An MPR New Feature where poet Robert Bly talks about reading poetry, and about how he doesn't consider himself a Minnesotan poet, and that he rejects the idea of "regional poetry." The feature also includes Bly reading, and a few fans of Bly speaking about the importance of his work.
Bly is a Minnesotan poet who was a pivotal member of the Mythopoetic men's movement who wrote about being in touch with his true "masculine" nature.
This recording was made available through a grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
Transcripts
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SPEAKER 1: The more you work in poetry, the more you see that it is some imaginative energy which passes through the body, and it doesn't belong in any way to the poet. And I often enjoy reading other people's poems as much or more than reading my own, because if you read only your own, you seem to be saying that this imagination belongs to me, isn't that wonderful? Don't you admire me?
But in the poetry, reading has nothing to do with that. The advantage of reading to an audience is that it becomes perfectly apparent as soon as you have read a poem whether the poem is moving and fresh or not.
And one is a very surprised sometimes that poems penetrate into others. And what happens then is that if you write a poem which which contains some psychic energy, which is truly yours and does not belong to your shell or your mask but belongs to your inner self, then you will feel it sink into the audience, and then it awakens energy in them, which they return to you.
SPEAKER 2: It just put me in the spirit. I've been feeling a little depressed lately and kind of forgotten who I was, and it just reminded me of it.
SPEAKER 3: Sometimes when I read my own poems late at night, I feel myself on a long road. I feel the naked thing alone in the universe. The hairy body padding in the fields at dusk. I am the baboon crying out as a baby falls from the tree. I am the flax that blossoms at midnight. I am an angel breaking into three parts over the Ural Mountains.
SPEAKER 4: I just grinned the whole time, either externally or internally.
SPEAKER 5: These are things that I felt for a long time. Somehow he articulated some of my own thoughts.
SPEAKER 3: I am the thorn enduring in the dark sky. I am the one whom I have never met. I am a swift fish shooting through the troubled waters.
SPEAKER 6: It's fashionable these days to talk about regional poetry. I don't believe in regional art of any kind. I am not interested in Minnesota at all, above any other state. It just happens that I live here, and I would be a fool to live on a farm and pay absolutely no attention to what is around me.
I don't believe that those things around me in that Minnesota farm are superior or different in any way to anything in the city. I think the whole regional thing is extremely dangerous. We're liable to produce a bunch of dumbbells wearing overalls.
SPEAKER 7: Perhaps I made a mistake coming here, you see. Everyone thinks it was the right thing to do. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe I would have been much better. Maybe I'd written better poetry if I'd gone somewhere else. How do I know? I'm thinking of leaving.
SPEAKER 3: Here's a line I didn't put in. I am your grandmother crying out from a gopher hole. I am the evening light rising from the ocean plains. I am an eternal happiness. Hands rushed toward each other through miles of space. All the sleepers in the world join hands.
[APPLAUSE]
Now if you don't think that one was fun to write, you're wrong. That was great fun.