Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

ROBERT BLY: "My poems resemble the bread of Egypt

One night passes over, and you can't eat it anymore.

So gobble them down now while they're still fresh,

Before the dust of the world settles on them.

Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest

Out in the world, it dies of cold.

You've seen a fish, put him on dry land.

He quivers for a few minutes, and then is still.

And even if you eat my poems while they're still fresh,

You still have to bring forward many images yourself.

Friend, actually, what you're eating is your own imagination.

These lines are not just a bunch of old proverbs."

SPEAKER: Robert Bly, Minnesota poet, author, and philosopher. A man of immense emotions and perceptive abilities, Robert Bly is perhaps one of the most dynamic poets in the country today. He won the National Book Award in 1968 for his book The Light Around the Body. And since that time, he's written Sleepers Joining Hands and The Morning Glory.

His most recent book is The Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. He's also published translations of South American and European poets. This reading, given in late October at Concordia College in Moorhead, is a good example of the span of Bly's talent.

His poetry ranges in style from his very early objections to the Vietnam War to sensuous and heady love poems. And aside from his obvious talents as a writer, Bly is also very entertaining. Poet Robert Bly.

ROBERT BLY: Well, I can take off my shoes first. A poetry reading is a kind of a strange thing in a way. There are very few of them when I was in college. And poetry readings are connected with something wonderful that's happening really, in which poetry is coming back off the page, where it has been for 500 or 600 or 700 years.

And ancient poetry was never read on the page. It was always spoken or sung. And it's been a great loss for all of us that poetry ended up on the page. That's where we met it in high school and learned to hate it. And very few people get out of high school in the United States without hating poetry for the rest of their lives.

And one reason is because it's taught as a written form, I think. Many of the newest teachers that I know who are trying to teach poetry in a different way memorize their poems and bring them in spoken. The next generation may be sung. And the Greeks sang all of theirs and danced them.

And you can imagine a high school teacher dancing a poem, can you, in a Sauk Center? Well, we have a little ways to go there. So I'm going to begin with five translations. American literature is only a couple of hundred years old, and it's not really deep enough or rich enough yet.

So when poets come along and they get hungry, they have to go somewhere else. And England is pretty well chewed up. So they go somewhere else for it. And some of our people have been going to France and Germany. And I've been going to India lately. Not in a plane. It cost too much, but through words.

So I'll give you a poem by a 15th century Hindu poet. Kabir. And this civilization was-- I can't say it was higher than ours, but it was more inside. We know the word outside very well. How outside us, there's wonderful things like McDonald's, Russia, China.

And that's all we really know now, is what is outside of us. And you look inside, you see a big mush thing. And the Indians were given at that time. They looked inside. So here's a poem.

"Inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains

And the maker of canyons and pine mountains.

All seven oceans are inside and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is here and the one who judges jewels

And the music from the strings that no one touches

And the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth,

Friend, listen. The God whom I love is inside."

So there's a little remark of Christ to that effect, but it didn't last long. And most of us imagine God out there. Want to hear it again?

"Inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains

And the maker of canyons and pine mountains.

All seven oceans are inside and hundreds of millions of stars

And the acid that tests gold is here and the one who judges jewels

And the music from the strings that no one touches

And the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth.

Friend, listen. The God whom I love is inside."

Lovely things. I think I'll give you a poem now by-- you want another Kabir? Let me see what you think of another Kabir.

"The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out in the road.

Some say it's east of us. Some say it's west of us.

Some say it's in the primitive Earth rocks.

Other people say it's in the deep waters.

But Kabir's instinct told him it was inside and what it was worth,

And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth."

Well, I thought of a poem I read this afternoon. I'll give it to you whether you want it or not. And it's a poem by the Persian poet, Rumi. And I give it to you because I was over the radio station and read it this afternoon. And the idea of it is that it's good to take journeys.

Now, as you know, as Norwegian Lutherans, that's not favored among the Norwegian Lutherans. I went to Saint Olaf. I go to a Lutheran Church in Minnesota all the time. They say to stay here, kid. Don't go nowhere. You understand what I'm talking about? Slight conservativism.

And I think it's important for you to leave your environment. And it doesn't mean that you leave instantly or something, but sooner or later, because when you get out of college, you should go some other place like Tanganyika, joined the Peace Corps. Go somewhere where there aren't anyone like anyone you saw in high school. It's such a relief not to meet your high school friends again.

Understand there are different beings in the world. And it's true that in the '60s, kids were going different places like the jail. They don't do that so much anymore. But still, it's important because it's possible you're not a Lutheran. Can you follow me? Maybe somebody put you in the cradle wrong.

It's possible that you're different from everyone else in high school. It's conceivable. I said that enough. Have I? I'll say it with a poem now. This is a poem by Rumi, the Persian poet who founded the Whirling Dervishes, a great Sufi poet. It's called "That Journeys are Good."

"If the pine tree had a foot or two like a turtle or a wing,

Do you think it would just wait for the saw to enter?

You know that the sun travels all night under the Earth.

If it didn't, how could it throw up its flood of light in the east?

And the salt water climbs with such marvelous swiftness to the sky.

If it didn't, how would the cabbages be fed with the rain?

And that grain of sand, it left its father.

Its father was a boulder.

And only then it became introduced to an oyster and became a pearl.

Have you thought of Joseph lately?

Didn't he leave his father in tears, going?

And didn't he then learn how to understand dreams and give away grain?

And that man with a long nose,

Didn't he leave his own country, forced to,

And only then learned how to travel through the three worlds?

And you, if you can't leave your country, then go into yourself,

Become a ruby mine, open to the gifts of the sun.

Your travel could be that you leave your manhood and go to the inner man,

Or you leave your womanhood and go to the inner woman.

By a journey like that, Earth became a place where you find gold.

So leave your complaints and your self-pity and your internalized death energy.

Don't you realize how many fruits have already escaped out of sourness into sweetness?

Well, a good source of sweetness is a teacher.

Mine is called Shams.

You know that's the same word as Samson meaning the sun.

You know every fruit grows more handsome in the light of the sun."

That's a poem of Rumi's. Feel how it goes on. So Rumi's teacher was called Shams, and he taught-- Rumi was a-- inherited his father's law library. And he was a professor of Muslim law and theology until he was 35. It isn't bad to understand all that academic stuff.

But then at 35, someone came. Shams came and taught him to meditate. And that is a different proposition. That means you go into the feeling side. And at that point, one time Shams took all of Rumi's books and threw them outside in the pond. And Rumi went wild. What are you do with all my books?

And so Rumi says, well, shall we go and find them? And Sham said, dry them off. We can do that. Do you want me to dry them off? He says no, it's all right. Let it go. So then he taught him to meditate. And then he went into the other arc that a man, a woman can go into and phew, like this.

And then his students became jealous and evidently killed Shams in the backyard. And Rumi then his grief was so terrific that he took hold of a pole in the backyard and started to go around it for two to three hours at a time. And that was the invention of the Whirling Dervishes, who are still very prominent in Turkey.

Well, that's enough of that. Now, I'll give you a Norwegian. I'll give you two or three more translations. I'll read a few of my own. This was a Norwegian named Rolf Jacobsen. He's the best Norwegian poet. He's about 61 now. And if he comes to this country, you should have him here.

He came last year, and we gave a reading together at Madison, Wisconsin. Marvelous. And here's one of his poems. He is in the feeling side. It's not over in the academic side, in the feeling side. So here's a beautiful poem about old people. I think Rolf Jacobsen writes more beautifully about old people than anyone I've ever known. Here's a poem.

"I put a lot of stock in the old.

They hardly see us and have enough with their own.

They are like fishermen along big rivers.

I put a lot of stock in fishermen along big rivers and old people.

They have a look in their eyes that you don't see much anymore, the old.

Like people who are just convalescing from a big fever, the old,

Who so gradually become themselves once more.

And so gradually break up like smoke.

No one notices it.

They are gone into sleep and light."

I'll read that for you again. You like the poem? It's so different than our view of old people. We go to an old people's home, and we think they're experiencing nothing and saying they're sort of out of it. Chances are that old people are going through incredible numbers of rethinking of their whole lives. Whole kinds of insights that they missed when they were 30 and missed when they were 40 are going through their head right now.

And then you go up to them, and you're saying, you want a new transistor, Granny? And they say, well, who are these weird people?

"I put a lot of stock in the old,

The old who have enough with themselves and they hardly see us.

They are like fishermen along big rivers.

I put a lot of stock in fishermen along big rivers and old people.

They have a look in their eyes that you hardly see anymore,

As if they were convalescing from a big fever.

The old, who so gradually become themselves once more.

And so gradually break up like smoke.

No one notices it.

They are gone into sleep and light."

Nice poem. I'll give you a couple of poems by a Swede now, and then we'll get back to America. Here's one by Tomas Transtromer.

"We got ready and showed our house.

The visitor said, you live well.

The slum must be inside you."

Notice your head fall off. It's good for welfare Sweden. It's good for America to go into any big suburb in the United States.

"We got ready and showed our home.

The visitor said, you live well.

The slum must be inside you."

It's a scary poem. Don't think so? It's possible the Blacks have their suburbs out there, and we got them in here. And there's something true in it. There's no reason to live as a slob. And yet, every time you go into a house that's extremely wealthy, you have the feeling of being in an emotional slum.

And we are trying to blind ourselves to that now, because we're so crazy about rich people, because they're all rich on television. I'll give you the rest of the poem.

"Then he takes them to the church in Westeros."

Tomas Transtromer works as a psychologist for juvenile delinquents and so on and about 40 miles West of Stockholm. And so he-- I'll give you the other three stanzas.

"We got ready and showed our home.

The visitor said, you live well.

The slum must be inside you.

And the pillars on the church are white,

Like the plaster cast around the broken arm of faith.

There's a begging bowl in that church.

During the service, the begging bowl gets up and floats along the edges of the pews.

But the church bells have gone underground.

In fact, they're in the drainage pipes.

Every time we take a step, they ring.

Nicodemus, a sleepwalker, is on his way to the address.

Who's got the address.

Don't know, but that's where we're going."

I can't tell if you understand the poem or not. There's nothing to understand. It's gruesome and funny at the same time. That's a frightening thing to say. Like the pillars in a church are white like the plaster cast around the broken arm of faith. But it's true. I was in Oslo at Easter. They couldn't get enough people to do the choir at Easter in Oslo in Easter Sunday. They were all off skiing.

So then he says, the church bells have gone underground. In fact, they're in the drainage pipes. And in some way, we understand what that-- anyway, do you want me to say anything about this or not? No. We'll let it go? The church isn't doing its part anymore.

In Madison, Minnesota, the church is dead, D-E-A-D, dead. I've never heard so many boring sermons. Why not? Why are the Lutheran ministers so boring? Why is that? Why do you go into a Lutheran Church and it's dead? [SOUNDS] like that. Nobody sits there interested.

Why is that? That's a part of our reality. And we have to face it. You understand me, what I'm saying? Transtromer says, let's face it. The church bells are not up there on top of the churches anymore. They're underneath us somewhere. And I was translating it, and I said, what do you want me to do?

He says, put in whatever word you do like. You say the weathermen went underground, whatever that word is that you use. Somehow, they're beneath us. And that doesn't mean God is dead. Every time you take a step, the church bells should be up there or down there ringing.

Interesting. You can't piece it out with your rational mind, but you sense it's true somehow. It's like the idea in ancient times that God is below us, it's in our animal part. It's not up there. There's a lot of truth in that, too. He isn't out there. He's in here. Well, that's enough of that stuff.

I give you one more poem of Transtromer's. This is a wonderful poem. I have to do this for Paul Christiansen. It's a Haydn poem. He comes home after a hard day's work, and he's poor, Transtromer. Income tax, 56% in Sweden. So he comes home, and the only thing he really has is a piano. So he plays Haydn on it. And here's a little poem. Let's see.

"After a black day, I play Haydn

And feel a little warmth in my hands.

Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists,

And someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

And act like a man who's calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag.

The signal is we do not surrender but want peace.

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope.

Rocks are rolling. Rocks are hurtling.

The rocks roll straight through the house.

But every pane of glass is still whole."

Shall I read it again? It's a wonderful description, first of all, of classical music. It's a wonderful description of Haydn, who actually is saying that there is a freedom in the world. And Haydn is connected now with discipline or something, but it isn't true.

And it's a good description of all classical music. "Rocks roll straight through the house and every pane of glass is still whole." And it's also what it says if you spend your life trying to help other human beings, you may be wiped out when you come home at 5 o'clock and figure the whole thing is over. But actually, you look inside, you will see every pane of glass is still whole.

Go ahead, become an advertising man and spend your life cheating other human beings. You get home at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, every pane will be busted. We mean busted. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Well-- see, I went to-- the brightest people in my college class all went into the public medias, television, advertising, journalists.

As Kierkegaard said, if I had a daughter and she became a whore, I'd pray for her salvation. If I had a son and he became a journalist and remained one three years, I'd give him up. If he goes in television and remains for six months, give him up. All right. A television freak laughed here.

"After a black day, I play Haydn

And feel a little warmth in my hands.

Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

And someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

And act like a man who's calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag.

The signal is we do not surrender but want peace.

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope.

Rocks are rolling. Rocks are hurtling.

Rocks roll straight through the house.

But every pane of glass is still whole."

Well, it's very seldom that you have poems about music. That's why I love that one. I'll read a few poems of my own. So, as you know, in consciousness, the Indians of the 15th century are far ahead of us. You can look at their literature and their music.

We live in mainly unconsciousness. You understand what I mean? The first half of your life is spent roughly in unconsciousness in this country. You marry in unconsciousness, choose your friends in unconsciousness, choose your job in unconsciousness. About 40, you wake up and said, what happened?

Someone says, well, you've been sleeping. You ever read the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale? So the greatest danger is that when you're in your 20s, you feel awake. Actually, you're snoring so loud everyone can hear it but you. So therefore, if we're going to go down to American consciousness, we have to sink considerably. You're following me?

What American consciousness was like became clear during the Vietnam War. American consciousness enjoys quite a few murders on television, just enough to make the drinks interesting. And if you can't get them on television, you're going to have to have them out there somewhere. There's this longing for murder and death in the American consciousness. Ooh, rock music. [GRUNTS] That's got it, too.

So I'm going to give you a couple of depressing poems, so you'll feel at home. And the first poem is written from those-- I saw those snow, the snow that comes down here. I live in Southern Minnesota. We get it all from up here, and we resent it a lot.

Anyway, it comes down, and then it comes almost up to the house and stops and leaves a little-- and I brooded about that since I was a kid, and I finally wrote a poem about it.

"Those great sweeps of snow that stopped suddenly six feet from the house

Thoughts that go so far.

The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books.

The sun stops calling home.

The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread.

The wife looks at her husband one night at a party and loves him no more.

The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls, leaving the church.

It will not come closer.

The one inside moves back.

And the hands touch nothing and are safe.

And the father grieves for his son and will not leave the room where the coffin stands.

He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And then the sea lifts and falls all night.

The moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.

And the toe of the shoe pivots in the dust.

And the man in the black coat turns and goes back down the hill.

No one knows why he came or why he turned away and did not climb the hill."

And I don't know what that poem is about. You write a poem, and you don't know what it's about. But I think it's about the powerful resistance energies in us. Just when you're about to take your degree, [GRUNTS] just when you're about to really love a woman, [GRUNTS] something comes in and distracts you. [GRUNTS] That's it.

And you wake up just before they put you in the coffin. Something like that. You want to hear it again?

"Those great sweeps of snow that stopped suddenly six feet from the house,

Thoughts that go so far.

The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books.

And the son stops calling home.

The mother puts down her rolling pen and makes no more bread.

And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party and loves him no more.

And the energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls, leaving the church.

It will not come closer.

The one inside moves back.

And the hands touch nothing and are safe.

When the father grieves for his son--

This is Lincoln.

"And the father grieves for his son and will not leave the room where the coffin stands.

He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And the sea lifts and falls all night.

And the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.

And the toe of the shoe pivots in the dust.

And the man in the black coat turns and goes back down the hill.

No one knows why he came or why he turned away and did not climb the hill."

So those are sad poems. And one of the things that they say when I was in college, I wanted all my poems to be cheerful. That's a real form of unconsciousness, boy. And that's the worst. Whenever I meet a really cheerful person, I get out of the room instantly.

As I know this one hasn't been awake since the second grade or something. They're very dangerous, cheerful types. So if you have a depression, what it means is go into your depression. Don't try to come back up out of it. There's a reason you have the depression.

The best thing I ever heard on a-- depression means there's a longing in you for a reconnection with the divine. Sometimes you go way down into a depression and think wonderful happens at the bottom. Well, I'll give you one more poem like this. My wife and children and I were living out in Point Reyes Peninsula. I'll read you a poem called "The Dead Seal."

We were living out in the Point Reyes Peninsula near San Francisco a few years ago. And there was an oil spill in San Francisco harbor. Then the oil started to come in, heading towards the lagoons there, including Bolinas Lagoon, which is a long two-mile lagoon with little shell creatures and sea fishes, strange things that are not existent in any other lagoon in the United States or in the world.

And if the oil came in and remained for six hours, all dead. Standard Oil is professionally asleep. So of course, it did nothing. And the only ones awake were the students at San Francisco State who tried disabling this lagoon. And they came out in carloads of 50 and 60 carloads of students. And

They took telephone poles and put them across the mouth of the bay with wires and chains. That was good, but the oil went underneath the telephone poles. Then they went out and bought bails from the farmers for $0.50 a piece, bought them out in the water, dived into the water, wired them to the underside of the telephone poles.

And the oil did not go under the bales, but the water disintegrated them every two or three hours. So they had to go and do it again night and day. Three days or so, they save Bolinas Lagoon. Then they started to wash birds. I think they washed 960 birds covered with heavy oil. It would take them two to three hours to wash each one in mineral oil.

That is an interesting experience for them. They never-- you don't believe those Standard Oil ads anymore when you go through a stand like that. You don't believe that Standard Oil is wonderful, my friend, all that con jobs that are put on us. They taught us that in high school.

All the businesses in America really love the consumer. Yeah, they love consuming them, especially. Anyway, so a few weeks later, I went out walking on the shore. And I found a dead seal lying on the shore that had been killed with oil derivatives in the liver.

And I was a farm boy from Minnesota. I had never seen a seal close. So I took a piece of paper, and I wrote this poem.

"Walking north toward the point, I come in a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. He's lying on his back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There's a quiver in the dead flesh. My God, he's still alive. And a shot goes through me as if a wall of my room had fallen away.

He's lying on his back. The whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He's dying. This is the oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. And the flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at the edges. And the other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal skin looks like an old overcoat, scratched here and there by sharp muzzle shells maybe.

So I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he rears up, turns over, gives three cries, awaark, awaark, awaark, like the cries from Christmas toys. And he lunges toward me. I'm terrified and leap back, although I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea, but he falls over on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like an old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down in the sand, rearranges his slippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

So the next day, I come back to say goodbye. He's dead now. But he's not. He's a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today, he's thinner, squatting on his stomach with a head out. The ribs show more. Each vertebrae on the back underneath the coat is visible, shiny. He breathes in and out.

A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me. The forehead slanted. The crown of his head looked like a boy's leather jacket bending over some bicycle bars. He's taking a long time to die. The whiskers, white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes.

Goodbye, brother. Die in the sound of waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your race, your inner-tube race, so uncomfortable on land, so comfortable in the ocean. Be comfortable in death then, when the sand will be out of your nostrils, and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don't want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way."

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: You're listening to a reading given by Minnesota Poet Robert Bly. He was addressing an audience at Concordia College in Moorhead.

ROBERT BLY: So when I say that we're living in some kind of sadness in this decade, it's not only the sadness that we know that we're capable of doing what the Germans did, which we didn't know before. We could wipe out three million Jews like nothing. Just give us a chance.

We wiped out about a million in Vietnam for what? Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What did the Germans get out of all the Jews they wiped out? So there's that sadness. We have to live with that. And then there's the sadness and knowing that even though we feel sorry for the seals, we're going to have our thermostats at 72 if they all die.

That's what Carter doesn't mention. But we all make that decision together. I make it, too. I use oil at home. What I'm saying is we have to live with the sadness. We don't care anything about the animals. Got to dismantle all the natural history museums. It's just not true.

What human beings like about animals is when you get 700 chickens all together, and they lay eggs. And then you get them on a slanting thing. And as soon as the egg is laid, it goes away. The chicken looks around, no egg. And so you took away that satisfaction from the chicken.

It makes it nervous and lays another egg faster. That's how they get big egg production in those places. That's how we like animals. Wild. Well, someone asked me to put on a couple of masks. And I've got my United bag here. The airlines don't like my mask.

But in ancient times, they use masks in poetry readings. And I've been using them the last five or six years. So some of you up here, I've already scared. I'll begin with this old lady, friend of mine. During the war, there used to be a lot of anti-war readings.

And we didn't have any poems, and we finally had to make up our own. And at that time, you'd listen to the paper, and it said, 68 Vietnamese bodies found today, 78 found yesterday. Now, they say-- well, never mind. I'll give you this poem. "Counting Small-Boned Bodies."

"Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the body smaller, the size of skulls,

We could make a whole plane white with skulls in the moonlight.

If we could only make the body smaller,

Maybe we could fit a whole year's kill in front of us on a desk.

If we could only make the body smaller,

Maybe we could fit a body into a finger ring for a keepsake forever."

Would you like me to read it again to you? You like poems about sunsets and things, don't you? You like that poem, and you like me. I remind you of anyone? You want your fashion kind of poetry reading, don't you? We don't have old fashioned poetry readings anymore now.

In India, they know me. They call me Kali, the Death Mother. I decided to come to America. And I decided to come here to this college. Maybe you're a little too depressed sometimes. That's me. Anybody want to sleep with me?

Oh, come on. Anybody? I'll sleep with you. Within three years, after you get out of here, I'll be sleeping with you when you get your first television set. I like classy and juicy students. I like the ones that never play music, but just listen to it.

Those classy ones are so good to eat. I get those within a year. You know who runs the rock concerts? Me. Think you'll get rid of me? Well, I'll give you another little one here.

"Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

And when that dread heart began to beat,

What dread hands, and what dread feet?

Did he who make the lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

[APPLAUSE]

"When we are in love, we love the grass,

And the barns and the lightpoles,

And the small main streets abandoned all night."

Give it you once more.

"When we are in love, we love the grass,

And the barns and the lightpoles,

And the small main streets abandoned all night."

Here's another little one, about five lines long.

"Taking the hands of someone you love,

You see they are delicate cages.

Tiny birds are singing

In the secluded prairies

And in the deep valleys of the hand."

That's just a little thing that happens when you take the hands of someone you love. Hundreds of messages go through, and we miss them all.

"Taking the hands of someone you love,

You see they are delicate cages.

Tiny birds are singing

In the secluded prairies

And in the deep valleys of the hand."

I give you a few little love poems, new ones.

"Inside this thick consciousness,

There are bats and dogs and thunder powers.

Through the night, go long lines of weeping women.

I love you as I drive this car through the snow.

I saw a black fence wire curl up above the snow for an instant,

And I drove on and it was gone,

And the white fields all around.

The White fields all around."

Give you another one. And the horny ones will understand the first line all right.

"All day, I loved you in a fever holding on to the tail of the horse.

I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.

And my hand moved over your body covered with its dress.

Burning, rough, the hand of an animal's foot moving over leaves.

The rainstorm retiring, sunlight sliding over ocean water

A thousand miles from land."

The last image comes from being out in the middle of the ocean and seeing a cloud open up. I read that poem first in-- I think it was Auburn Community College In New York. And an interesting thing happened. I was reading it, and there was a little question in the students.

You can feel every question here. There's a little question when I came to the little part where it says, "my hand moved over, your body covered with its dress." There sort of question like, why not have her naked, more like repressed? And so I said, well, I wrote the line that way so you would understand that we love a woman even when her dress is on.

And there was a wonderful Black woman sitting in the front row. And she said, thank you. Beautiful. Wow.

"All day, I loved you in a fever holding on to the tail of the horse.

I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.

And my hand moved over your body covered with its dress.

Burning, rough, the hand of an animal's foot moving over leaves.

The rainstorm retiring, sunlight sliding over ocean water

A thousand miles from land."

I'll give you another one.

"I love you around and among the willows.

The cowrie shell has its strange mouth without teeth.

The tree nods, and its crown rises again.

The true home comes toward us from the dark waters.

I love the brown men who rule the ocean.

I love the tender one hidden in a boat.

Come with me.

We will walk alone, away from the crowds and the high buildings.

I love to go with you and enter the valley where no one is king."

Another one? You want that one again? If you say no, it's no.

AUDIENCE: Yes.

ROBERT BLY: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

ROBERT BLY: How does it begin?

"I love you around and among the willows.

The cowrie shell has its strange mouth without teeth.

The tree nods and its crown rises again.

The true home comes toward us from the dark waters.

I love the Brown men who rule the ocean.

I love the tender one hidden in the boat.

Come with me.

We will walk alone away from the crowds and the high buildings.

I love to go with you and enter the valley where no one is king."

Give you one more. Oftentimes, you know if you're in love with someone when you want to know about what they were like in the second grade. What did you look like in the third grade? And I noticed oftentimes women would say that to me. But it took me a long time before I finally felt it in here, and I could say, what were you like? I'd like to know. And so I wrote this little poem.

"I want what is inside you to be brought inside me,

As the boat is bought at night inside its slanted house by the shore,

As the brother goes to bed in his attic bed at last near his brother in the room where they sleep,

And the mother joins her son after the long trip to the cemetery,

As the lover goes to the bus to meet his wife and impatiently brings her home.

So what was far out into the air and the longitudes of the Earth is brought home,

Taken in, a place prepared in the chest,

And the mountain loon returns

And soon is asleep in the mountain lake."

[APPLAUSE]

So I'll give you a little one written by a woman. It's a Pakistani woman. It's a wonderful one.

"Call it romance.

Call it love.

You did it.

Now, pull up the blankets.

I want to sleep."

All right. I'm going to read a poem for my children, and then-- I have a couple of my children with me tonight. They're out at Elsa's house. I have a little boy, Noah, who's out there, and he's mentioned in this poem. He's about 10 now, and a little boy, Micah, who's about six.

And they're out there playing pong on the television, which I think is insane wonderful thing. And I have a couple of daughters, Mary and Biddy, whom I describe here. And Mary is about 14. She's an Aquarius. I don't know if you know anything about Aquarius. They float around a lot.

And then I have a daughter, Biddy, who is a Taurus. And so I'll read this little poem. What happens is that we don't have a television set. How could we after the way I scream at it in poetry readings? So when the kids come home, and they get snotty-- and what they do is they'll disappear on Friday or something, and they start to write a play. Mary usually writes a play.

Then Saturday, they cast it, and then they make the costumes. And then by Sunday night, they're all done. And the grown-ups are invited up to watch it for a small fee. So this describes one of those nights, and I'll read it to you. "Coming in for Supper."

"It's lovely to follow paths in the snow made by human feet.

The paths wind gaily around the ends of drifts. They rise and fall.

How amazed I am after working hard in the afternoon

That when I sit down at the table with my elbows touching the elbows of my children,

So much love flows out and around in circles.

Each child flares up as a small fire in the woods.

Biddy chortles over her new hair, curled for the first time last night

Over her new joke song.

(SINGING) Yankee Doodle went to town,

Riding on a turtle,

Turned a corner just in time

To see a lady's girdle.

And Mary knows the inscription she wants on her coffin if she dies young.

And she says it

(SINGING) Where the bee sucks,

There suck I

In a cowslip's bell, I lie.

She is obstinate and light at the same time,

A heron who flies pulling long legs behind

Or balances unsteadily on a stump,

Aware of all the small birds at the edge of the forest where its shadowy,

Longing to capture the horse with only one hair from its mane.

And Biddy can pick herself up and run over the muddy river bottom without sinking in.

She already knows all about holding,

And kisses each grown up carefully before going to bed

At the table, she faces you laughing, bent over slightly like a tree bent in wind.

Protective of this old shed, she is leaning over.

And all the books around and the walls are like feathers in a feather bed.

They weigh hardly anything.

Only the encyclopedias left lying on the floor near the chair contain the three-million-year-old life of the oyster shell breakers.

Oh, those dusks were 10,000 years long that fell over the valley from the cave mouth where we sit.

And the marmoset curls its toes once more around the slippery branch,

Aware of the furry chest of its mother, long since disappeared into a hole that appeared one day in the afternoon.

Well, supper is over, and the children pass out invitations composed with felt pens.

You are invited to, The Thwarting of Captain Alfonse, Prince's Gardiner, Mary Bly, Captain Alfonse, Wesley Ray. Aunt August, Biddy Bly, railway track, Noah Bly, Train, Sam Ray, costumes and sets by Mary Bly and Wesley Ray. Free will offering accepted"

So the boys since are younger always get those crummy parts, like trains and railway tracks. All right. What I'd like to do is to read you two more poems from this one and a song. I get sidetracked into children and love poems and-- is that OK for you?

AUDIENCE: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT BLY: Here's one that's from this little book called Camphor and Gopherwood. "This body is made of Camphor and Gopherwood." I started the poems that way. "My friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood. Doesn't mean anything." Well, it sounds wonderful, and it always made me start writing.

And gopherwood is mentioned in the Bible as what they made the Ark out of, but it was snake by a bad translator. And it just made out of a boxelder tree or something. Anyway, so all of these poems are sort of anti-Saint Paul poems. I'm sick of Saint Paul bitching about the body.

[APPLAUSE]

There's never was a bigger ingrate. He had one for a long time. And besides, we know what he means when he says body. He really means women. As you know, women are a source of evil, sin, and things like that. So one of the biggest things in the Midwest, I think the next step is to hold a church convention and remove Saint Paul's books from the Bible, unless you want Moorhead and Fargo to be like this for another 400 years. Is that what you want?

Because there's nothing like a hatred of the body and a hatred of women to dampen everything down, to bring it down to some low level, like a molecule's barely moving in a car fender or something. Read a lot of Saint Paul. He ended up in a car fender anyway. So I'll read-- so this is an anti-Saint Paul book. I'll read you this poem,

"My friend, this body is made of energy compacted and whirling.

It is the energy that carries the henhouse down the road dancing, and an instant later, lifts all four walls apart.

It is the horny thumbnail of the retired railway baron, over which his children skate on Sunday.

It is the forehead bone that does not rot.

When Saint Paul is finished, you'll know when we have women priests.

It is the forehead bone that is not rot.

It is the woman priest's hair still fresh among Shang ritual things.

We love this body as we love the day we first met the person who led us away from this world,

As we love the gift we gave one day on impulse in a fraction of a second

That we still see every day as we love the human face.

Fresh after lovemaking, more full of joy than a wagon load of hay."

SPEAKER: Minnesota poet, author, philosopher Robert Bly. He read in late October at Concordia College in Moorhead. Bly is editor of a magazine called The Seventies. He's written several books including Silence in Snowy Fields, The Light Around the Body, Sleepers Joining Hands, and The Morning Glory. His most recent book, The Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood is being published by Harper & Row.