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going to be drinking or noshing on, because tonight, I am going to present a telephone interview done yesterday with the world-famous American poet Robert Bly by Joe Stroud and myself. And we're going to be talking to Robert about a

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variety of subjects and this is in relation to Bob's reading this weekend, that is the 10th January, which is the birthday on 100th an- birthday- anniversary birthday of Robinson Jeffers at the Cabrillo College theatre, and that will be at 8

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pm. And I urge everyone out there for an exceptional evening, an evening of great performance as well as provocative thought and beautiful poetry, as Robert Bly will read the Russian story, ‘’The Frog Princess‘’, and in

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relation to that, read his own poems, the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Antonio Machado, and the Persian poet Rumi. It's an evening not to be missed, and I think you will see the spirit and provocativeness of this man in the next 50 minutes as we

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listen to a tape, as I said made yesterday. Now, the part of the program in which Joe and I are speaking, does not have the best quality radio sound to it, but Bly’s answers are much clearer, so don't be put off by the question- the sound of the

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questions that Joe and I are asking. The first part of this interview with Bly will cover the following subjects, and I will just interrupt every now and then so you know what we'll be talking about. First, he will talk about poetry, and

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performance, and what significance he thinks it is. He will then talk about his trip to Russia last year and some of the things he found out about censorship in Russian poetry. Then he will talk about new directions in his work and

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really new directions that are occurring now in American poetry. And then he will talk about the language poets, but before then I may break it. Anyway, here is the first part of the telephone interview in its entirety between Joe Stroud,

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co-host of this program, yours truly Morton Marcus, and the American poet Robert Bly. Robert Bly: Hello Morton Marcus: Hello Robert, this is Morton Marcus and I'm

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here with Joe Stroud, and we're talking to you from radio station KUSP, and this is a radio interview, and we know that you are in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So I'm saying this all for the radio audience, though this is not live and we

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will probably edit it. And I thought, first of all, if you have any- anything you would like to say about poetry or your poetry in general, you can say it or we can just start asking questions

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Robert Bly: Why don't you- why don't you just start. Morton Marcus: Okay. I hope these questions don't sound too pompous, but there- there are questions that interest me and you can take them in any direction you want. The first

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is, do you hope to accomplish anything specific in your reading performances? Robert Bly: Yes. I- I hope to achieve two things. One is a partial return to the traditions that poets held to before the

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time of written language. You know, all ancient poetry was delivered person to person and by voice. And their catalog has done a lot of work on that in Greek things, he said that Homer wept or Plato objected to was not poetry but the forced

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reading itself, which was already in something of a- of a late-stage by the time Plato heard it, but one of the- one of the qualities of a poetry- public poetry reading in Greece was that inductive reasoning, or deductive reasoning was

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impossible during the course of the reading. And that's what Plato objected to. So I think there's a possibility in the poetry reading of turning the poem directly towards the soul. Ordinarily, when we read it on the page, it goes to the brain,

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and if you're a very experienced reader, you can then move towards the soul. But the ancient people always tried to use a clear voice, to try to use certain rhythms which would be true to the soul and particularly music. So then, I

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have added some music recently, the Dulcimer and more recently, a Greek lute. So I consider it that- that's a very serious tradition which I tried to work with. Morton Marcus: Joe, do you have any questions? No. Okay, I will

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just go on here. Robert Bly: I'm not the only one doing that. Morton Marcus: No, I understand. Robert Bly: John Logan, I think is the greatest reader that I

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have heard in poetry, and I think Etheridge Knight is very close behind him. Morton Marcus: Now I know that Knight for example, and and Logan does not use instruments, though,` and they just use their

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voice. Robert Bly: Yes, that‘s true. Morton Marcus: And how do they, in your estimation, get closer to the soul, let's say than other readers

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Robert Bly: Thinking of Etheridge, whom I've heard recently. I would say first of all, that there's an enormous voice there. I heard Galway Kinnell talked a little bit this spring at a poetry conference that- that I organized and he

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spoke of the connection between Etheridge's voice and Dylan Thomas's voice, that the voice is so large in its range, in its- in its inclusion of human suffering and human material and humor and so on that- that the voice is itself a force or

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power. And so the voice then itself penetrates to the soul, which is, you know, is very different than the voice of bureaucrats. And, and I think John Logan does that also, but he also has an incredible awareness of pitch. So that when

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he's reading, the pitch of his voice rises and falls in an astounding way, which makes it very close to music and- and if the pitches are done right, it goes directly into the soul in the same way that pitches are provided. Does that help at all?

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Morton Marcus: Yes, it does. Here's Joe. He wants to ask a question. Joe Stroud: Hello, Robert. Yes. You were recently, about a year ago, in Russia, and I know they have a very strong tradition of-

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of poetry readings in the oral tradition. Were you able to witness any- any Russian poets reading at all when you were on that trip? Robert Bly: Well, you see, we went there, we were invited by

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Yevtushénko for the first international poetry reading that had been held in Russia. And the American representatives were Jim Reagan, a playwright from- poet from Los Angeles, and Bob Dylan, and myself, and- and then there was Seamus Heaney

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from Ireland, and Ernesto Cardinal from Nicaragua so on. Then there- we were joined on stage by about 15 Russian poets. Joe Stroud: Wow. Robert Bly: So both Yevtushénko and [unidentified] read and the

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power is absolutely unmistakable. There's a certain verbal music that they begin to make, which I understand it comes down to some extent from the old orthodox liturgy, so they are definitely not speaking. We heard three or four

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poets from Moscow really doing a kind of street poetry and they had the same tune in it; and this tune moves like waves, it has its own arising and falling of pitches and this is like some kind of a boat that carries the poem. One of the disadvantages

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of it apparently to the Russians, I heard a few, I heard some conversation about it, was that even though they well- it's a huge boat and it's the same boat whether you‘re doing a very delicate love poem or were you doing a big angry poem. You hear

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me? Joe Stroud: I did. Robert Bly: [loud sound imitation] That could be a very delicate love poem, but the boat is so huge and it can't be

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modified. Joe Stroud: I see. Robert Bly: And then they of course also have a second tradition of reading, which is reading inside an apartment, and

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I've heard people like Bella Akhmadulina read in that way and that is not histrionic at all. It is very, very quiet, and the rhythm is still there, the pitches are still there, the real, the old Greek orthodox tune is still there, but it's

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done with a lot of delicacy. Joe Stroud: Yeah, that's- that's what imagine Akhmadulina to have read too Robert Bly: No, I'm sure that's exactly right.

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Joe Stroud: Yeah. Robert Bly: Here were two traditions and the interesting thing is that we don't have either one of those two. We have the tradition really of the spirit of the voice that spoke

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in which- like Hemingway or- or you try to make it as close as possible to the- you would speak on the street. Joe Stroud: Right. Robert Bly: In Russia, they've already got something that

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separates it entirely from the way you‘d speak on the street. Joe Stroud: But do you think maybe someone like Dylan Thomas would be closer to what they do? Robert Bly: Yes, I think so. And there is a certain amount of

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Welsh traditional reading behind his work. Right. But we don't have that. So I think one thing is that we're in the process of doing is trying to- trying to construct such a

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thing. What would it feel like if it were an American, we know that the,- that the- that the speaking voice world would still penetrate through it in some way. But it would be wonderful to be able to build up a song so to speak around that. And I

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think Rosa, Etheridge, and- and John Logan have contributed to that. Joe Stroud: I think so. Let me switch gears for a minute. When you were there did you have much sense of the situation of the-

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of the poet in Russia today at all? If there was much censorship or suppression of work? Robert Bly: Well, I happen to be there when Yevtushénko got back the proofs for his new book and one-third of it had been marked

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in red. Joe Stroud: Now that means it will not be published? Robert Bly: To be ever censored. But he said, ‘’well, you see, the thing is, it's a problem because- because Novy Mir which

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is a great literary magazine has already accepted the entire book as a special issue.‘’ So, therefore, there's a conflict here, because they've accepted it and the state censorship has not. So this has got to be solved and he was very nervous

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about it, but I said, ‘’how do you think it will be solved?‘’ ‘’I don't know,‘’ He said, ‘’I'm meeting- meeting with all the people from Novy Mir, they're all supporting me, and we don't know what'll happen, if it goes all the way finally, it'll go

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directly to Gorbachev and he will setttle it‘’ . So I said, "Gorbachev wills setttle it?" "Certainly, I'm already in touch with his secretary." Joe Stroud: Gorbachev meets poetry, that‘s amazing.

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Robert Bly: "Gorbachev will settle this thing?" "Certainly. Even- it will come to his desk because it's a conflict that can't be settled, it's inside the bureaucracy. He will decide. I don't think it will go that far, but he would do that." I

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said, "Jeez, that's amazing." Can you imagine Reagan deciding such a thing? Joe Stroud: I have a hard time imagining that, yes. Robert Bly: He can read the Westerns and that's the limit of

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his intelligence. So I felt that- I felt a strange kind of a grief there and then- then- then also, Yevtushénko said to me, "You know, it was strange," he said, "you know, when years ago when Time Magazine made me the angry young man to Russia. Then

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when I got back, Khrushchev said to me that I couldn't go to America anymore, maybe for four or five years, and so I didn't I was blocked from coming." And then he said, the same thing happened. "Khrushchev, just before he died, he sent a note

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to me that he wants to see me. So I went to see him and he was lying in bed and he said, 'you know, Genya, I managed to tell you one thing, you know, when- when I pulled you back from going to the United States, it wasn't me that did that, it was

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them.' And then he said, "I wanted to tell you that before I died," and then he reached in his drawer, and he brought out a whole book- a bunch of poems that Khrushchev had been writing, and he read a couple of them to Yevtushénko.

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Joe Stroud: That's great. Well, everyone is familiar. I think most of our audience is familiar with the work of [unidentified poet] and Yevtushénko but are there- are there any- did you come across any new Russian poets that are being translated

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now? Do you want to recommend to anyone in our audience? Robert Bly: No, I can't. I haven't- I've been studying the books that I have, but I'm not ready to do that. But I- to name them because I don't have my books with me. But there are

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some very- I mean, they're still working very strongly. Joe Stroud: I like- I really love that that new Akhmatova translation of Jane Kenyon. Robert Bly: Yes. It is fine.

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Joe Stroud: What was it like to bounce around Russia with Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan? Robert Bly: Oh Ginsberg wasn't along Joe Stroud: Oh he wasn't- I thought Ginsberg was- was with

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that group. Robert Bly: No, no, this is- you see you're thinking of the writers- The Writers Conference, that's held once a year. Joe Stroud: I see.

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Robert Bly: I was at that three years ago or two years ago, I forget, and any year before, and this last year, I didn't go but the thing I'm talking about is a separate thing. Poetry International Poetry Festival, that Yevtushénko organized and

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the numbers were comical because he originally set it up in a hall for 60,000. 60,000? They use 60,000 people, but the Youth Festival was on with

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300,000 people and so they- they, they didn't want to have such a large hall and besides, six months before some people broken down the doors trying to get in when there weren't enough tickets due to forgery. So they were a little nervous and so

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they put it in a hall seating only 10,000. That's very small, said Yevtushénko, very small. Joe Stroud: I see. Well, I think we might have 150 here. Robert Bly: [unidentified] you know, some of the seats were

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empty because- because they sold him in blocks to the Youth Festival people from- from Africa and so on. And so Yevtushénko was very upset. He said, "Every seat- those empty seats, I've never seen any empty seats of 30 years of reading in

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the United States. I said, "Listen, we're used to empty seats, that doesn't bother us in the slightest." Joe Stroud: Here's Morton. Morton Marcus: Robert, I'm just going to continue some questions

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I prepared. Those are great answers. And I mean, I'm- I'm looking forward to just having this interview as an audio document that Joe and I have been looking forward to having and just playing it at different times, though we will definitely

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play it this week. What about- you- you really have gone through a lot of changes as a poet. You started off almost as a pastoral poet in love with nature, you became very social and political, though you were doing all these things at the

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same time. You then began to talk about right brain, left brain, examine the position of the mother and the father in the human psyche, and then produce a series of beautiful love poems. And where do you think your work is taking you now?

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Robert Bly: Well, I don't know. I- as you [unidentified] let's say in content I have been doing some poems different than some of the others because of work I've been doing with my own father and with other men I have been connected with, often with

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fathers and sons. So I'm thinking of doing a book- I'm not sure if I will call it that- it would be called something like ‘’Poems for 50-Year-Old Men‘’, and it would talk about some of the grief and some of the- some of the intensity that

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comes to people, comes to men, (I can't speak for women at all), but it comes to men when they have made some kind of movement towards not always depending on women or being dependent on women, but- but moving towards men. What that

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feels like and what- what it feels like to become older as a man. I'm very interested in that and I've done some poems the last year and I'll read some of those. And the second thing in terms of, you know, my first poems were not the nature ones

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but we're the ones in iambic pentameter. Morton Marcus: Right. Robert Bly: And they aren't known very well but I put a couple of them in selected-

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Morton Marcus: in the selected poems, right. Robert Bly: So I'm going to publish a whole group of those soon. And I'm interested now in moving into forms in poetry, which- I have the feeling that, as many others do too, that it

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may be that free verse is just as worn out now as the old iambic pentameter. And the question is what to do. You see, now many of the conservatives, Brad Leithauser, and others, want to go back to the iambic petameter. There's a strong

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movement now to try to do that and there's another one called ‘’Strong Measures‘’, and I don't- I don't believe that's the right way though. So I do think that we can't remain forever in this sort of limbo of free verse. But I'm interested

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in the possibility of moving forward into a new kind of performance. So I'm really studying Beowulf and many other- what is the essence of form in the poem? We know what the essence of free verse is. I just did a little article talking

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about the connection of free verse with relaxation and what a tremendous help it was to me when I was able to use the free verse developed out of Whitman, in order to relax the body tension in my whole body, and many perceptions come in when

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your body muscles, when your body tension is relaxed. And I think that's one great gift that free verse has given. But if that's so then one thing we've lost is the ability to increase tension in the poem. We know how to increase relaxation, but we

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don't know how, we almost lost the ability to increase tension in the poem, and does that make any sense? Morton Marcus: Yes, it does. Do you think that part of the direction may be found, though it was a Whitman-esque

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direction, in William Carlos William's "variable foot‘’ Robert Bly: I don't think so. But you know, William Carlos William is very interesting. And when I was doing this essay, I had to realize that he wrote free verse with a lot of tension

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in it, as does Robert Creeley. Morton Marcus: Yeah. Robert Bly: But the predominant poetry now is- in the poetry now is- or it could be called a relaxed free verse. So I was

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talking to that point, I don't find much help in his "variable foot." I don't think a variable foot- I think a variable foot is a contradiction in terms. It's either a foot or it isn't. You know, if you're talking to a drummer and you say to him "I'm

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going to use variable time." He says, "Forget it. I can't play with you if you're going to use variable time." Morton Marcus: I think that's really good. Here, Joe wants to say something.

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Joe Stroud: Right, Robert, I agree with you 100% about your comments about what's happening in free verse right now. And I have noticed something that, you know, I know that poets like you and the poets of your generation, John Logan, Kinnell,

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Adrienne Rich, James Wright, you- all of you began writing in closed form as metrical verse and so forth and then you gradually worked your way into more open forums and free verse. And I think we've got a whole generation of poets now who have

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grown up on free verse. They've never written metrical verse, many don't even know what it's like, or how to go about doing it and I think that's in part one of the reasons why we feel this kind of slackness in, an emptiness in the forms. But I

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agree also- Robert Bly: Slackness and emptiness in what? Joe Stroud: In- in their language. Robert Bly: Yeah.

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Joe Stroud: And I don't think that going back to closed forms will- will be the answer, but I'm wondering what you think of some of the things like say, Frank Bidart and C.K. Williams are doing, what the- you know, the really long line, or this

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sort of dramatic monologue. If you think that that's the direction that- Robert Bly: I think they're both- you know, do wonderful work. I haven't heard Frank Bidart read but- but I know his

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work. I heard of C.K. Williams read a few months ago in Berkeley and there was something very intense in driving about that peculiar way he is making this long line into- into personal and public material. But I don't feel it's a form. In

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other words, I hit the same problem in a way in doing "The Teeth Mother" in which the- the line is a unit, there's no question about it. But the individual words cannot be separated from the line. Don‘t know if that means anything to

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you. It's like- it's like it's a horse running but you can never get a still shot of the horse. And there's something in, say, sometimes when Frost will work, in which a single word will stand out from the line and simply glow and become radiant.

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That means that the word is rising and it's not independent of the line, but there's some kind of slowness or some kind of adjustable speed in the line so that one word can come out and really hold its own. The long Whitman line‘s a little bit like

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getting on a runaway horse, if you follow me. Joe Stroud: Yeah. What do you think? Change- change this for a moment here. What do you think as far as directions and new directions go in poetry? Have you been in contact much with

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what's being called language poetry? Robert Bly: Yeah, but it doesn't interest me very much. I feel there's not enough language in it. Joe Stroud: Uh-huh.

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Robert Bly: I really like intensity and color in language. Joe Stroud: What about their idea that they feel that one of the problems with a lot of contemporary poetry is that it's so self-referential, that it's, it's caught in the, in the ego

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and in the self and that- Robert Bly: Well, you know, I love- I love their questioning of poetry and that's gotta be done all the time. Joe Stroud: I think it's important, right.

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Robert Bly: Yeah, I think it's lovely the way they start to throw out a whole lot of stuff and say, "You have to look at this." So, I like that very much. But to me, it's a little bit of re-run of what I used to hear when I was about 25 from

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the Olson people. And they- I mean, I did an attack on them at the time, saying, they said we wanted, you know, no ego interference. And if you don't want ego interference, you have to go to some other planet because on this planet, the

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language is connected deeply with our feelings, and our thoughts, and our ego, and our soul, and our personality, and all of those things. And when you [unintelligible] it's absolutely inescapable. So if you don't want that, then I

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think you have to go to the moon or somewhere. You can- you can achieve a language with no ego interference, but it's going to be very thin. It's going to resemble, you know, a two-minute Buddhist lecture and I don't mean to mock Buddhists in any

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way, I mean, they move towards that, but they don't move towards language, their thing is not language art. And I'm saying that if you're going to use language art, it's going to have to have a strong element of the poet's selfishness, his

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solitude, his or her opinions, his or her anger. Try to do that without that is trying to be too pure, in my opinion. Joe Stroud: Yeah, I think part of the truth also is a kind of a mistrust of feeling, of human emotion. It reminds me a bit

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sometimes of the new critics‘ approach to poetry that you know to get the person to- Robert Bly: It was related to the structuralist approach to I think.

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Joe Stroud: Right. Robert Bly: But I can understand in a way, because a dear friend of mine said that in her family words when they were spoken were always associated with lies, and so she was like 35 before she

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could really trust human language to- that it was intended to say the truth. And I think there's something like that in the language poets. They really- they really want- I mean, there's some background thereof having been lied to and

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of course, we've all been lied to by the culture, by advertisers. So, understand that part of it. I think. Joe Stroud: Getting back also to the- to the question about the problem with- with writing and the sort of emptiness and lack

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of tension that we see in a lot of contemporary American poetry. Do you think there's any connection with that and the kind of incredible surge in translations that have taken path- taking part over the past 20 or 30 years? I know that you

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played a remarkable role in introducing into America foreign- foreign poetry, but I think it may be Donald Hall or someone said recently that the impression they get reading through APR or some magazine is that it's, it's poetry written

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as if it were translation. Robert Bly: Yeah, that's a funny kind of remark, I think [unidentified] said something like that, too. All I can say is that I would never have translated that stuff if that's

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what it is. In other words, I wanted to bring over Neruda and Vallejo because of the charge of intensity which is so much higher in the way, and even than- than a marvelous force like E. E. Cummings, it‘s much higher. And so- so this stuff is

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not imitation of really good South American stuff, so it doesn't feel like translation in essence. In terms of language, I understand exactly what's being said, because I have found out in translating that you cannot work with music a tremendous

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amount when you're translating, you know, your- Joe Stroud: Right. Robert Bly: You're going to lose like 35% and you have a choice- a choice of losing the meter, or the image, or the mood and tone,

00:29:29.540 - 00:29:45.890

or the music. Yeah, you got to make a choice among those things and I've always chosen the image as supreme, and then the mood of the poem, and the tone of the poem as supreme, that means that I lose certainly the meter and, and if you if it's free verse,

00:29:46.130 - 00:29:57.780

I'm going to lose the music. Well, I found that my own sense of music in English was decreasing the more I translated Joe Stroud: Decreasing or increasing? Robert Bly: Decrease and that's one reason I stopped, I haven't

00:29:57.780 - 00:30:20.700

translated now for about 8 or 10 years. And I don't know how to say that one, when one uses a practical English with as much spirit as you can to translate an immensely musical poem. And so- so if the poets were reading translations including mine,

00:30:21.330 - 00:30:36.840

rather than to read great musical English poetry like Gerard Manley Hopkins, or great Neruda in the original, then, of course, they're getting a- they're getting a de-musicalized language and trying to write with it. So, from that point of

00:30:36.840 - 00:30:46.990

view, I agree completely it‘s a- it‘s a- you- you gain something in- in your breath and you lose it in the intensity in the music. Joe Stroud: Right.

00:30:48.460 - 00:31:06.670

Robert Bly: So I regret it in a way, no, I mean, I regret providing those kinds of models without being able somehow to make clear the immense music of the original. Joe Stroud: I think you can't help but lose the music of the

00:31:06.670 - 00:31:23.020

original. But I also think that what an impoverished situation we would have in American poetry right now without the influence of, you know, the remarkable variety of foreign poets that we have had translated in the past 20 or 30 years.

00:31:23.000 - 00:31:34.880

Robert Bly: Maybe I don't know, I can't speak for others, but I get to depressed once in while and I told Bob [inaudible] a lot of good for- for my generation- his generation, he said. Joe Stroud: I can speak for myself; it certainly enriched my

00:31:34.880 - 00:31:42.620

life. I mean I know that- well in- in terms of the translations that you've done, I mean, Rolf Jacobsen is- has been a real Robert Bly: Has he really? find.

00:31:43.330 - 00:31:52.540

Joe Stroud: Oh, absolutely. And also the, you know, the things that- that were extracted with the Chinese have all been tremendous. Yeah. Robert Bly: Well, I found Manuel Machado through a single poem I

00:31:52.540 - 00:32:02.660

read once, in trying that 30- English, 30 poems, "Thirty Spanish Poems Of Love And Exile" God- [cross Joe Stroud: That's a wonderful little book. Here's Morton again.

00:32:04.850 - 00:32:17.330

Morton Marcus: Yes, let me just say again about those translations, they were enormously important to me and just about every other poet I know. I also think that no matter what somebody does that is influential on other people

00:32:17.540 - 00:32:27.770

they take it in directions that could never be imagined, then usually they take things totally overboard in the opposite direction than intended. It's just human nature I think. Robert Bly: Yeah

00:32:27.800 - 00:32:41.620

Morton Marcus: But- And I think you know, even going back to forms now after we've had this time away from forms is part of this endless cyclical movement of things. Robert Bly: I feel good about that too, I do, you can't stick

00:32:41.890 - 00:32:56.320

forever with the forms and we've had a good cleansing, you know. Someone said to me, Well what is it like to do a- why should you do prose forms, I mean, you began by doing sonnets and by- and then you end up doing the prose forms, a lot of people

00:32:56.530 - 00:33:05.890

absolutely despise that. I remember someone told me in Berkeley people said to him, who's a friend of mine, he said "Well, Bly is just too lazy to rite a real poem. It's why he wr tes in prose p

00:33:07.050 - 00:33:19.190

Morton Marcus: Huh! Interesting. Robert Bly: But someone said, What is it like? Well, to me, I believe the prose form is a marvelous form, it's an extension of the relaxation of free verse stilled further, but

00:33:19.220 - 00:33:34.160

what it feels like is when you take the car apart completely, and you not only take the motor out, but you take the motor apart, and the pistons and everything are all lying around on the floor. That's called prose form. Then you have

00:33:34.190 - 00:33:53.030

intimate knowledge of a piston, for example, it isn't- it isn't running, you actually- to get anything moving in a prose form, you cannot use the- the iambic rhythm which is given to you like a motor that's already been started. You have to- to get any

00:33:53.030 - 00:34:08.330

rhythm it has to come out of your-your spirit or something, it has to come to you from your own voice. It's like picking up a piston and seizing it with your fingers and putting it in somewhere, see if you can get it to move, and so on. So, to me, I

00:34:08.330 - 00:34:27.320

had that feeling, it's like really experiencing the elements of a poem, each one separate; sound separate, rhythm separate, your own voice separate. I never really heard my own voice until I heard it in a prose poem. And- and that isn't my Minnesota

00:34:27.320 - 00:34:43.340

voice, either, it's just whatever it is, some kind of, I don't know, some kind of way I talk or think, I experience in the prose form. And then- then I think after that you can- one can begin to put in- put it back together, which would be the joy

00:34:43.340 - 00:34:52.540

that one would be going through in trying to work towards a new form. Morton Marcus: Well, it will be interesting to me to see these. I know that when I was working on those closed forms in the

00:34:52.540 - 00:35:08.170

place that is not even the most popular place, which is Iowa. It just seemed to me that even the syntax and all of the methods that one got from one line to another within closed verse had been done so many times, the answers had been found by so

00:35:08.170 - 00:35:23.680

many of the great poets, that there was nothing for you really to discover. Your answers were there and you started using what Yeats did, using what Wordsworth did, and the other poets. So it's- it's back to that problem again, maybe after a good brisk

00:35:23.680 - 00:35:38.590

walk on the ice outside with the trees shaking their iced hair at us and now- now started again, but I think that's the problem that's gonna be run into immediately. Robert Bly: Yeah, I like that metaphor and I mentioned in my

00:35:38.590 - 00:35:52.480

[unidentified] poems I wrote, one of the problems I had is that in the beginning, when I was doing that work, I wanted to write about American history. I wanted to write about the West and the Indians, and every time I wrote one, I could hear Milton

00:35:52.930 - 00:35:59.340

singing away in the background. Morton Marcus: But that- that poem of yours, which is the first poem of yours I ever saw, which is the ‘’Missouri Traveler‘’.

00:35:59.500 - 00:36:10.750

Robert Bly: Yeah. Morton Marcus: I thought that was very successful. I studied that again and again and again back in 1958, believe it or not. And I just I really thought it worked, though it was again in a

00:36:10.750 - 00:36:19.210

form that I was listening to very intensely, I could not hear anything out of, except Whitman. Robert Bly: I didn't hear, what did you say at the end, you couldn't what?

00:36:19.510 - 00:36:29.850

Morton Marcus: I could not listen or hear anything out of that, the beat of the iambic pentameter line. Robert Bly: When you were reading that? Morton Marcus: Well, it wasn't a poem, it was where I was at that

00:36:29.850 - 00:36:41.280

time, where American poetry was at that time. Robert Bly: What happens now when you read the poem? Morton Marcus: That's interesting. I'll tell you this weekend. So I'll go back and look at it from this viewpoint.

00:36:41.280 - 00:36:49.290

Yeah. Robert Bly: Please do. Morton Marcus: Let me ask you another question- well, okay, Joe has a question on the subject. So let's just keep

00:36:49.290 - 00:36:59.870

going. Joe Stroud: Well, this is more about American history. I have just been told that he recently published a book on- on Thoreau. Robert Bly: Yeah, it was selected poems of Thoreau that

00:36:59.870 - 00:37:08.090

had not been done. So, with my interest in the prose form, I took various passages in his prose- Robert Bly: -and then I laid them next to a poem, if he had Joe Stroud: From the journals?

00:37:09.940 - 00:37:19.210

done it on the same subject, so that you go from one page from Joe Stroud: You mean in the journal work- page prose, to form, to prose form, I don't call them prose forms, because I don't want to get in the fight about it. But I

00:37:19.210 - 00:37:35.320

felt that Thoreau's greatest poetry is appearing in his prose. Robert Bly: In the- his prose is so brilliant, and I mentioned- gave various reasons as to why the poetry couldn't at his time

00:37:35.320 - 00:37:46.740

couldn't adapt to his intensity of detail. Joe Stroud: What- what about the political aspect of Thoreau? Did you get into that at all or? Robert Bly: Yeah, we did to some extent. I did- I divided his

00:37:46.740 - 00:38:04.080

work into about five sections and the first section was something like the immense abundance in the soul, which, you know, which Emerson was very aware of, and the Germans were very aware of like Goethe, they brought that energy to their

00:38:04.080 - 00:38:19.560

students. And the second stage was the way people lived meanly despite this abundance in the soul. And of course, he has a tremendous amount to say on ethics. And then the third section I had was Thoreau's own decision not to leave meanly.

00:38:20.550 - 00:38:36.360

And then the tremendous waiting period that that required from him. He had to wait like 13-14 years before he really was able to produce any fruit of his decision not to leave meanly. Whereas if you decide to live meanly you can publish a book

00:38:36.360 - 00:38:48.330

when you're 18, so to speak. Joe Stroud: Now by "meanly," do you mean like- like would Robinson Jeffers be an example of that. Robert Bly: No, it's a crucial issue as to what he means by "to

00:38:48.330 - 00:39:00.810

live meanly." To live meanly means to live your neighbor's life or your parent‘s life, not your own life. Joe Stroud: I see. Robert Bly: So to live meanly for him would have been to have

00:39:00.810 - 00:39:12.670

taken the kind of job that his parents or his- his school teachers wanted him to take. Joe Stroud: I see. Robert Bly: Something like that. And well, of course then once he

00:39:12.670 - 00:39:30.130

became feisty in that way, of course, he- he had a lot to say about John Brown and there's a wonderful little detail in there, which the day that John Brown was executed, he went to the local townhouse and said that he was going to hold a

00:39:30.550 - 00:39:44.680

memorial service for John Brown. And they said that- all of the people there were Republican, and they said that they would not ring the bell. And he said, "I didn't come here to ask your permission, I came here to tell you that I'm having a memorial

00:39:44.680 - 00:39:57.070

service." And he went out and rang the bell himself. He is a little difficult. Morton Marcus: But I know that wonderful story about him in jail when Emerson heard that he was in jail for not paying taxes

00:39:57.370 - 00:40:06.790

for the Mexican American War. I'm sure you know that story. Robert Bly: Yes. Morton Marcus: Yeah, wonderful, wonderful true, as far as I'm concerned, American, whatever that is.

00:40:07.110 - 00:40:20.200

Robert Bly: Yeah. Robert, the station's gonna love how much money we‘re taking up with this interview. Let me ask you then what you're planning on doing this Saturday here at Cabrillo. And- yeah, okay, go

00:40:20.200 - 00:40:32.240

on. I'm giving a series of three readings here, one night after the other. And the first night, which will be at San Jose Poetry Center, I'm going to do- I'm going to read to- read my

00:40:32.240 - 00:40:46.220

Selected Poems, so there will be early, middle, and late poem. Then when I come to Cabrillo, what I'm going to do is to do a different sort of a poem, more- more similar to- more related to the ancient kind of poetry reading. I'm going to take the

00:40:46.220 - 00:41:03.830

Russian fairytale called ‘’The Frog Princess‘’ and I'm going to tell that story and then go back over the stages and illustrate them with poems of my own. So that's a way in which there will be a kind of a union of the narrative and the poem and the-

00:41:03.860 - 00:41:20.630

you leave with a good sense of what the Russian fairytale has to say. We have ‘’The Frog Prince‘’ in the beginning of the Grimm Brothers, they have the frog princess. And then the third night, which will be at Asilomar down at the Monterey

00:41:20.630 - 00:41:27.320

State-, Monterey Community College, I'm going to read all new poems that night. Morton Marcus: That's on Sunday. Robert Bly: Yeah.

00:41:27.770 - 00:41:39.830

Morton Marcus: Okay. Robert Bly: That will be the sequence of three. Morton Marcus: Okay, I do- I take it to there will be a lot of ideas about the great mother and the place of the father and

00:41:40.160 - 00:41:56.520

things like that in your presentation on Saturday. Robert Bly: Well I don‘t know if you should expect that. ‘’The Or should I just wait? Frog Princess‘’- The subject of ‘’The Frog Princess‘’ is how do

00:41:56.520 - 00:42:23.310

we stay in touch with the moist part of ourselves which is referred to in the story as the frog skin. What is-? The frog kin is a kind of creative and mo st, and even sexual part of the soul, and how can one sta in touch with that, and not a

00:42:23.310 - 00:42:37.830

low your frog skin to be o be damaged by the dryne s of capitalist culture or comm nist culture or university cul ure? You follo Morton Marcus: I follow you and-

00:42:39.690 - 00:42:53.940

Robert Bly: Very depressing. Morton Marcus: Well, since we're on that, I certainly was gonna ask you questions about that, where- kind of nice little question here. Where do you see American politics and actually

00:42:53.940 - 00:43:04.070

world politics and the human race heading in the last part of the 20th century now? Robert Bly: Ah, you like small questions! Morton Marcus: Small questions, yeah. Remember I'm Russain. I

00:43:04.070 - 00:43:17.330

make a lot of those chugging engine noises all the time. Robert Bly: That‘s true, that‘s a Russian question. I would well, this particular to the United States. I, you know, in terms of the father work, there's a tremendous hunger in

00:43:17.330 - 00:43:30.770

the country for a grandfather. They have been exiled and put into old people's homes or been separated from them, and the hunger is very deep on the part of both men and women. The hunger is so deep that we would even accept a fake one, as

00:43:30.770 - 00:43:45.800

president, who agreed, who told everyone he was fake. So- so Americans have two problems now, that they have to face the fact that their hunger for grandfather was so deep that they- they conned themselves into accepting a fake one and

00:43:45.800 - 00:43:54.300

now they have to accept the fact that their grandfather's a liar, and that's hard to do. Robert Bly: It's hard. Morton Marcus: That‘s well-

00:43:56.910 - 00:44:11.580

Morton Marcus: Your-, your- the way you look at things and put them into metaphors immediately is very provocative. I mean, I- I had the actor image in my head, but Americans are looking for grandpa. That's fascinating. That is fascinating. Well-

00:44:11.730 - 00:44:25.380

Robert Bly: See, first you look for a father and then- But in ancient times, you see, you were never initiated by your own father, you initiated by an older male, an uncle, a grandfather. And so I think, as the males are out of the house

00:44:25.380 - 00:44:41.340

more, and as you probably know, the average American father now spends 10 minutes a day with his son. That son is going to grow up with a tremendous father hunger and an even deeper grandfather hunger. So that's the way I look at that.

00:44:41.730 - 00:44:54.810

Morton Marcus: Now, Joe's just said he did not mean it metaphorically. So you did not mean it metaphorically while using the whole grandfather image. Robert Bly: Well, I don't know, everything's metaphorical, as

00:44:54.810 - 00:45:10.440

Joe Campbell would say. But on the other hand, it's a real hunger, and if we can't have our own grandfather, then we're going to allow the entire government of the United States to be run by a couple of juvenile delinquents out of the

00:45:10.440 - 00:45:21.420

Marine Corps; in order that we can have this fake grandfather in front of us all the time on television. We're willing to sacrifice foreign policy and everything, and so it's the grandfather.

00:45:21.480 - 00:45:29.760

Morton Marcus: Well, you know, the letters that have been arrived, supposedly arriving not only at the White House but at all the senators‘ offices over Christmas, which is, "Leave the grandfather alone."

00:45:29.810 - 00:45:42.710

Robert Bly: Yeah, exactly. That's going to be our problem. You see if we have to move- move in that direction. It doesn't seem so to me that they- we‘re willing to accept a lying grandfather and deny that itself. Did you hear the joke?

00:45:42.710 - 00:45:49.700

What's the difference between the National Security Council and a daycare center? Joe Stroud: What is the difference? Robert Bly: Well, a daycare center has adult supervision.

00:45:53.390 - 00:46:04.970

That‘s a Washington joke from last week. Morton Marcus: That‘s very good. Robert Bly: As far as- in general, I think that continuation is downward, continuation is downward into

00:46:05.840 - 00:46:24.740

worse schools, worse government, worse deficits, continual lying on our backs, like puppies in front of Japanese industry, continue a lack of discipline, more and more drugs, not a pretty picture of the next 50 years.

00:46:25.020 - 00:46:38.430

Morton Marcus: Yeah. Well, what would it take to? Or is this just a cyclical trend in the cosmos as far as you're concerned? Or what will it take to stop this if you don't consider it a cyclical wave, in a fashion?

00:46:39.680 - 00:46:58.700

Robert Bly: Oh, I don't know about that. One of the things that- it could be said that Americans are acting like an alcoholic. You know what it takes for an alcoholic when- it's called a dissent sometimes. Sometimes the dissent moves

00:46:58.700 - 00:47:16.940

slowly and inexorably down until he's maybe 45 and by that time he's virtually destroyed his family, his wife, his job, and eventually there has to be something called a- what do they call it- interference? [cross talk] Nine or 10 people, you

00:47:16.970 - 00:47:32.900

know, get him in an office and say, look, this is what you're doing. And, but it doesn't do any good until you hit bottom. So if America is one of the first alcoholic countries in the world, then I would say that we still have some distance to go

00:47:32.900 - 00:47:54.320

before we get to the bottom. And then you have to look at the history of an alcoholic and they do change. They do move, but not until they have hit some sort of absolutely chaotic conclusion. Morton Marcus: And a lot of alcoholics do not live beyond

00:47:54.320 - 00:48:10.720

that point which is an another unfortunate turn of this metaphor. Robert Bly: Well, I remember Jim Wright, when he stopped drinking, he said his doctor said to him, "Now, Jim, you're

00:48:10.720 - 00:48:29.290

going to be depressed for about two years. Because you stole a lot of energy from your body with the use of alcohol and now your body is going to take revenge for that, and you will have low energy, and the main thing that you have to remember

00:48:29.290 - 00:48:42.250

is don't commit suicide in the next year." And someone did not warn Berryman about that, and he did commit suicide before that two year period was over, because it appears to be endless. You think you're gonna be like this for the rest of

00:48:42.250 - 00:48:57.340

your life. And Jim said, "Thank God that my doctor told me that. I only got- you know, six months to go now. I've been depressed for a year and a half now." And he was that way too, and he had to, you know. Jim was very alert, he saw that, and those

00:48:57.340 - 00:49:11.620

late poems of his makes it clear that he came through that without self-pity, and in fact, knowing he could come out of it, and he did. Morton Marcus: So what in this downward movement of the society

00:49:11.620 - 00:49:26.460

and everything that that involves in the thinking, in the psyche of the Americans, what do you think is the poet's purpose in this period? Robert Bly: Well, you know, I remember taking- remember Bill

00:49:26.460 - 00:49:40.470

Knock came to see me one time in Minnesota and I took him down to see Fico Ficomer(?) of [unidentified] and- and Bill liked him a lot, you know, and, and Bill is living in Chicago, and he asked Fred, about, you know, here Fred was already 55

00:49:40.500 - 00:50:01.440

or something about being an artist in [unidentified]. Fred said, you know, as, as Robinson Jeffers said, it's not compulsory to be corrupt. And so I think that the artist in a time like that has to hold onto the integrity of art. Because

00:50:01.440 - 00:50:18.330

the situation in America is not that different than the situation in Russia. There, there's kind of the integrity of the artists, he holds, or he or she holds their dignity in the face of an enormous amount of political lies and so on. And

00:50:18.600 - 00:50:32.970

that's what sustained Anna Akhmatova. And when you see her in her last photograph getting off the train in London to get an honorary degree, she was extremely crippled by arthritis at that time, and she's walking down the platform with not a

00:50:32.970 - 00:50:52.650

trace of pain because the integrity of the artist sustains her in the middle of private pain or other pain. So- so I think that- that the artist has a more and more important situation in America now. More important than when everyone,

00:50:52.680 - 00:51:06.210

say, at the time of Thoreau was- was trying to act decent. And his job is not that decent, but to act- to hold to the integrity of art. Therefore, I think it's important to reconnect with the older tradition.

00:51:07.560 - 00:51:23.310

Morton Marcus: That seems to me to be a perfect place to stop this interview and inspiring, provocative words that I always used to describe you anyway, Bob. It's gonna be a great pleasure to see you here this weekend. And do you know that

00:51:23.610 - 00:51:35.160

coincidentally, you will be speaking at Cabrillo and then the following day in Monterey, January 10 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robinson Jeffers. Robert Bly: Oh, how wonderful.

00:51:35.220 - 00:51:42.740

Morton Marcus: So we'll work that in and- Robert Bly: Well, let's be sure to work it in, Morton. Morton Marcus: Definitely. Thank you, and from Joe here- Robert Bly: Thank you both, a pleasure to talk to you.

00:51:42.950 - 00:52:07.040

Morton Marcus: Thanks a million. Thanks, see you this weekend. That was a phone interview conducted yesterday by Joe Stroud and yours truly, Morton Marcus, with the American poet Robert Bly, who will be here this Saturday evening at 8 pm at

00:52:07.040 - 00:52:26.060

the Cabrillo College Theater. I urge everyone out there for an evening that is rewarding spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally, not just a poetry reading but a performance of enormous dramatic power, to come and hear Robert Bly. Earlier on

00:52:26.060 - 00:52:45.530

Saturday from 3 to 4 pm he will be at The Bookshop Santa Cruz on the mall, and he will be talking with people there, he will not be doing any reading. Maybe you can buy his new book, his Selected Poems, and maybe he'll sign it for you, but do make the

00:52:45.530 - 00:53:05.450

Saturday evening reading at Cabrillo College. This is an abridgment of a prose poem of his which gives you the man spirit and his words. He said ‘’when I write poems I need to be near grass that no one else sees, as in this spot, where I

00:53:05.450 - 00:53:24.920

sit for an hour under the cottonwood. A branch and the grass lie here deserted, a part of the wild things of the world noticed only for a moment by a heavy nervous man who sits near them, and feels he has at this moment more joy than anyone

00:53:25.220 - 00:53:48.800

alive.‘’ Robert Bly this Saturday at Cabrillo College Theatre; I hope to see you all out there. This is The Poetry Show for this week. Again, thanks to Plaza Books on Pacific Avenue for a donation that makes this show possible in part, you

00:53:48.800 - 00:53:58.700

people out there are the ones who make it possible in the greater amount. Thank you so much. We will see you, I hope, this Saturday.