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BILL SIEMERING: Robert Bly is Minnesota's best-known poet, winner of the National Book Award, translator of Kabir, Rilke, Neruda, Alecsandri, and Lorca. He writes of the familiar Minnesota landscape and the unfamiliar terrain of the unconscious. Now 50 years old, he is tall, straight, radiating an energy of someone who enjoys life, who is vitally engaged with ideas, who is both playful and serious.

As he reads, his hands are busy giving shape and shading to his words. Today, we hear Robert Bly read from his most recent collection of prose poems, This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, published last year by Harper & Row. The reading was recorded at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

ROBERT BLY: The first one, I suppose, describe what is it like to get to be 50 years old. And it feels good, very good. And so the poem begins with the following scene. I go out and make my children bring some apples in. Then I make them cut them in fours and core them and take the peelings off. And then I throw them into an authorizer and grind them up to make applesauce for the winter.

Then my children take these apple peels and they throw them immediately outside the door, of course. And then in the middle of the night, my sheep get out and wake us up where we were sleeping on the screen porch, eating the apple peels. And sheep make a lot of noise eating apple peels. So I was awakened at half past 5:30 in the morning by sheep eating apple peels, and there was nothing else to do. I may as well write a poem. So this is what I wrote.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

It's called "Walking Swiftly." When I wake, I hear sheep eating apple peels just outside the screen. The trees are heavy, soaked, cold, and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm. And yet, somewhere inside, I am not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of 2 by 4s, making the landscape nervous for 100 miles. And the emperor, when he was 60, called for rhinoceros horn for sky blue phoenix egg shaped from veined rock dipped in rooster blood.

Around him, the wasps kept guard. The hens continued their patrol. The oysters open and close all questions. The heat inside the human body grows. For a while, it knots into will, heavy, burning, sweet, and then into generosity that longs to take on the burdens of others, and then into mad love that lasts forever. The artist walks swiftly to his studio and carves oceanic waves into the dragon's mane. I think I'll read it to you once more.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

You understand what these poems are doing? They sort of go along like this. There's a little joke here and there. And then they jump to something else, and it's a practice in jumping around a little bit. And if you don't jump fast enough, you end up in the mud pedal. So I think really is sort of in your 20s when will-- your late 20s when will finally comes in. And you feel that intensity, I'm going to do this and it's going to be done. I'm going to do it. And that's a wonderful place for energy to go.

Then in your 30s or maybe your 30s and early 40s, then that's replaced sometimes by a kind of generosity. I call it generosity here, but that's a point in which a woman takes a job and tries to help people in a hospital or a man suddenly becomes interested in ecology maybe and stops beating other people and becomes interested maybe in a sea or something like that. Do you follow me, what I'm saying?

And then later, maybe in your late 40s, then something else happens in which-- in which-- I don't know what happens, but another kind of energy comes that's more ecstatic than anything you felt in your 20s or your 30s. And that's why the Chinese are crazy about old people. And Chinese can't wait to get to be 60. Chinese say hell, nothing ever happens till you're 60.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

And so it's strange, all the great poets that we know in China, most of their work was started around 55 or 60. Whereas in this country, we say, oh, God, you're 23 years old and you haven't published a book yet? Hmm. So I published my first book when I was 36. I had my first child, my first book when I was 36. it was a little too early, but-- I'm not reading that book. OK, I'll read you this one.

This one's called "Walking Swiftly." When I wake, I hear sheep eating apple peels just outside the screen. The trees are heavy, soaked, cold, and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm. And yet, somewhere inside, I'm not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of 2 by 4s, making the landscape nervous for 100 miles. And the emperor, when he was 60, called for rhinoceros horn for sky blue phoenix eggs shaped in veined rock dipped in rooster blood.

And around him, the wasps kept guard. The hens continued their patrol. The oysters open and close all questions, The heat inside the human body grows. For a while, it knots into will, heavy, burning, sweet, and then into generosity that longs to take on the burdens of others, and then into mad love that lasts forever.

The artist walks swiftly to his studio and carves oceanic waves into the dragon's mane. I don't know how that Chinese artist got in. In the last line. Suddenly, a Chinese artist appeared who was on his way to a studio to carve waves into a dragon's mane. So I just let him in. This is a poem called "The Left Hand."

One day, I was sitting out in my study. It was an old school house where I work. And I had a lamp, and my hand was somehow hanging up here. And I looked at it and it looked as if someone loved it, looked more loved than I was, as I felt. So I wrote this little poem. My friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood.

Where it goes, we follow even, into the ark. As the light comes in sideways over the damp spring buds in the winter trash, the body comes out hesitatingly. And we are shaken. We weep. How is it we feel that no one has ever loved us? This protective lamp-lit left hand hovering over its own shadow on the page seems more loved than we are.

And when we walk into a room where we expect to find someone, we don't believe our eyes. We walk all the way over the floor and feel the bed. It's a short one, so I'll read it again. We can't keep this up, otherwise, we'll be here all night. But I'll just read you this one again. My friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood. Where it goes, we follow, even into the ark.

As the light comes in sideways from the West over the damp spring buds in the winter trash, the body comes out hesitatingly. And we are shaken. We weep. How is it we feel that no one has ever loved us? This protective lamp-lit left hand hovering over its own shadow on the page seems more loved than we are. And when we walk into a room where we expect to find someone, we don't believe our eyes.

We walk all the way over the floor and feel the bed. Here's a little poem called "The Sleeper." And I don't know where this poem came from. I found it written in my notebook in my own handwriting, so I concluded that I had written it.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

So a wonderful thing about as you get older and you're writing in the beginning in your 20s, you get your poem and then you say, oh, God. And you rewrite it right away and ruin it, and then you ruined the ruining of it. And you know, the whole page is all messed up and everything. And all you do is that your neuroticism comes in on the rewrite, you know? So later, as you get older, you just take a notebook and you write it one page and then you turn the page over and you've got a whole blank page to do another one there.

And you don't read that stuff, you know? And then you wait three months and then you read it over, and the stuff that's bad that says, well, it wasn't good that day. You didn't have a good coffee. It was bad coffee, so-- and then once in a while, you find a good one. And I found this one in here, and I don't remember anything about writing it. I don't remember if I wrote it on waking up or what, but it's called "The Sleeper." He came in and sat by my side and I did not wake up.

I went on dreaming of vast houses with rooms. I had not seen of men suddenly appearing whom I did not know, but who knew me, of points of thistles whose points shone as if a lighter inside. A man came to me and began to play music. One arm lay outside the covers. He put the dulcimer in my hand, but I did not play it. I went on hearing.

Why didn't I wake up? And why didn't I play? Because I am asleep, and the sleeping man is all withdrawn into himself. He thinks that the sound of a shutting door is a tooth falling from his head or his own head rolling on the ground. So that's when you know that there's something in the poem because when I read it, I smile like you're doing at the end. I say, that's good, that thing of the tooth falling from the head.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

That's good. And if I don't have that feeling, I just let the poem go. Forget it. Send it out to pasture. Here's a poem called "Finding The Father." The theme of the book really, as the theme, actually, of every drawing that Gendron has ever made, is that there are a lot of things in this world that deserve praise.

I can't speak for Gendron now, but for myself, the one that I dislike most in not saying that is Saint Paul. I can't stand his constant bitching about the human body and sexuality and women and worms and animals. And he's always confusing women and animals in the first place. And then it happens he doesn't like one of them, that complicates it.

So I'm serious when I say that we inherit through Saint Paul a terrific superiority to everything in the universe, as if the spirit of everything in the body, nothing. And Saint Paul said these disgusting words, you know, somebody said, should we marry? And he said, well, it's better to marry than to burn.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

But he doesn't mention the third possibility. And this produces a kind of meanness in the Christian spirit. Meanness. I don't mean that all Christians are mean at all. I consider myself a Christian, but not a Paul Christian. I don't find that meanness in Christ, and his words are so different than Paul's. So therefore, in a way, this whole book is a non-Saint Paul book.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

So the first line of this poem touches on that tiny bit. The first little phrase is this body offers to carry us for nothing. Well, that's something.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

Why complained about it? This body offers to carry us for nothing as the ocean carries logs. So on some days, the body wails with its great energy. It smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs who flow around the sides. Someone knocks at the door. We do not have time to dress. He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met, who wandered out in a snowstorm the night you were born, and then lost his memory and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp, you will see him. He sits there behind the door. The forehead so light, the eyebrows so heavy, lonely in his whole body, waiting for you. Those remarks about Saint Paul was not a good introduction to that particular poem. But do you understand what area of the poem is in? You don't?

Someone shook their head. It belongs in the area of-- I think it belongs in the area of the male looking for-- I don't know. Looking for-- you understand how the male has been-- the respect for male consciousness has been harmed in the last 10 years? Vietnam War did a lot of that. A lot of the males have been attacked on many areas. So it's very hard now. I notice there's very few younger males now who have trust in older males.

Yet, I was doing the other day a play adapted from an old Welsh legend of the fourth century AD, and that begins with an older male coming to help a younger one. And they felt that the male could never get away from his own mother without the help of an older guide male. Well, I'm just saying-- you understand me-- I think it belongs in that area somewhere, recognizing something divine inside the male. Should I read it again? Doesn't have to do with Jehovah.

This body offers to carry us for nothing as the ocean carries logs. And so on some days, the body wails with its great energy. It smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs who flow around the sides. Someone knocks at the door. We do not have time to dress. He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says, and there find the father, whom we have never met, who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born, who then lost his memory and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp, you will see him. He sits there behind the door, the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light, lonely in his whole body, waiting for you. All right, I'll read you another one. Going out to check the ewes. We had some ewes who were going to have lambs. And, of course, ordinarily in life, the lambs come along in March or April, May when it's fairly warm.

But since we were all partisan freaks, we try to get as many lambs as possible at the right time to sell them in October 1, which means that you have to have the lambs in January or February. And then if it's really cold, the lamb comes out wet. It can die within an hour. So therefore, if you're having lambs, you had to go out and check them a lot, and the ewes to make sure they don't last-- you know, they don't suddenly come. So we'd often go out.

And actually, in this case, the lambs did come shortly after this poem. And we went out and found one had been born only about 10 minutes and another one, maybe 20 minutes. And so then what you do is you pick them up and run back to the house, get a cardboard box, and your children. And the children get all kinds-- oh, yes, one of my children went and got a hot blanket, you know, an electric blanket. A good idea, was never thought of in the old days. And--

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

And you get some warm milk and a nipple, you know, because there's always one or two mothers so mean, they won't let them nurse. They're a little freaked out. They were just virgins a few weeks ago, I mean months ago. So then we had to do that. One mother wouldn't accept them at all, and we had to feed that one for a while. Anyway, so you bring them in and save them. And then after they've dried off, an hour and a half or so, most of them can go right back out and they're fine. It's just the problem of drying them off. All right, that has nothing to do with this poem.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

My friend, this body is food for the thousand dragons of the air. Each dragon light is a needle. This body loves us and carries us home from our hoeing. It is ancient and full of the bales of sleep. In its vibrations, the sun rolls along under the Earth. The spouts over the ocean curl into our stomach, and water revolves, spout seen by skull eyes at mid-ocean.

This body of herbs and gopherwood, this blessing, this lone ridge patrolled by water. I get up. Morning is here. The stars are out. The black winter sky looms over the unborn lambs. The barn is cold before dawn. The gate's slow. The body longs for itself. Far out at sea. It floats in the black heavens. It is a brilliant being, locked in the prison of human dullness.

I'll read you the last three lines again because that's the really depressing part of the poem. I want you to get that. This body longs for itself far out at sea. It floats in the black heavens. It is a brilliant being, locked in the prison of human dullness. Understand what I'm talking about? Ever woken up in the morning or take a nap in the afternoon and your body is full of energy and feels terrific, and then you go to some dopey party where everybody talks about the weather?

How can it be that with all that wonderful energy we have, our conversation is so boring? You understand the shock, that's the idea. Or you go to a Kiwanis meeting, right? How about feeling full of energy and you go to a faculty meeting? How about that? Shall I speed up?

SPEAKER 1: No.

ROBERT BLY: Where are we? "Galloping Horses." I'll read this one, "Galloping Horses." There's a form called the fable in which you don't say I, but you make up a little narrative. And I'm not very good at that, but I made up one in this book. "Galloping Horses." The horses gallop East over the steppes, each with its rider hard. Each rider carries a strip of red cloth raised above his head. The horses leap over a line of fire, then a stream.

They leap higher. Hooves push into the mud then the crevice, space stretched out sideways. A few horses fall in, and now they meet their fourth obstacle-- flesh. It is a Garden of Eden. Elephant trunks reach lazily up into the tree branches, and the gazelles hurry over the plain like blood corpuscles in a storm, flock on flock.

Even the monkeys have hair. And the horses slow. They become confused among so many gentle animals. The riders turn to the side and behind them, looking in their saddles to see the large animals peacefully grazing behind. I think it's related, again, to Saint Paul somewhere where it says that you meet the fourth obstacle, which is flesh. That's the obstacle we hit and like in puberty.

What are you going to do with it? Well, you can kill it. That's one plan. Somehow, there's a feeling in our culture that sexuality is something violent and brutal and an enemy. I mean, if that weren't so, why would a porno magazines be so ugly? I mean, the porno people must really hate sex. They must really hate it. And how do you hate anything, unless you're afraid of it?

You follow me, huh? Maybe that's not the case at all. So I tried to get something of that in here. And the poem just describes-- I don't know where the poem came from. I just started to write and I saw a whole bunch of horses galloping like Genghis Khan people galloping out of Asia, galloping towards-- galloping towards Europe or something. And then I saw them jump over some fire and I saw them jump over some air and I said, wow, air and fire, whoa, solid.

And so then they jumped over-- what-- water, I guess. And then it'd be too boring. So I made the fourth one flesh instead of fire, earth, water, and air. I made the fourth one flesh. Walking to the next farm. This one's a little easier. This is a poem about two years ago, I think, when we had the wonderful snows, and I and two friends took a walk to the neighboring farm called the Kylen Place, which has been abandoned for the last seven or eight years.

And it was one of those days in which snow falls and everything is quiet. And there was snow beneath my feet, snow above my head, snow all around. And we just walked over, saying nothing through the snow. Man, that's divine. You ought to leave the city. What the hell are you doing here? Anyway. so and then on the way, I started to think about male and female energies. We used to talk so much about it 10 years ago.

And I don't know if I need to say any more here. My brother was killed in an automobile accident a few years ago, and he's mentioned here. The year that he died, he bulldozed down all the trees on the farm and replanted them, which we have to do from time to time. There's a statement here-- more and more docile men are being born every day. I don't know who made that, but it's obviously someone had visited IBM or something like that.

And you can't get along in those big companies, unless you agree to be a docile, that is to say to be a dog. Later, you want to be vice president, they'll make you a German shepherd.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

So it's a problem. All right, shall I read the poem? At the end, there's a little statement from the "Tao Te Ching," which I rewrote. It has been snowing all day. There is a sort-- three of us start out across the fields. The boots sink into the ankles but go on. Our feet move through the most powerful snow energy. There is falling snow above us and below us and on all sides.

My eyes feel wild, as if a new body were rising with tremendous swirls in its flow. Its whirlpools move with their face upward as those worlds in the Missouri that draw in green cottonwoods from collapsed Earth banks pull them down with all their branches. And our feet carry the male energy that disappears, as my brother's energy did. In his powerful force field, his whole life disappeared, and all the trees on his farm went with it.

There is some sort of energy that comes off the fierce man's hair. It's not a halo, but a background of flames. The energy increases while, quote, "more and more docile men are being born every day." As the Tibetan exhales, 50 pale men melt back into the ground. Huns fade back into the forest around Vienna. The doctor leaps up from his desk. He curses a stupidity of his life and grinds his teeth. That's Chekhov.

Lenin refuses to eat with others. The carriage goes on through the night. Then what is asked of us? To stop sacrificing one energy for another. They are not different energies anyway, not male or female, but worlds of different speeds as they revolve. We must learn to worship both and give up the idea of one God.

I taste the snow lying on the branch. I picked up some snow and tasted it. I taste the snow lying on the branch. It tastes slow. It is as slow as the whirl in the boulder lying under the riverbed. Its whirls take 9,000 years to complete, but they too pull the buffalo skin boats down into their abysses. Many souls with hair go down. And here's a little poem. The light settles down in front of each snowflake and the dark rises up behind it. And inside its own center, it lives.

Well, that's a strange experience reading these poems. I've never read them all in a group. And I can see they're much more concentrated and stuff than most poems that I read. Well, so this poem came about from reading a marvelous book written by Lewis Thomas called Lives of a Cell. And if you haven't read that book, you should read it. He's the head of the Sloan Kettering Institute, and he-- in this book is a series of book reviews. He's very witty and smart.

In the course of it, he says a lot of remarks about what they've discovered in the last 15 years about the protozoa systems inside the human body. It turns out that your muscles couldn't move, unless there were protozoa in there who had made agreements 9 million years ago.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

He says there are no Republicans inside the body.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

And those protozoa have other protozoas on them. It's unbelievable the number of living beings not connected with us inside our own bodies all working together. And he said-- he said, you know, 15 years ago when I wanted to take a walk in Central Park, I thought I knew who wanted the air. Now, he said, I'm not so sure.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

And it is quite true that you can describe human beings as simply the most fantastically ingenious way that protozoas have figured out to get around.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

Human beings even will take airplanes to Africa, where the protozoa get a change of climate. And he considers this possibility very carefully. And then he says wonderful things. He says, you know, protozoa can actually see odors. They don't smell them. They see them. And he says, evidently, odors have different shapes. Wow, that astounded me. I stuck it in here.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

And then I took the same lines from the Tao Te Ching I used for the snowflake and I rewrote them for the protozoa. And you'll find that in here too. OK, I guess that's about all. Yeah, so there's a tremendous amount of joy and energy. I just read a new article of his, Lewis Thomas, and he said this. He says, you know, the most awful thing about human beings is most of the conversations that I hear have to do with their health. How are you today, huh? Yeah, I had cold last week. How are you now?

He says the fact is that there's only 3% or less than 2% of the bacteria in the whole world that have any evil designs on us at all. He says why this paranoia about germs? That'd be a stupid germ that would kill the host. So he says the fact is that this our paranoia. And he says it came out wonderfully when they came back from the moon and they had to be sure these guys didn't breathe on the president.

He says the fact is that we are extremely healthy beings, and the power and the toughness of our bodies is absolutely staggering. But no one talks about that. Well, are you still after it? OK. The origin of the praise of God for Lewis Thomas and his Lives of the Cell. My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

And it's with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow. Translators of Virgil who burn up the whole room. The man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment. This is the body, so beautifully carved inside with the curves of the inner ear and the husk so rough, knuckle brown.

As we walk, we enter the magnetic fields of other bodies. And every smell we take in, the communities of protozoa see. And a being inside leaps up towards it as a horse rears at the starting gate. When we come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling energies, slowly circling smells. And the protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges, of tornadoes, of octopuses.

The sunlight lays itself down before every protozoa, and the night opens itself out behind it. And inside its own energy, it lives. So the space between two people diminishes. It grows less and less. No one to weep. They merge at last. And the sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body.

And beings unknown to us start out in a pilgrimage to their savior. Their holy place is a small black stone that they remember from proterozoic times when it was rolled away from a door. And it was after that they found their friends, who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world. The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms.

The cells dance inside beams of sunlight so thin, we cannot see them. To them, each ray is a vast palace with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells, praise sentences rise to the throat of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head and he says, now, do you still say that you cannot choose the road?

[APPLAUSE]

That was fun. I never read that aloud before. And that last line comes from Rumi, the great Sufi poet who ends one of his poems, now, do you still say you can't choose the road? Learn from your great grandfather, Adam. When he lost the road, the tears that fell from his face made every valley and salon full of fragrant spices and herbs. And you say you can't choose the road?

The stubborn angel said that. He was also the one who refused praise to the inner man. When a human being has experienced the ecstasy, he knows. He doesn't say, please lay out your system of proof for me.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

From the outer layers of the unconscious logic, from the inner man, love. That's a poem by the greatest poet probably of the last 2,000 years, Rumi, who was born around 1265. All right, here's a little poem called "The Pail." Friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood. So for two days, I gathered ecstasies from my own body. I rose up and down, surrounded only by bare wood and bare air and some gray cloud.

And what was inside me came so close to me. And I lived and died. Now it's morning. The faint rain of March hits the bark of the half-grown trees. The honeysuckle will drip water. The moon will grow wet sailing. The granary door turns dark on the outside. The oats inside still dry. And the grandfather comes back inquiringly to his farm. His son stares down at the pickup tire.

The family lawyer loses his sense of incompetence for a moment. In the barn, the big pail is swung out so as to miss the post. I don't know where that pail came from. All right, here's another little poem. This one I wrote in the same day as the one about walking to the next farm.

I was standing over in the farm and there was snow there. It was an abandoned farm. And there was maybe two feet of snow on the ground and more snow falling all the time. Beautiful. No one had ever stepped in it. And there's a few little pigeon grass clumps, heads coming up out of the snow. Beautiful. Wow. So I said to myself, if you've had 15, 20 years of writing poetry, you better write one right now. And it's hard, you know? You're out there and your ballpoint pen freezes and everything.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]

So I wrote this one, and it's nothing but images of snow on snow. If you're a painter, it's simple. You just do a white thing.

SPEAKER 2: White?

ROBERT BLY: White, yes. I'm not a painter. He is. He says, white? What do you mean, white? I never do that for snow. He's right. Mm.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

Snow has fallen on snow for two days behind the Kylen farmhouse. No one has walked through it or looked at it. It makes the sound that the porgies hear near the ocean floor, the sound that the racer hears just before his death, the sound that lifts the buoyant swimmer in the channel. Wind blows for pigeon grass heads, scarce and fine above the snow.

They are hair and legs in white morning fog, a musical thought that rises as the pianist sits down at her table. The body laboring before dawn to understand its dream. Everyone in the house still asleep. In its dream, thin feet come down the mountain side. Hooves clatter over the wooden bridges, walk along the stone walls, and then pause and look in at an orchard where a fount of water is rising in the air.

Men are lying asleep all around its base, each with his sword lying under him. And the orchard keeper, where is he? Here we have two poems left now. This poem is called "Snowed In." It was from the big snow of two or three years ago when everybody was snowed in for two or three days.

Power was out for three days. It's the third day of snow. Power has been out since yesterday. The horses stay in the barn. And before I leave the house, sinking up to my waist in snow and push open the study door, snow falls in. I sit down at my desk. There's a plant in blossom. The upper petal is orange red.

The lower petal, paler, as if the intensity had risen upward. Two smaller petals, like country boys' ears, stick out on either side. This blossom faces the window where snow sweeps past at 40 miles an hour. So there are two tendernesses looking at each other, two oceans living at a level of instinct surer than mine.

Yet, in them both, there is the same receiving, the same longing to be blown, to be shaken, to circle slowly upward or sink downward toward roots. One cold. One warm. But neither wants to go up geometrically floor after floor, even to hold up a wild-haired roof with copper dragons through whose tough nose rainwater will pour.

So the snow and the orangey blossoms are both the same flow that starts out close to the soil, close to the floor, and needs no commandments, no civilizations, no drawing rooms lifted on the labor of the clawhammer, but is at home when one or two are present? It is also inside the block of wood and inside the burnt bone that sketched the elk by smoky light.

A man and a woman sit quietly near each other. In the snowstorm, millions of years come close behind. Nothing is lost, nothing rejected. Our bodies are equal to the snow in energy. The body is ready to sing all night and be entered by whatever wishes to enter the human body singing.

You understand that it has-- you understand that at the end, the Tibetans and everybody say, you have to be careful if you're doing meditation and stuff because, you know, a lot of things can come-- broom-- jump in. But if you're singing or something, you say, all right, come on in. Anyone that wants to come in while I'm singing, come on. I'll read a tiny bit. I'll read the last paragraph again. A man and a woman sit near each other. In the snowstorm, millions of years come close behind them.

You know, you always feel a whole history of the human race if you're in a snowstorm. Millions of years come close behind. Nothing is lost, nothing rejected. Our bodies are equal to the snow in energy. The body is ready to sing all night and be entered by whatever wishes to enter the human body singing. All right, the last poem is "The Cry Going Out Over Pastures."

I love you so much with this curiously alive and lonely body. It is a young hawk sitting on a tree by the Mississippi before any green has appeared on the Earth beneath. I love you among my chest where walnut hollows fill with crackling lights and shadows. There, birds drink from water drops.

It loves you with what it extracts from the prudent man, hunched over his colony of lizards. And with that, it loves you madly beyond all rules and conventions. Even the six holes in the flute move about under the dark man's fingers and the piercing cry goes out over the grown up pastures no one sees or visits at dusk, except the deer out of all enclosures, who has never seen any bed but his own of wild grass.

I first met you when I'd been alone for nine days. And now this lonely hawk body longs to be with you whom it remembers. It knows how close we are. How close we will always be. There is death but also this closeness. This closeness, when the bee rises into the air above the hive to find the sun, to become the sun.

And the traveler moves through exile and loss, through murkiness and failure to touch the ground again of his own kingdom and kiss the Earth. What shall I say of this? I say praise to the first man or woman who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. Ginger, Come on.

BILL SIEMERING: Minnesota poet Robert Bly, reading from This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, published by Harper & Row, and the reading recorded at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. After the reading, I spoke with Bly about the relation of the times and place to his writing. He began by comparing the 1960s when he was actively opposed to the Vietnam War, and the 1970s.

ROBERT BLY: I've been noticing an interesting thing in poetry readings that the poetry reading in the '60s was an extremely exciting thing because the Vietnam War protests carried that with it in every reading. And I have been trying to, to-- in a poetry reading, to have-- to move from excitement to feeling.

And that has made me understand something about the '70s, that I don't think the '70s are a time of doldrums. I think in a way that there was too much excitement and too little feeling in the '60s. There was a lot of emotion. I'm interested in the distinction between emotion and feeling. Emotion includes anger and things like that when you're rubbed raw. Whereas, feeling is a form of intelligence which actually makes you feel closer and helps you understand certain things. And I feel there's a lot of feeling in the '70s going on underneath.

BILL SIEMERING: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT BLY: You can talk about it in terms of-- and audiences in the '70s are very attentive. They don't respond as enthusiastically or wildly maybe as those in the '60s, but they also are not so crazy about clichés, so that the students are in some ways are more pleasing in somehow because they're more thoughtful. And I think that everyone is tired in the way of excitement and is longing for feeling.

So I've thought of that as a possibility, and from that point of view, the '70s is a positive time with a lot of material going on beneath the level of consciousness. Second thing that I have been doing a lot of thinking about is the contrast between the-- well, I should say that in the '60s, as I look back on it, there was a very strong concentration on the positive elements of female energy.

What you saw in the '60s was female energy thought of positively in terms of ecology, in terms of baking bread, going to a chicken farm in Oregon, compassion, opposition to the war or long hair, whereas the male energy was thought of mainly negatively and destructive, domineering, patriarchal, tendency to result in murder. Whereas, I think what-- again, that's an overemphasis.

And what happens in the '60s-- well, what I feel happening in the '70s in an underground way and probably get stronger is that the males need to come forward in a positive way into male consciousness. And that means that they-- the males, help each other in the '70s more than they did in the '60s. The males are learning to reject many of the female projections upon them.

The feminist will project a positive female consciousness. At the same time, they'll project upon the males the negative male consciousness. And the males have to learn to reject that as much as a woman learns to reject the cheerleader projection put on her. And this is a slow process for the males, but I think one that's growing. And I mentioned the Welsh legend in which in the ancient times in Wales, they thought that the problems of facing a female consciousness and the problems of facing dependency to the parents could only be solved with the help of an older, wiser male.

And that implies considerable trust between the generations. In this older Welsh legend that I found, Arthur is a shaman. And the first thing he does to the young man is set him down and give him a haircut. And the young man has to be able to accept a haircut by an older male. And that's not a haircut that you get in the Marine Corps because that's simply without wisdom. But there's another kind of haircut that a wise older male gives the younger male, and somehow that kind of thing is possible in the next 10 years, learning about that.

BILL SIEMERING: So this is in the '70s, we have maleness with wisdom, the emerging male consciousness.

ROBERT BLY: It must be what people were longing for in the 1860s when Thoreau came along, and Emerson. Surely, that is the male with wisdom.

BILL SIEMERING: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT BLY: And then I think, you know, Whitman felt that all the hopes he had for male consciousness with wisdom, which in a way is related to his idea of brotherhood. Historians think of that as being destroyed by the development of the Industrial Revolution and everything that the Civil War produced, which was a heavy northern industrialist, smashed that hope of males and essentially produced the destructive JP Morgan kind of society in which the male is actually crushed, and there's nothing going on except competition between males.

And it's possible we've gone over the crest in that now. And we may be able to return again to thinking of male consciousness with honor, which I don't think implies any anti-female, not at all. Just, you know, in the last two or three years, I've met a number of males who find themselves brooding on this and thinking about it and what that means. And they begin to be in touch with their grandfathers again. And grandfathers weren't much during the '60s, you know?

BILL SIEMERING: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT BLY: And everyone was looking for something else. And I noticed there's a lot of response towards Rolf Jacobsen, the Norwegian poet I translated, who has this beautiful work about old people. And I have the feeling that inside each of us, there is an old man and an old woman. And if we don't accept this old man and old woman inside of us, then what happens is that the old people end up in old people's homes, lonely.

And that we're at the process now, I think, in which the youth madness of the United States is passing. And this old man and old woman is inside every 20-year-old as well as every 50-year-old. And what is touching, I think, is the young male finding inside himself, an old male, and then being able to respect and work with that.

BILL SIEMERING: And there's an integration of young and old and male and female. Now, in one of your poems, you're saying that the male and female is one.

ROBERT BLY: In the '60s, the women forced people to think about what women's energy was really like. And that was terrifically interesting. And then it turns out that they objected a lot to the males, you know, deciding what that energy was. And I sympathize with that a lot. And what I was saying is that I think that the male and female energies shouldn't be called that. They should be called something else because the female energy is also in the male and the male energy is also in the female.

And I just threw out a metaphor that just like radio waves, you know, are different from other waves and that there are different length. So it may be that the male energy and the female energy simply revolve at different speeds and are made of the same material.

BILL SIEMERING: The '60s were really a time of this revolution. It was like the soil was parched and dry and the plow of the-- with the violent act of the plow going in. And now there's the opportunity for growth as the soil is aerated and moisture can go in and reach the roots perhaps.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, that idea of growth is very interesting to me, especially in artistic terms, in terms of poetry because I notice that there's two possibilities. I mean, there are two choices here. One is that as a sloppiness in the culture increases, as the rock music gets more and more stupid, and the musicians are less and less intelligent and disciplined, that the younger people are pulled in two directions. One is to go in the direction of stupid rock and of getting a job in a factory and simply not doing anything with your life.

And the second possibility is a return in art to a kind of discipline. And I notice in poetry, many poets that I know-- I met a young man at Lindisfarne this summer, and he said something like, I'm 24 years old. I want to know what the lineage is in poetry. Everyone tells me that the lineage goes back to Buddha in Zen things, and that's very interesting. How about the lineage in poetry? Where does the discipline go? How do you go from Rathke? Where do you go from Rathke backwards?

And how does a man find his lineage going backwards? Do you go back to Wielka? Is that possible? Or are you going back into English poetry, you go back to Chaucer? What is this lineage going back? And that's a desire to receive the discipline done by the dead and receive those into the consciousness and really work in art. Now that's something that really wasn't there in the '60s. And I think that's-- I feel it myself. I feel a strong longing. I've been working a lot with sound lately, which I never did before.

Sound is a form of discipline in poetry, completely aside from inspiration or anything of that sort. I look at a symphony orchestra. I look at it with a kind of a wonderful kind of brotherliness now because I see how much discipline is possible in a symphony orchestra, how much is needed. In the '60s, you looked at it and you said god, what are they? Members of the white establishment?

BILL SIEMERING: How is the sense of where we are in the '70s reflected in what you're writing today?

ROBERT BLY: Oh, I suppose, you know, this business of the maleness, I spent all of January writing a play called The Thornbush Cock-Giant, which is about the guiding of the older male-- guiding of the younger male by the older male. And in terms of poetry, I've been working a lot with sound, and I'll recite you a little poem. It's a poem that uses ends a lot. Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.

The tines dug out of the snow. The singing so low, the other cannot hear it. Thick chords and strong fingers. The mountain enters the man who walks on its slopes alone. He sits down. He finds a stone. No one has seen it. He sits down and is alone. Here's another one involving ends. I love you singly, as the tinkers do, with the sound of chandeliers ringing together on the windy afternoons of that stubborn century when animal noses left some of their warmth near the hand-hewn houses.

And human beings slept through the long nights, rolling down the hill of sleep. In their dreams, an angel visited an old man and a monster wept for his sins and then helped to repair the spinning wheel. And later, the spinning wheel had children and took a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela, walking on two furry legs, no one had noticed.

BILL SIEMERING: Very nice.

ROBERT BLY: [CHUCKLES]

BILL SIEMERING: So it's a joy to work in that kind of sound? And that's a whole new area for you?

ROBERT BLY: For me, entirely new--

BILL SIEMERING: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT BLY: --and connected with the idea that art contains disciplines, which doesn't mean that that is involved with repression. It simply means that it's tougher to be a civilized human being than it appeared in the '60s. A lot of work has to be done, besides merely having your heart in the right place.

BILL SIEMERING: Poet Robert Bly from Madison, Minnesota. I'm Bill Siemering.