Conscious Choice: Poetic Vision

October 2005

Poetic Vision

Prior to his Chicago visit, Robert Bly talks about politics, protests and piloting life’s river of ruin

By Marla Donato

“The older you get the more you are able to take in the deliciousness of ruin,” or so says Robert Bly, who points out that after 78 years on the planet he’s still discovering a world of wonders, including the ghazal, the main poetic form in the Islamic world. Never one to shy from controversy, Bly has embraced the ghazal as both an art form and political statement.

He’s well-known as an activist and anti-war protester, (he turned over his National Book Award check to the Viet Nam draft resistance movement).

Bly wears many other hats as well: author, editor, translator, Midwesterner, storyteller, father of the “expressive men’s movement,” intellectual, Guggenheim recipient (twice). But perhaps the most apt description is poet.

Robert Bly, the poet, will be traveling from his Minneapolis home to Chicago to give a reading at 8 p.m. Oct. 22 at The Coffeehouse Unity Temple, 875 Lake St., Oak Park, Ill.

In advance of that trip we conversed over the telephone about all of the above, but mostly about his latest passion: poetry and the ghazal which is the form he used in two of his latest books: The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, (HarperCollins 2001) and My Sentence Was Thousand Years of Joy, (HarperCollins 2005). What follows is a complete transcript of the interview portion of the conversation.

CC: I was wondering about the Islamic poetry form you chose for your two most recent books, the ghazal. It’s interesting, even rather prescient, if you consider the copyright dates, that you decided to work in this form before 9-11.

Bly: Well, yes.

CC: So that was just a coincidence?

Bly: No. The people who read poetry in other languages know how great the poetry is in the Islamic world, particularly the poetry of Iran. Rumi has become famous. Hafez is a very great poet…. It’s impossible to know how enormously important the poetry in the Islamic world is to the people who live there. In Iran, for example, every house will have a copy of Hafez on the dining room table. And if a daughter wants to get married, the first thing they open is a Hafez poem and see what it says.

They open the book at random. It’s sort of like the Chinese using the I Ching. And so I had become familiar with that because of having a teacher in London who is from Iran. So then I became interested in the form of the ghazal. The ghazal began in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Arabic language. Then it was a love poem. Gradually, it moved through all the languages in the Islamic world, including Hindi.

So it became established as a form in which you are given about 36 syllables to say what you want to say. And in the Islamic world those languages are used to 18-syllable lines. But in English we can’t extend the line over 15 syllables. It begins to break down. So I use three 12-syllable lines. You still have roughly 36 syllables and when you say those 36 syllables, that’s all you have to say about that subject. Then you need to change the subject. It could be an emotional subject. It could be an intellectual thing. And then you go on and do your next 36 syllables.

We’ve never had that in English. In English, you generally follow straight through with your idea. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” … Frost said marvelous stuff about walls. But in the ghazal he would be through after the first three lines. So I thought that terrifically interesting.
… But since I’m a beginner, I arbitrarily chose six stanzas for each one. So that led me to bring into a poem a quality that I had been praising for many years. A quality of leaping. So leaping can be the opposite of just walking along the street. In your letter, you asked me what makes a poem bad.

CC: Right. What makes a poem good? What makes a poem bad?

Bly: I thought of four things. First of all, a lifeless popular language. The writer’s own prosaic nature. A writer’s obsession with fact. And the tendency we all have to lie about ourselves… So most poems that are written are bad. Many of my poems are bad for the same reason. Especially the latter one, the tendency to lie about yourself. Does that make sense to you?

CC: Maybe that explains why in American culture we don’t have poetry on our dining room tables, because we tend to exist in this factual, rational world. And would that be one of the differences between our cultures then?

Bly: Yes. When you’re dealing with a ghazal, you can’t live in that rational world. You’re going from one kind of wild generalization to another inside the poem.

CC: So when you go from that one wild generalization to another… they don’t necessarily need to be interrelated on any level?

Bly: Well, it’s terrifically interesting. In the Islamic world these poems are recited in cafes and public halls and a writer will do a new ghazal, and the writer, he or she, will do two or three stanzas and then the people in the audience will say, “What the hell is going to hold this poem together? And where is this thing going?” So the poet then has to find some certain ahhhh, invisible ways in which the stanzas hold each other. I’ll give you an example. There’s one called “The Cabbages of Chekhov,” on page 67 of The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.

The first stanza says:
Some gamblers abandon carefully built houses
In order to live near water. It’s all right. One day on the river is worth a thousand nights on land.

Note that’s a generalization, you either agree with it or you don’t.

The second stanza says:
It’s our attraction to ruin that saves us; And disaster, friends, bring us health. Chekhov shocks the heavens with his dark cabbages.

Well, we’re already making leaps there with his cabbages and what is that? But the whole poem requires leaping. And so one mustn’t expect to be taken by the hand and led along.

The third stanza:
William Blake knew that fierce old man, Irritable, chained and majestic, who bends over to measure with his calipers the ruin of the world.

So that’s his picture of Newton. I don’t know if you know that Newton is at the floor of the ocean naked with his caliper, trying to measure everything. Blake hated that. … That’s the way Blake thought, all this scientific measurement really ruined the world. But you know, I use the word “ruin” in two stanzas, so the reader gets a hint, maybe it’s the word “ruin” that will tie the poem together. You follow me?

CC: I’m wondering if you don’t take your readers by the hand and walk them through, then is this why some people claim they think your poems are more surrealistic?

Bly: Sure. Why not? Twenty years ago, I became dissatisfied with this plodding nature of a lot of American poets and so I began to translate Spanish and French surrealists. But I didn’t have any way at that time to tie this wild, leaping thing into a form. So it was a great joy to me when I found out that not only was I given permission for these kinds of surrealistic leaps, but the ghazal provides a form in which this all takes place.

CC: And you’re leaping in your consciousness from… ? Where are you leaping from and where are you leaping to?

Bly: Well, writing one of these is very difficult. I may get two stanzas and then I will make a mistake and write a third stanza which doesn’t fit at all. And then I write a fourth one and it doesn’t fit either and then I have to take them out and go back and see: What is the tone here? What would be appropriate? What is another form of ruin, so to speak? And one doesn’t ask those questions in the surrealist poem. In the general old surrealist poem one just keeps going. And I like that too. But this is so amazing. They are trying to unite wild imagination with form. They do that in two ways. First of all, they hold to the 36 syllables… Secondly, when the ghazal form is well-developed, every stanza will end with the same word….I’ll go to the fourth stanza:

It takes so little to make me happy tonight!
You see how I can change that completely? From “It is our attraction to ruin that saves us?"

It takes so little to make me happy tonight!
Four hours of singing will do it. If we remember
How much of our life is a ruin, and agree to that.

CC: So it’s a theme with the idea of the ruin and how to appreciate the real things?

Bly: That’s right and how to consider ruin as a positive thing.

Butterflies spend all afternoon concentrating
on the buddleia bush; human beings
take in the fragrance of a thousand nights of ruin.

So in the last stanza:
We planted fields of sorrow near the Tigris.
The harvesters will come in at the end of time
And tell us that the crop of ruin has been great.

So ruins are, at the very end, a crop. You understand, it’s very playful. And it would drive a rationalist mad.

CC: Do poems need to be understood? Or do they need to be experienced?

Bly: Oh, I think it’s experienced. I don’t expect anyone to understand these poems. Especially when the listener may be 30 years old and I’m 78. So my experience of ruin, let’s say, is something that person hasn’t had yet. So the older you get, the more you are able to take in the deliciousness of ruin.

CC: Are you surprised a lot of time when you read your poems and you come back a year later or a month later or five years later, and say, “Wow, now I know what I was talking about?”

Bly: That’s right and I say, “Man, that’s interesting” that I would end up with the Tigris and say the crop of ruin has been great. Because that throws a lot of light on a certain kind of war. Now the thing I was going to say is that in this poem I mention ruin in just almost every line, every stanza. But in the Islamic world that word “ruin” would appear at the end of every sentence. Now, they have much more ability to move their words around in their sentence than we do.

CC: In using this form, some people would perceive it as a sort of political/artistic statement about the value of Islamic culture, given the post 9-11 anti-Islamic sentiment.

Bly: But I saw that before 9-11. It’s a testimony to the real misunderstanding we have of Islamic culture, associated with mullahs and so on. But the wildness and the beauty… and the amount of poetry.

CC: Is there a parallel between today’s events and the ’60s and the ’70s, when you were known for taking a strong anti-Vietnam war stance…

Bly: I’ve done a book against the Iraq war called “The Insanity of Empire,” a book of poems against the Iraq war. And I fashioned it because with some of the poems I wrote against the war in Vietnam, I was amazed that nothing has changed. … I think we’ve actually declined. The people running the Vietnam War were much more intelligent than the ones running this one.

CC: Do you think poets, musicians and artists have as powerful a voice now compared to back then? Because it seems like that power has been diluted.

Bly: Well, to some extent it has. But you have to remember … how many years the Vietnam War went on before the opposition really became powerful. It takes a while to do that. This woman in Texas is beginning the process. It takes people a while to adjust themselves to opposing their country. It’s not difficult for me because I’ve done it once. But for some of the younger ones, it takes a while for them to say, “Well, I love my country but these people are stupid.” So we don’t have the big movement yet. But we will if the damn thing keeps going.

CC: You were quoted as saying that “ Vietnam taught us all that the source is inside of us,” and I was wondering if you still felt that way and, if so, is that why it’s so important to support the Tibetan cause and meditation practices and mystical traditions, particularly those in the East?

Bly: Well, I believe that the source is best described by a word out of the Muslim culture: Namn. Namn is the greedy soul. And in the Muslim culture they say, “You know every human being has a greedy soul.”

CC: So are these people just having a hard time dealing with their greedy souls?

Bly: I think that’s right. The more you know, the capitalist world runs on the greedy soul. Every advertisement on television appeals to the greedy soul.

CC: So what’s the solution to this? Does one have to do battle with the greedy soul? Or do you just acknowledge it and tell it to pipe down and realize it’s sort of an unruly child?

Bly: Well, any of those. The idea is that your life is going to be ruined by your greedy soul, unless you pay attention to it. ... One of the purposes of marriages is to make it clear how big your greedy soul is. That’s why marriage is painful.

CC: You’re known as a man’s man and pioneer in the men’s movement. … Back in the ’70s you talked about how men cannot write poetry without the woman consciousness and that we were in danger of the father types destroying the Earth before the consciousness can change sufficiently.

Bly: That’s really true.

CC: So what I was wondering is, how are these concepts related?

Bly: Well, I began with the female side. I’m a Jungian. So we call it — there’s various names for it — the feminine soul. So I did all my early work on that and then I realized the men were worse off than the women were. So I did begin to do a lot of work with them. And that has two sides to it. One, to encourage men to honor their feminine soul, which we do by having poetry readings and dancing, which we do at every session we give. And then the second thing is to think seriously about how your greedy soul has destroyed you as a man. And how everything in the culture is aiming toward making you a big earner of money and a big spender, how dangerous that is to your soul. So it’s interesting that the word soul, really in the old use of the word, the soul is feminine itself.

CC: When you say they are worse off than women, is this because they are hooked into this idea of having to achieve?

Bly: Well, in a way, and then maybe when they are 32, they will take a job in capitalism. But their instinct in high school and afterwards is to pull away, be careful. But the boys usually get pushed into it by their fathers.

CC: So if the capitalistic system is part of what is feeding this, if there any system that exists that is healthy for the soul?

Bly: Well, people thought it was communism but it turned out not to be true. … People thought at one time that communism would provide what was missing. And other people thought socialism would provide it. And nothing! Nothing. Nothing. Nothing! The greedy soul took over everything.

CC: I’m hearing from you is that things are getting worse instead of better in terms of politics and consciousness in general.

Bly: Yes, I think that’s right. People have been saying lately that we’re in a steep decline culturally. And every time I look at the New York Times book review, it’s a pitiful little rag, compared to what it was when I was 40 years old. So there is a terrific decline in readership. A terrific decline in the intensity of graduate studies… It’s also true in literature, that we have a decline in the intensity of the passion for literature. Some people feel it began, well, in 1980 and we’re about halfway through it now. It’s going to get worse.

CC: Are there any signs of hope?

Bly: Well, there’s always hope, you know, because our inner light does not depend on what’s happening in the nation. And the point of poetry and literature is that it retains its hold to the deeper soul…Hundreds of people have gotten through their lives in a disintegrating culture by paying attention to poetry and music, and that’s one of their purposes. So in the world of the soul, there’s a lot of hope. In fact, the soul often feels the most dangerous thing is for a culture to be successful and happy and balanced.

CC: I noticed you had a poem to Pablo Neruda. … And there is this explosion of great work from writers in the Latin American and Central American countries that I thought must have been born out of the turmoil of those countries… I’m wondering if political turmoil really leads to a richer life and literature. …. And is it even possible for America to produce the same depth of literature because everyone is so complacent?

Bly: I think it is absolutely right, what you’re saying. People were very complacent in the‘50s. We didn’t produce an awful lot, compared to the Russians. So nothing is bad all the way. The fact that we are in a steep decline culturally and politically is not all bad. Because imagine what would happen if we had insane people like Bush and we did the war well. The funniest thing about Bush is that now that everyone has seen what has happened in New Orleans, (Hurricane Katrina) I wonder if Bush knows how the people in Iraq feel.

CC: I wonder if Bush really cares about the way the people in Iraq feel. I think that’s the big problem. I don’t think he cares about the people in Iraq.

Bly: I think Americans don’t realize what situation the Iraq people are in.

CC: Today someone showed me this horrendous quote that quoted Barbara Bush… to the effect that, well, a lot of these people were in bad shape anyway, so being in the Houston Astrodome was a step up.

Bly: I read it today. She said they were underprivileged anyway, so this was a step up for them.

CC: She might as well tell them to eat cake then. It was a sort of Marie Antoinette kind of attitude.

Bly: She looks like a nice old lady but you’re right, she’s really Marie Antoinette. … I thought it was interesting because we tend to blame men for that, and this was a woman thing. ... Let’s go back for a second to that idea of hope. That in the times like this, (it’s) often when the soul is most alive. And that’s why poetry readings are very, very touching now. Because poets are able to touch on the grief that people feel without the scolding. You’re right, when Americans were feeling the most sorrow, that’s when Neruda came through. …

I’ll tell you a good story. I was in Washington for a thing we had at the Lincoln Center for the 100th anniversary of Neruda’s birth. That was a couple months ago. … So some of his old fans were there and so on. Anyway, so in the middle of it they showed us a tape of Neruda and he looked about 60 at the time and this is what he said: “Well, I was flying around Chile and there was bad weather and I got grounded, in a (small) town… and so I went into the hotel. And when the people in that town realized I was there, they insisted on a poetry reading that night. So I said all right. So I went to the town hall and there it was: all three, four hundred people there and so I began with a poem, number 20 from the “Twenty Poems of Love and A Song of Desperation.” (Most English translations have this last word as Despair ). And the poem began, “I think I could write the saddest lines tonight,” and then. …

The interview tape runs out as Bly explains how Neruda had stopped reciting the poem as he suddenly couldn’t remember it and the entire audience just picked up where he left off because everyone in the audience in this tiny little town had memorized this and many of his other poems. A quick flip of the interview tape kicks the audio back in and picks up as Bly says: Can you imagine? Everyone memorized, I mean, recited the rest of that poem back to Neruda?

That’s amazing. But you know poetry does mean more in South America than it does here. Can you imagine a scene like that in the United States? Even with a Robert Frost, I don’t think everyone in the audience would know and recite the poem back to him. I love that story.

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