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RICH DIETMAN: I am indeed here with Robert Bly, who is a well-established and well-known poet, both in Minnesota and around the world. He is also a storyteller. And in addition to writing poetry, he has, not too many years ago, gotten involved with men's groups, groups which we'll hear more about in this hour, and also about which you'll have a chance to ask questions during this call-in program.

Before we get into the caller questions, though, I want to read something, Robert Bly, if I may, before you read something. This is just a very quick piece of copy that comes from the Utne Reader, which is published here in the Twin Cities. And it's about, not about youth specifically, but about some of the reasons that men may be doing what they're doing as far as the groups that you're involved with. And again, from the Utne Reader of the April/May of this year edition.

"Something's happening in America that some observers are calling a men's movement. It's harder to see than the women's movement because it hasn't gained a lot of media attention. No marches or rallies, no jockstrap burnings, no demands for new legislation or battles for access to protected turf.

Instead, the men's movement has been more anecdotal, revealing itself primarily in the solitary soul-searching of a few male writers who dare to wonder aloud about the value of all consuming careers and who question the wisdom of leaving child-rearing, homemaking, and the realm of vulnerable feelings exclusively to women. They argue that the qualities we call feminine are necessary to anyone who aspires to become a whole human being." Some thoughts that preface a number of articles that were in the Utne Reader last spring.

Well, I should say welcome to you, Robert Bly. And thanks for coming in today.

ROBERT BLY: Thank you very much.

RICH DIETMAN: And you have a poem which you'd like to share with us too hear before we get along too much farther and take listeners calls both about your work and also poetry that is and also about these men's groups. And perhaps you'd like to read that now.

ROBERT BLY: Why don't you ask me a few questions first?

RICH DIETMAN: All right. I will do that. I'm interested in knowing about these groups and more specifically, what got you interested in doing these men's groups that you have periodically around the region and around the country.

ROBERT BLY: I think I could say two things. I got in it-- well, three things. I got in it first, I think because as my boys got to be 14 or 15, I realized I didn't know really what I wanted to pass on to them. So I began to wonder about that and think about that. Did I want to pass on to them what I got from my father or not?

And the second thing that led me into it was psychology. I've read a lot of Freudian and Jungian psychology, and I'm a great admirer of James Hillman. And Hillman is the one who made a remark a while ago that both Freud and Jung were mother's men. And that has thrown psychology off in the very beginning.

In other words, a tremendous effort has been put into understanding relation to mothers and sons but very little in relation to fathers and sons. Jung almost never speaks of his father. Freud considers the relation of father to son as one of hostility.

And the third thing, I think, that brought me into it was Joseph Campbell and his work with mythology. And it turns out that from the old point of view, mythology is essential for men. And as you know, the entire Iliad and Odyssey may be considered to be instructions for men given in the mythological frame. So those are three of the things that led me into it.

RICH DIETMAN: And what do you do when you conduct or at least initiate a men's group? I've read and heard that they can be weekend-long affairs that bring a number of people together in a usually an isolated setting, someplace away from, say, the Metropolitan area. What are some of the things that you do during the time that you spend with these groups?

ROBERT BLY: Well, I began doing weekend seminars for men and women using fairy tales as a text. I found out that most of the fairy tales seem to be written for women or by women. They're basically a lot of them are about women's growth and consciousness.

I became interested then in the seven or eight stories in the Grimm brothers out of the 230 that seemed to me to contain clear stages of male growth. Among those are the story of Iron John or The Wild Man, one called The Dark Man Sooty Brother, another called Hans My Hedgehog, which I'm going to read tonight at the Unitarian Church.

And then it occurred to me to have some seminars for men only. And a few years ago, the commune in New Mexico, llama called llama, had had many sessions for women, but they'd never had a men's conference. They asked me to do that, and then people started to set them up in other places. So I do for a year now. They're usually five days long.

I do a five-day one in Northern California, a five-day one in Minnesota, a five-day one in Boston area. And then I have a two-day one I just finished in California, in Southern California, in Ojai.

As for what we do, I myself will usually begin in the morning by teaching fairy tales, talking about what the fairy tales say. They undercut all psychological jargon, so one doesn't get caught in all of that stuff. Role-playing is really repulsive idea to me. And all this stuff about developing your feminine and all of that, I don't know, it gets caught in so many words that it feels repulsive after a while.

The stories are clean and swift and cut right through. And one person said, a story is to learning as the atom is to science. So I really believe that.

So I'll often do that and go over stories and tell them until noon or so. Then in the afternoon, we do physical things. A drummer will come, usually come from Seattle. We'll drum for an hour or so.

And then sometimes there'll be an Aikido man. We'll work with that, do a lot of movement in the afternoon to get the words out, get the words gone. And then in the evening, we may do some chanting or whatever feels right.

So we usually spend, there'll be 80 or 90 men, and we'll be together for five days. One of the most marvelous things is simply being with 80 men for five days.

RICH DIETMAN: So you don't do a lot of counseling.

ROBERT BLY: No, no, no, no. That's for therapists. Occasionally in California, especially, a lot of therapists come to our group. So we've had to try to restrict that. We say we'll have 10 therapists, 10 murderers and so on, but we have to have a limit on it.

RICH DIETMAN: I wanted to ask you more about what kinds of men or men with what types of backgrounds end up. Is there a particular age group?

ROBERT BLY: No, they range from 18 until 80 or so. In Minnesota, this last time in September, we had three men who brought their sons, or maybe the sons brought their fathers. I don't know. One man was there with three of his sons. And that's a beautiful thing to see.

One thing we did find out is that nothing much will happen in the men's workshops unless there are men there over 60.

RICH DIETMAN: And why is that?

ROBERT BLY: I don't know. It's as if men 20 don't learn anything from each other. Men 30 don't learn anything from each other.

They all know what they know. It's the old men who know something else. That's one way to look at it.

Another way is to say it is that we're used to being in generations of men. And when the men's groups have disappeared, we don't really have a chance to be much with older men. And oftentimes our fathers are not very talkative. So therefore, something psychologically good happens when there are some men over 60 present.

RICH DIETMAN: And some of the younger men seek out the older men?

ROBERT BLY: Yes, indeed. Yeah.

RICH DIETMAN: OK. Well, if you feel comfortable now, I'd like to hear that poem, and I'm sure that listeners would too. And then maybe we can go and take some questions.

ROBERT BLY: Well, one of the things that happens a lot in these things is that we'll start maybe on the first day talking about mothers and sons. And there's a lot of fearfulness in that fear in the way that mothers are often holding onto sons now, or sometimes not even wanting to. Sons don't get out of the house. Or in single-parent families, maybe there only is a mother there.

So that issue of how the son leaves the family in the United States is very crucial. With animals, they just bite them and get them out. But it doesn't happen with us.

Then maybe on the third day, we'll begin talking about fathers and sons. And then usually a tremendous amount of grief comes in. And many of the men, to my amazement, remember every time their father took them fishing and remember every time that he didn't take them fishing, but he said he was going to.

So there's a tremendous amount of hunger for closer relations with fathers. Secondly, there's a lot of hurt feelings about the father's remoteness in this culture. We're Norwegian American. I mean, I am Swedish American and German American. None of those fathers are great talkers.

And then there's a lot of sorrow about a division from the father that usually began around in adolescence and sometimes doesn't heal until you're 45 or 50. So the younger men they like to hear stories that the older men tell of having reconciled somewhat with their father, usually not before 40 or 45. And that's saddening to the younger man, too, to realize how difficult, such a reconciliation is.

So it wasn't until I began really working with the men's group that I started to think about my father. And I wrote a long poem about him called "My Father's Wedding 1924," which expressed a lot of my anger and the way I felt. He was an alcoholic. And there's a lot of grief and sorrow in that relationship.

So I suppose about a year ago, I went out to Madison, Minnesota, where my mother and father are still there in the old people's home. My father that day happened to be-- had pneumonia, so he was in the hospital, and I wrote this poem sitting by him. So it's called "My Father at 85."

His large ears hear everything. He looks up in a hermit, wakes and sleeps in the hut underneath his gaunt cheeks. His blue eyes, alert, disappointed and suspicious. Ask me for what the nurses give for some maternal excitement I cannot give.

He is a small bird waiting to be fed, mostly beak, a vulture or the Pharaoh servant just before death. My arm on the bed rests there, relaxed, with new love. All I know of the Troubadours I bring to this bed.

I do not want or need to be shamed by him any longer. The general of shame has discharged him and left him in this small, provincial Egyptian town. If I do not wish to shame him, then why not love him? His long hands, large, veined, capable, can still retain hold of what he wants. But is that what he desired?

Some powerful engine of desire beats inside him. He never phrased what he desired, and I am his son.

RICH DIETMAN: Robert Bly here with us today, reading a poem entitled "My Father at 85." And he's here also in the studio to take some calls from listeners this afternoon to talk about the men's groups that he has organized and leads and perhaps also about the writing that he's doing, too.

ROBERT BLY: What's the relationship you have with your father?

RICH DIETMAN: Well, I think it's better than it once was. And I think that as I've gotten older, it has become more open. And he's relaxed and I think doesn't feel like he has to play the father role that he once had to. It's been very nice the last few years.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, that's strange, isn't it, that one of the theories, of course, is that as a man gets older, he develops more of his feminine side as the wife often develops more of a masculine side. So he's more open and vulnerable now, is he?

RICH DIETMAN: I think so.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah.

RICH DIETMAN: I think so. Well, let me give out some phone numbers so that our listeners can ask you questions if they'd like. The number here in the Twin Cities to call if you have a question or a comment about what Robert Bly has read or about the work he's doing is 227-6000. That number again is 227-6000. If you're listening to us outside the Twin Cities but anywhere in the state of Minnesota, call us toll-free at 1-800-652-9700. That's 1-800-652-9700.

And as I look over, I see the phones lighting up. That means we have callers. And if you'll slip on your headphones, you can hear those questions. And let's go to our first caller this afternoon. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I have been looking for a poem of yours since 1978, and I've also got a number of things I'd like you to touch on that I've been taking notes on as you've been talking.

ROBERT BLY: Mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE: The first thing is, you wrote a poem called-- I don't know what it's called, but it's about old people are like fishers on the banks of a river. And in the end, they dissolve to mist. And there's a whole bunch in between.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, that's a poem by the Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen, which I translated.

AUDIENCE: OK.

ROBERT BLY: And if you want to send a note to me in Moose Lake, I'll mail you a copy of the book.

AUDIENCE: Oh, my gosh.

ROBERT BLY: I've got some copies. So just write to me-- Robert Bly, Moose Lake, Minnesota, mm-hmm?

AUDIENCE: OK. Do you have a zip code? OK. And there's a number of points here that I want you to touch on. In one of your books, I came across an idea that women come into their bodies much earlier than men.

ROBERT BLY: Yes, mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE: And that hooked up with the thing that you were talking about, dancing in the workshops, tricking men into their bodies. Second is men in the ritual of hunting. My husband goes away every year with his father and his uncles into the generations of men you were talking about.

ROBERT BLY: How do you feel about that?

AUDIENCE: I'm wondering what women do like that. So that was just something I was knocking around yesterday in my own thoughts.

ROBERT BLY: Well, maybe women talk while men hunt. Do you think so?

AUDIENCE: I think that men do a lot of talking when they go up in the woods.

ROBERT BLY: Oh, yes, that's true.

AUDIENCE: And the third thing is, what about developing nurturing attitudes in men, which you've been really working on for, what, the last 10 years at least, and how our society is becoming less nurturing?

ROBERT BLY: You mean the society itself is becoming less nurturing or the men in it or the women in it or--

AUDIENCE: Everybody is. It's no longer regarded as important to have children. It's more important to go out and do real paid labor. I'm a new housewife.

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: And I'm finding it very frustrating when children are just not respected anymore. They're not seen as a national treasure. And it seems like life has become more competitive instead of less competitive in the United States and less nurturing and how you're really bucking the tide. And I want to say how much I appreciate what you do.

ROBERT BLY: I think you're absolutely right on that point. And Joseph Chilton Pearce, whom I admire a lot, said in a tape I heard recently that the birth practices instituted by rationalist men, I suppose you'd call them the doctors, birth practices that separate the-- act to separate the mother from the baby and prevent early bonding in the first two or three days, he believes is more dangerous on the planet than the atom bomb. So I think he agrees with you that this disruption in nurturing very early causes a spread of disease, coldness through the whole culture. And as much as we can do in the men's group to combat that, we do.

RICH DIETMAN: All right. Let's take another caller who's on the line. Good afternoon. We're listening for your question.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, good afternoon. I was a participant in the men's group, that men up at Camp Widjiwagan outside of Ely a couple of years ago with Robert Bly. It turned out that I was a few months older than even Robert. And I appreciated his comment that nothing much happens unless you have this span of ages involved. A couple of observations and a question.

ROBERT BLY: Tell me who you are, first.

AUDIENCE: This is the disabled dermatologist, Dr. Armstrong.

ROBERT BLY: Oh, yes. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: And in my talks with Robert, in the chanting group, particularly and all, it turned out that I was equipped when you had to leave in the middle of the week because of the family crisis, mythology part, because of studying Latin. I was particularly intrigued with Greek and Latin. Because of exposure to modern dance when it was the New Orleans night to get down on the ground and really move, I think many things happen on the Mardi Gras night that it was built up to. When men introduced themselves, and you were taking notes, I always wondered, what do you do with those notes?

And rather to extend this too long, you were impressed that men in our society don't memorize poems, right? And--

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: --I made some assignments for that. So it was intriguing, different kind of experience. And I felt that when you left somehow a part of your mantle I inherited and sitting on the little log bench and chanting with the group old man lead me home was a very moving experience.

So what do you do with the notes that you make? And then when you bring up some of this pathology and people have a crying jag or something like this, how do you and the group do you think best handle when the people bring it up to that degree?

ROBERT BLY: Well, thank you for those. Usually, as you know, we opened the group by asking each man why he came here or what in his life led him to this point. And often, they tell stories, and we all need to know more about the life histories of other men. So I often write them down. And sometimes I remember them and tell them to others.

One of the most horrendous that I remember was a man out in California. I think we were talking about shame and what shame meant and how we get shamed when our parents don't respond. He mentioned that when he was about 12 or 13, he went in to see his father. His father was shaving in the bathroom, and he mentioned something to his father about masturbation. That must have been a wild, brave kid to do that at 12 or 13.

And so we all said, what happened? He said, my father didn't reply, and he didn't stop shaving. And he said the result is that I really couldn't take any pleasure in sex for five or six years. The shame was so deep. So that's a story I'll never forget. What was the other thing you were interested in?

RICH DIETMAN: He may no longer be on the line.

ROBERT BLY: OK. I'll just say that one thing that oftentimes--

RICH DIETMAN: What you do with your notes, maybe that was what you just did.

ROBERT BLY: And he mentioned about the weeping. Sometimes when you go into the father and son things, a lot of weeping happens. And all we do is hold them.

RICH DIETMAN: OK. All right. Let's take another caller. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Hi, Robert. It's Claire. I was just in the car when I heard your voice and I rushed back in again. Are you there?

ROBERT BLY: I am.

AUDIENCE: I was thinking of for the whatever it is of something, December, there is no solution.

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: I wrote an essay called The Uses of Poetry, and I was talking about, you can't blink away the fierce unselfconscious grace of a tiger met and the unconscious.

ROBERT BLY: Yes, that's nice.

AUDIENCE: I learned that from my father. I have two questions. I'd like to hear you talk about what girls learn from their father about relating to lovers or husbands later, for one. And in the same vein, how to get women to appreciate the qualities in the men on both the feminine and masculine side that need to come out that the women need to appreciate.

ROBERT BLY: Mm-hmm. That's a good question. Let me just touch on the second one first. I have been thinking that there is such a thing as a male mode of feeling as well as a female mode of feeling. And given the fact that Freud and Jung basically spent, or Jung especially spent a lot of his life describing the female mode of feeling and to some extent claiming that was the mode of feeling, I think it's valuable for men to try to articulate how their mode of feeling is different from women's.

And women in the feminist movement have not talked about male mode of feeling. They've talked about the male mode of domination, which is a different thing. And oftentimes some of them will deny that men have any feeling at all, let alone a mode.

So I think it's really important for-- since women have done very well in articulating their mode of feeling, I think it's very important for men to do that. So that's one of the things we struggle with at the men's conference to try to get ways to articulate that and describe it. And I think that helps women. It's a big surprise often, and I think it helps them to understand what's going on.

One little detail that I remember James Hillman said when he came to the men's group in Minnesota a couple of months ago was that in general, when men and women want to be close to each other, women often like the eye to eye method in which you talk eye to eye. But James said, men often do that differently. It's called shoulder to shoulder.

And one man described it for the last nine months, he'd gone out every Sunday with his father and walked for five hours every Sunday. And usually they never spoke a word, but that was shoulder to shoulder. And they often came home tremendously close.

Well, and the other question you had was about fathers and daughters. And there's a lot of wonderful things that could be said in that one. I think it's important that the father know that the daughter, in a way, wants to know from him, whether she is attractive and sexually interesting.

And I think the father has to accept a little bit of that flirting. But it has to be with a very delicate line, very delicate line. And not to interfere with her privacy, nor try to take the place of any later lovers that she will have.

But it seems to me the daughter sometimes tries that out on the father. And some of the most horrendous stories I've heard from women, for example, in one of these is one woman said, I was about 9 or 10 and I was sitting on my father's lap, and I had been sitting. I always sat on my father's lap. And all of a sudden he pushed me to the floor one day and never said a word about it.

And she said she felt tremendous shame about that for three or four years. And all it was necessary really would be for the man to say, I don't think it's appropriate, really. Because girls understand this word appropriate wonderfully.

Also, I feel that the father carries the spirit for daughters often. It's his responsibility to bring down some spirit energy down through him into the house.

The mother will often bring Earth energy or nurturing energy up from the ground. And it doesn't mean she can't bring down the spirit energy. But I think oftentimes that comes down through the man, through the father, and it's important for him to do that.

It's as if both these energies are sky energy and the Earth energy need to enter the daughter. So my feeling is that when the father is sitting in front of the television set all weekend with a beer can in his hand, that's the worst thing he can do to a daughter because he's then blocking-- it doesn't mean the television is bad or beer is bad. It means that if that's all you do, then you're blocking that energy, and it can't enter your daughter, and she'll never forgive you.

RICH DIETMAN: So fathers oughtn't to just step back and say that if I've got daughters, their mom's responsibility.

ROBERT BLY: No way. No way at all. Another way to say that often is that the father is the one who helps lead the daughter out into the world. And his attitude of confidence in the world will help her go out. If he is whining and saying everyone's bad to me at the office and the whole world is hideous and terrible and so on, that'll tend to block her inside the house. So I'd say the father has a number of obligations there in relation to the daughter.

RICH DIETMAN: Let's take another caller here at 27 and 1/2 past 12:00 noon. Our guest is Robert Bly. And what's your question for Robert Bly this afternoon?

AUDIENCE: I'd like to follow up on that. Is that why in the Western religious tradition and in many of the Eastern traditions, all down through the centuries, the male has been the priest?

ROBERT BLY: It's possible. There have been times, of course, in which the-- in the Cretan civilization, apparently the female was a priest, but I think that she was definitely calling Earth energy up. You know, those Cretan statues of the great goddess who's standing there with bare breasts and holding a snake in each arm, and that snake is from under the ground.

So I don't think men do very well in pulling up snake energy. And it's a wonderful. Hillman says, what the men need most is to be reassociated with their own snake. But I think there is something about men being priests from that point of view, bringing down spirit energy. Did that answer your question at all?

RICH DIETMAN: Are you still there?

AUDIENCE: Yes, I am.

RICH DIETMAN: OK.

AUDIENCE: Do you have time to--

ROBERT BLY: Sure.

AUDIENCE: --my original question?

ROBERT BLY: What was the original one?

AUDIENCE: OK. The one that I had in mind was about my father.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: He's 80. And he fits into that category of a person who grew older but never became vulnerable, never opened. And I've beat my head against the wall, I guess, over the decades. And I don't want to give up, but then again, sometimes it seems like there's nothing I can do.

ROBERT BLY: No, I think that's right. Probably his father never opened up either. It's as if-- men need a model for that. One of the griefs, I think, for the younger male is to realize that he wants something from his father. If the father opened up, he'd be able to get something.

And men tell me of going into their father's death bed and saying, I'm going to get it this time. And they don't get it. So I mean, the labor of the son is to realize that he's not going to get from his father what he wanted.

RICH DIETMAN: OK. Let's take another caller. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, hi.

RICH DIETMAN: Go ahead with your question, please.

AUDIENCE: Thanks. I've got two questions. Actually I just finished 11 books from the library and men's issues. The one book was Men and Friendship by Stuart Miller.

ROBERT BLY: Men and Friendship. I just saw it last night. I haven't read it.

AUDIENCE: Oh, it's excellent. And the other book was Finding Our Fathers by Samuel Osherson.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, I know that book.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, good stuff.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: But my questions come out of those two books that I mentioned out of those 11, which was a lot of reading. The first one was, what might you say about overcoming the barriers to emotional intimacy between men and that whole difficult dance that we do, trying to be close to men, but not quite getting it done? And the other question has to do with reconciling with father and the father image from childhood. How is that reconciliation complicated when, one, the father is incredibly shut down and not in touch at all with himself, and two, the son is gay?

ROBERT BLY: Mm-hmm. OK, let's go back to the first one. Now, you were talking about how men can--

AUDIENCE: Overcome the barriers to emotional intimacy that are--

ROBERT BLY: Well, one of the things that's come more and more to light in the workshops I've been doing is that in a way, we learn to talk about feelings with our mothers, because when we come in hurt from the playground or something, she's the one we go to. Our father usually isn't there at all.

So therefore, usually men know how to talk intimately or vulnerably with women, but not with men. And then when you got these beer commercials in, it's obvious they don't do anything of that while they're drinking their Miller Lite. So I think that it takes real practice on the part of men to really understand how to talk in an intimate or about wounds with other men.

We've all found the men's groups helpful in that way because men don't respond in the same way that women do. They don't comfort as much. And so you get of different response when you speak to men. But it's a great joy to realize that you can speak to both. And I think a real effort has to be made in the part of men to do that and not be content with the normal conversation that men have with each other about stock prices and stuff.

The second question, this business of the father being shut down and so on, as I said the last time, then maybe that'll never change. But when the son is gay, I think sometimes the father is blaming himself for something. And somehow the most difficult thing, I think, when sons are approaching fathers is to avoid blame. It's a secret of fathers that they feel guilty for everything that they shouldn't feel guilty for. And that's a part of the control that they hope to have maybe over the son.

So I don't know in some way in which I have to-- I don't do it well, but in which I have to go to my father. And I have to say to him-- I have to say something that doesn't imply that I'm judging him or that I'm blaming him.

AUDIENCE: Could you clarify that a little bit more by mentioning something about being gay. How do you feel that affects one's manhood? Do you think that that's part of the problem with reconciling the relationship with the father? Do you think that being gay makes that harder?

ROBERT BLY: I think so.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

ROBERT BLY: I think so.

AUDIENCE: But obscures the masculinity ties and all that stuff.

ROBERT BLY: I think so, yeah. It's very confusing often to the father, but I think the best thing is to try to get in a situation where the father doesn't feel it's something unfortunate that's happened to you.

RICH DIETMAN: All right. Well, thanks for your questions. And let's take another caller now. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Hello.

RICH DIETMAN: Hi.

AUDIENCE: Yes. I'm a middle-aged man, 45 years old, from Minneapolis, and recently joined a men's group here in the city. And I am openly gay. I was invited into it by a straight friend of mine. The rest of the group is entirely straight.

And I found it amazing how it was scary. And I found it how amazingly well received I was, non-threatening. Have you run into this in your group?

ROBERT BLY: Yes. Often times, all of the men who will come will be straight. Other times, one or two will be gay and will say so. And they're often very welcomed and accepted by the other men. After all, there's a lot of grief that both the heterosexuals and homosexuals have in common.

One time I did a weekend in Seattle, I think near Seattle, and it turned out that about a third of the men there were gay. And they simply started right off by saying, we want to know this and we want to know this, and we want to know do such and soy apply and so on. And that was wonderful too, because then they spoke up and they really demanded a part in the whole conversation. And that was amazing to a lot of to the straight men to realize.

And it didn't end really in any disruption between them either or anger between them. But it was the one time when I saw the gay men really expressed their concerns and their fears and their point of view, and we were able to compare that to the others.

RICH DIETMAN: When you go into a group, is that a potential tension that's there in your mind? Do you sense that a group of men who normally aren't used to getting together for two days or five days and a lot of the taboos that surround that whole business?

ROBERT BLY: Oh, absolutely. One of the things that Michael Mead, who is the drummer who teaches with me, learned is that nothing much will happen in the first two days because the fear is so terrific. It's a fear you walk in and you say, these people are creeps. I'm not a creep. What am I doing here?

Another one is they'll all be gay. And then what'll happen to me? And the third one is very serious, which is that what if these people have a different tribe? We would have been very careful to 4,000 years ago to be with different tribes because you get killed.

So there's a real physical fear that happens the first couple of days. And it isn't until everyone really starts to talk about their own grief that it turns out that everyone is in the same tribe. And about that time, then the real work begins.

RICH DIETMAN: All right. We have more listeners on the line. Let's take another caller. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. I'd like to ask Robert a question about another male poet who's been dead for a few years, whom he knew, the Minnesota poet Franklin Brainard, who died just over 10 years ago.

ROBERT BLY: Yes, who is this calling?

AUDIENCE: James Nathan.

ROBERT BLY: Hi. How are you.

AUDIENCE: How are you. Well, Franklin died at the age of 55. And you edited his first book, Rain Gatherer.

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Which was appeared in '73. And he was obscure, really, at the time of his death, except for certain places in the upper Midwest.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: And his reputation has lapsed into obscurity since his death, of course. And many of the younger people interested in poetry and in your work know nothing of him. And since you are neither obscure nor dead at this point, sir, I'm wondering if you're going to help bring out a collected edition of his poems and when that might happen.

And secondly, you will be 60 on the 23 of next month. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or reflections to give as you enter the stage of life.

ROBERT BLY: Well, let's take the first one, you and I have talked over the possibility of a collected poems and doing more. And I think it would be good also to have some readings for him, whether they're in connection with the selected poems, I mean, the collected poems or whether just in the reprinting of some small volume. I think a good public readings, which three or four people express their affection and admiration for poems is a good way to help bring someone dead back to life in the hearts of younger people.

AUDIENCE: I don't mean so much bringing him dead back to life. It's rescuing his reputation.

ROBERT BLY: Sure, I understand.

AUDIENCE: Yes.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah. Thank you. But that has to be done. It's very interesting in Europe, for example, that they will always do Festschrifts, and they'll do celebrations for everybody's 60th birthday, 65 birthday, 70th birthday and so on. And that's not a tradition with us. But I think it would be lovely to have a, say, for Franklin's-- what birthday of his is coming up?

AUDIENCE: Well, he's born in June 20th, 1920.

ROBERT BLY: So where are we now, in '86?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, he'd be 66.

ROBERT BLY: Well, why don't you call a reading for his 67th or 68th birthday, 58th birthday, and just do it that way.

AUDIENCE: You think something could be done about getting a book of his into print, like a collected poems of those who've never been printed before.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, I think so. Let's try and see if Milkweed Chronicle will do it.

AUDIENCE: All right.

ROBERT BLY: And as for becoming 60, I'm really enjoying it. I don't have any advice for anybody.

RICH DIETMAN: All right. Let's take another question. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Hello, Robert. I'm interested in what you described as the difficulty in men bringing up the Earth energy, and that they're not very good in bringing up the snake energy. And I was reading some Jung lately in which he said that the Trinity that the fact that the Western religious culture worships the Trinity is a reflection of them both, of this missing ability to bring up the Earth energy that in a more whole system it would involve four images and that the fourth, the missing one is the devil. And that we don't have any male gods of the Earth. Vulcan would have been, I think, one in the old tradition. I'm interested in your-- anything that you may have discovered about male Earth gods.

And the second question is, I saw a movie yesterday Stand by Me, which addresses to a certain extent, male issues. And I was wondering if you'd seen it. If you haven't seen it, then I recommend that you do. I'd be interested in.

ROBERT BLY: I haven't. I heard it's wonderful from exactly that point of view. It's in Minneapolis now, is it?

AUDIENCE: Yes, it is.

ROBERT BLY: Good. And the first question about the male Earth gods, there's a good book called Sky Father/Earth Father. It's done by a man and a wife named Colman. And their point is that what has happened here is that the women have been given the Earth in our culture mythology, and the men have been given the sky.

And he points out that in Egypt, for example, that's not the case. There's an Earth god named Geb, who's brown and reaches toward the sky. Then there's a sky god named Nut, who reaches down from the stars. And she's actually the one on top of the-- painted underneath the mummy case. So she holds you forever with all of the stars around her body after you die.

And then, of course, there is the usual ones that we have, the Earth mother and the sky father. So instead of having two, they have four. And the father, then, the male is understood as having a strong connection with the Earth. And every male knows he has that. And so I think there's something off in the mythology in which women receive the Earth, and there's something off in the way that women are claiming it, too.

It's our Earth. We make bound bread. You just stay up in the Wall Street and keep out of trouble. We'll do all that.

That's all absurd, in my opinion. And if women are going to claim the Earth only, then men are pushed into the sky. But if men also take apart with their snake and their Earth energy, then there's also a place in the sky for women. And that's what women are longing for also. So to me, that's a wonderful little book there, Earth Father/Sky Father.

RICH DIETMAN: What do you say to men who are listening who haven't done as much reading or any reading as nearly as much as some of our callers so far to know about all of these things, these various aspects of mythology? And who are sitting there thinking, I'm interested in more of what he's talking about, learning about myself and where I've come from and where I'm going. But a little bit perhaps, if not put off, then a little skeptical of talking about snakes and sky gods and Earth gods and that sort of thing.

ROBERT BLY: What should they do?

RICH DIETMAN: Well, I guess, yes. I mean, I suppose each person has to make his or her own decision for themselves, but they're interested but perhaps just a little bit don't spend a lot of time thinking about them.

ROBERT BLY: Well, I don't think mythology says anything that isn't already registered in the body. When you see young males in our culture walking, they're often walking very high. They're floating. And they're liable to float off to Oregon and be with Rajneesh for a while. Or they fly to India and be with a guru.

All of that is ascending material. And that the danger is that the young males don't get grounded. And we all know that in our bodies. I was totally ungrounded at 20, totally ungrounded. I didn't need mythology to tell me that.

Mythology helps to give you a way to articulate what you already know. And many women I know are too earthy. They're too grounded. They don't float enough. So we already know that.

So I think that the main thing for the male to do is to trust his body and trust the way he feels about things. And as DH Lawrence didn't use mythology at all when he described what happens when he went down to a place in Crete, and a snake was there at the fountain drinking before him.

And he looked at the snake, and he liked it. And suddenly all of this material that snakes are evil came up in his psyche. And he took a stone and threw it at the snake. And the snake, tomb, disappeared.

And he said he went into the earth, into his dark hole. And I realized that I had lost my chance with one of the lords of the universe. And then he ends it at the end saying, well, there's something I have to atone also, a pettiness.

There's a very intelligent male just registering what's happened to him by watching how he behaves in relation to his snake. And there's no question about it that Christianity, a popular Christianity, by associating the snake with evil, has blocked a lot of that good, strong Earth material that needs to come up.

RICH DIETMAN: Well, we have 15 minutes left, enough time to get to several callers. So let's take another call right now. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Hello. I want to thank you for what you said about fathers and daughters just now. That was real helpful.

ROBERT BLY: Mm-hmm. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I think I got the sky energy through my mother.

ROBERT BLY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: It was quite the right way to do it. What I wanted to ask you about is if you have anything to say about pornography, which there seems to be this tremendous hunger for, I mean, the violent type of pornography. And whether that has anything to do with the mothers, which I think I heard Susan Griffin say something.

ROBERT BLY: What did she say?

AUDIENCE: Well, on the lines of the woman being this enormous, monstrous, almost or smothering creature when the boy is so small. And so to attack that image, he resorts to violent pornography and--

ROBERT BLY: And it's possible. It's not a very practical way to do it, though.

AUDIENCE: No, and so I'm wondering if there's any other way that men can free themselves from that without that route? And on the other hand, the female backlash.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, that's right. Well, I believe that the men should take a strong part in getting rid of violent pornography. I don't think it should be left only to women to do that. Women have had double feelings about that.

They encouraged pornography 10, 15 years ago. And women like Francine du Plessix Gray said we thought it would be wonderful if there were less censorship in sexual matters. And we thought that would loosen the men up, but she says it didn't happen. And she said, I regret every step that I took in trying to lessen that kind of censorship because my friends and I now can't even walk past these porno shops without feeling horror.

So I think that the women are taking a strong stand. I think the men need to, too. There's one thing, however, I think that's completely beyond all of us. And to go back for a moment to Joseph Chilton Pearce, he believes that the heavy influx of sexual material coming in at 16 or 17 is overwhelming the human being now, partly because of all the sexuality useful in advertising. So capitalism produces this kind of overemphasis on sexuality, which floods over into pornography.

And he also says a very serious thing, that at 17, there's a certain spiritual awakening that is meant to happen, and it comes from a center close to the sexual center. And since our religious life and our mythological life is so dreary and hopeless in the United States, that religious awakening or spiritual awakening doesn't happen. And the young boy and the young girl try to get everything out of the sexual center that 2,000 years ago, they would have gotten from a little from the sexual center, but mostly from that other center that opens.

So Joseph Chilton Pearce is marvelous on that thing. And his new book is called the Magical Child Matures, in which he describes this kind of material. So I feel a lot of grief as you do about this. But I feel that the very capitalist culture that we have chosen is the one that's entrapping the men in their pornography.

RICH DIETMAN: All right. We have 12 minutes before 1 o'clock. Let's take another caller. Good afternoon. You're on the air.

AUDIENCE: Good afternoon, Robert Bly. I'm calling from Bemidji, Minnesota.

ROBERT BLY: Hi, how are you.

AUDIENCE: And I'm the naturalist at Jay Cooke State Park. We've met before.

ROBERT BLY: Oh, thank you for showing us that wonderful walk. It was grand.

AUDIENCE: I have a question, Robert. For the people who can't attend your marvelous five-day workshops on the Great Mother, now the Great Father, do you have some kind of a simplistic book list that might be shared that I could share with someone? I have seven sons, and I'm sure that they would be interested in this. Do you have a starting point where we could begin to read?

ROBERT BLY: The starting point for a lot of the men that come to the workshops was an interview that I did with Keith Thompson in New Age magazine in May of 1982. And it introduced the subject of the wild man or the possibility that we have the soft male who's very sensitive and very open to women's issues. That's a wonderful male developed in the '60s.

And then there's the old macho male. And the idea is that in between those two, there's a third possibility described as wild man. So I think that would be a good way to begin. And Samuel Osherson's book that's been mentioned called Finding Our Fathers, I think is a pretty good way.

And also Joseph Campbell is marvelous in any of his books. And then there's a book by Zimmer, The King and the Corpse. It's a book of myths and fairy tales, really, for men. It's called The King and the Corpse. And when we did a one-day thing-- we're doing a one-day thing for men in San Francisco this fall when there were 700 men there last time and probably 800 or 900 this time. We're going to take one of the stories from that book and tell it and use it as a text for the day. So the question that you ask is a difficult one because there isn't much good men's material in print.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Robert, very much.

ROBERT BLY: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Goodbye.

RICH DIETMAN: Thanks for calling. Let's take another call. Good afternoon. We're listening for your question.

AUDIENCE: Yes. I would like you to comment on the issue of jealousy revolving around a father's love for his daughter, how his wife perceives that, what ramifications that has for the daughter, and how the father feels torn between, let's say, an only daughter and his wife.

ROBERT BLY: Well, that's a very good question, and there's a lot of grief in that. I came in at first from the male point of view, thinking of what it was like for my father when my mother, for example, chose me as the favorite. And I use the word conspiracy here. Often there's a conspiracy between the son and the mother to push the father out.

So I then began to realize and other women said to me, the similar thing can happen in the family in which the father and the daughter will have a conspiracy together. You and I are the sensitive ones. I don't know about her. And they make a little conspiracy here and they push the mother, in this case, out.

Well, obviously, the mother reacts with jealousy, in fact, rage. She's lucky the daughter doesn't get killed in this situation. But it seems to happen over and over again. And I think the sooner or later the daughter then would have to renounce that conspiracy and would have to go to the mother and say, look, I know that this happened. And I didn't know what I was doing. And I don't know if my father knew what he was doing either.

But the tradition is that the soul of the man is female and it's younger than his male side. So therefore, in a way, the father has a soul relationship with his daughter because his soul is young that he may not have with his own wife. So that's very dangerous material, as I'm sure you know, don't you?

AUDIENCE: Yes, I am speaking from a personal point of view. Just in terms of understanding how my father feels and trying to maybe rectify tattered relations he feels between loving his daughter, but yet feeling really torn and feeling jealousy from his wife. How does he feel? How do I understand him and repair the damages that have been done?

ROBERT BLY: Hmm. That's a hard question. Does he still have a great longing for a kind of soul relationship with you?

AUDIENCE: Yes, but feels torn by the conflicts that develop and have been for a long time with my mother.

ROBERT BLY: Right. So I think there would be-- I don't know. It's a hard thing, but my impulse would be to go to the Father and say to him, this soul relationship is not appropriate now. I'm going to have a soul relationship with a man my own age, and I want you to find a soul relationship with someone else, maybe with your own soul. Why don't you have a relationship with your own soul instead of with me? I was only standing for your soul anyway.

So why don't you go off for two weeks and take some books with you and have a love affair with your own soul. And if you could say it in a very loving and gentle way, I think that he would accept it. In a way, it's a father's longing for a religious life that initially gets him entangled in that way with the daughter. And that would make you a little more free.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

RICH DIETMAN: All right. Thanks for calling. Robert Bly, we have about four to five minutes left, and we have a choice here. We can either take some more phone calls until we have to get off or you could read something for us if you wanted to do that for the next couple of days.

ROBERT BLY: How strange there's been a lot of talk here about fathers and daughters, so I have a little poem which isn't finished, but I'll read it anyway. And I wrote it when I saw a Minneapolis Tribune front page, an account of a snowmobile wedding. Did you ever see that one?

RICH DIETMAN: I missed that one.

ROBERT BLY: Well, the father bought the daughter on a snowmobile, and everyone in the wedding was on snowmobiles.

RICH DIETMAN: OK.

ROBERT BLY: This could only happen out here. So I'll read this poem. It's about fathers and daughters. It's a poem written for a snowmobile wedding.

The eternal beauty of the daughter rises up out of the father, is when the dark-haired daughter arrives with her father on a snowmobile for her wedding and guests throw snow instead of rice. It's all right.

The daughter rises up out of granite with dark hair and flaring nostrils. And each person knows the divine fierceness that she brings to relationship as if born again and again.

I say, let the daughter plunge down the dark valley, shielded on both sides by tall granite walls. Let the father turn and go home. The water goes on. The dark-haired water on the way to its wedding.

I'll read the last dance again, because this is something I have to say to myself because my daughters are getting to the age where they're going to be married.

I say, let the daughter plunge down the dark valley, shielded on both sides by tall granite walls. Let the father turn and go home. The water goes on. The dark-haired water on the way to its wedding.

That's especially for the woman who just called in.

RICH DIETMAN: All right.

ROBERT BLY: And for Claire.

RICH DIETMAN: Do you have something else that you'd like to share with us? We have about two minutes left.

ROBERT BLY: Hmm. Well, in two minutes.

RICH DIETMAN: OK. Well, why don't you look for that. And I will tell listeners that at least in the Twin Cities, or if you're within driving distance, if you would like to hear Robert Bly read this evening, he's going to be at the Unity Church in Saint Paul at 732 Holly Avenue. That's a reading tonight at 7:30. And we're told that there are still plenty of tickets available. They are $6 apiece. And again, that's the Unity Church at 732 Holly Avenue in Saint Paul at 7:30 tonight.

ROBERT BLY: All right. So I found one here that I wrote for my 59th birthday, and James Naiden would be interested in this one. All right. And there's a person in it named [? Ever ?] [? Okeson, ?] whom I imagine is the part of myself that is able to feel grief. He's a grief man. It's in three stanzas.

"Come by, dream after dream pulled from the storage. [? Ever ?] [? Okeson ?] wakes in his souring house. And the Orkney serpent lies coiled beside him, curls around his arm.

Come by, dream after dream drawn from the storage. [? Ever ?] [? Okeson ?] wakes in his souring house. And the Orkney serpent lies coiled beside him, curls around his arm."

Second stanza. "Dancing the estampida, lovers and husbands whirl round and round. A man and woman sweat and shout, kicking and inviting their desire."

Third stanza. "All that I have lived but I desire after 59 years, the company of the mad and lovers of soul, those who swallow burning stones and live without shame."

So that's a poem from my 59th.

RICH DIETMAN: Robert Bly, thanks very much for coming in today. It's been a pleasure having you on the program. And if we're judging from the number of calls that we took this afternoon, I think our listeners enjoyed it.

ROBERT BLY: I enjoyed the look on your face, too, when I was talking. Thank you.

RICH DIETMAN: Thank you. Paula Schroeder, are you there?

PAULA SCHROEDER: I certainly am. I wish we could go on with this all day, though, Rich.

ROBERT BLY: Yeah, why not.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's been wonderful having Robert Bly on the air. Thank you for coming.

ROBERT BLY: Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Rich, are you handing it back to me?

RICH DIETMAN: It's all yours. It's all yours.

PAULA SCHROEDER: OK. All right. Thank you. Rich Dietman with Robert Bly this afternoon on Midday.

Well, we were talking earlier, if you tuned in for our newscast before Robert Bly came on the air, about the possibility of French hostages being released by their Muslim kidnappers in Beirut that was supposed to have happened about 11:30 this morning. But so far, there's still no sign of those hostages. The revolutionary justice organization said that they would free some of the hostages at a hotel in Muslim West Beirut.

Scores of reporters and photographers are assembled in and around the hotel, but none of them have seen any hostages. So no word yet on exactly what is happening in West Beirut.

Taking a quick look at our weather situation, we have a snow advisory continuing over the southeastern part of the region into this afternoon. Snow continuing in the Southeast with a total accumulation of 1 to 2 inches, mostly sunny in the Northwest today, becoming mostly sunny in the Northeast and the Southwest. It's going to be cold with highs from around 10 above in the Northwest to the lower 20s in the Southeast.

GARY EICHTEN: Good afternoon. Gary Eichten here inviting you to tune in later today for regional news on MPR journal. Today, we're going to focus on waste and what to do with it.

There's a meeting under way in Saint Paul and what to do with our radioactive waste. There's also growing concern about garbage. We're running out of landfills and nobody wants a landfill in their backyard. MPR journal is broadcast at 5 o'clock on FM 5:30 on 13:30 AM.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Technical direction for Midday today provided by Randy Johnson and Dave Schliep with assistance from Bill Wehrum. I'm Paula Schroeder.

This is the news and information service of Minnesota Public Radio KSJN, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. If you just tuned in to hear the last part of our Midday program today, you can hear it repeated at 8:30 tonight. The time is now 1 o'clock.

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DICK ULIANO: AP Network News. I'm Dick Uliano. A deadline passes with no hostages in sight. Kidnappers in Lebanon said they would release some French hostages at a hotel in Muslim West Beirut. But scores of reporters and photographers assembled in and around the building as the deadline passed with no sign of anyone released.

The kidnappers calling themselves the Revolutionary Justice Organization had sent two handwritten statements promising the release. The group of Muslim Shiites has claimed the kidnappings of three Frenchmen and two Americans, Joseph Scipio and Edward Austin Tracy, both Americans missing since last month.

Some European nations take economic aim at Syria. The 12 common market countries have ordered action against Syria at the insistence of Britain, which charges Syria with supporting terrorism. Britain's foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe lists the steps being taken against Syria.

GEOFFREY HOWE: We shall not authorize new arms sales to Syria. We shall suspend high-level visits to or from Syria. We shall each review the activities of Syrian diplomatic and consular missions accredited in our country and apply appropriate measures. We shall each review and tighten security precautions surrounding the operations of Syrian Air.

DICK ULIANO: Britain says it has proof Syria was behind the attempted bombing of an Israeli jet in London last April. A group of Eastern Airlines employees says it has the financial backing to buy the airline for about $600 million--

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