Robert Bly died last week. He was 94. I heard the news on November 22, 2021 and wrote:
Yesterday was Robert Bly’s last morning.
It was he who gave me the idea of
writing a poem each day, which is what he was doing
in January 1996, the coldest January in years
at Bennington College. He wrote first thing in the morning,
before coffee (if he ever drank coffee)
while curtains remained drawn.
He would sit up in bed, in close contact
with what he called his reptilian brain, and write when
travel across the Maginot Line of consciousness
went both ways on uncongested highways
and took unpredictable turns — not a metaphor
Bly would have liked, by the way, not only
because he didn’t go to history for his rhetoric
but also because, dreadful as it was,
the world did not face what France faced in May 1940.
Robert liked images, a turtle, a spear, an onion, a castle,
and wishes, like the desire to travel far or
to be in Paris on a Thursday on your last day alive.
A big man, the author of “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,”
among other aresting titles,
Robert was said to be cantankerous but I found him generous,
loyal, an excellent teacher and raconteur,
and it was a joy to work with him on The Best American Poetry 1999.
On publication of Robert’s Morning Poems, the product of his practice of writing a poem a day first thing on the morning, I wrote,
is a sensational collection — Robert Bly’s best in many years. Inspired by the example of William Stafford, Bly decided to embark on the project of writing a daily poem: Every morning he would stay in bed until he had completed the day’s work. These ‘little adventures / In Morning longing,’ as he calls them, address classic poetic subjects (childhood, the seasons, death and heaven) in a way that capitalizes fully on the pun in the book’s title. These are morning poems, full of the delight and mystery of waking in a new day, and they also do their share of mourning, elegizing the deceases and capturing the ‘moment of sorror before creation.’ Some of the poems are dialogues where unconventional speakers include mice, maple trees, bundles of grain, the body, the ‘oldest mind’ and the soul. A particularly moving sequence involves Bly’s imaginative transactions with a great and unlikely precursor, Wallace Stevens. The whole is a fascinating and original book from one of our most fascinating authors. >>>
— David Lehman, January 1998
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Author: The Best American Poetry
