Transcripts

MARIANNE COMBS: Hugh van Dusen, Robert Bly's editor of close to 20 years at HarperCollins, says Bly's place in literary history is clear.

HUGH VAN DUSEN: He's one of the great American poets that's still alive. I mean, it's just obvious. I mean, you don't even have to talk about it it's so obvious.

MARIANNE COMBS: Van Dusen says he's mystified as to why Robert Bly has yet to be named the nation's poet laureate. He speculates that Bly is now too old to handle the heavy travel schedule the position demands, and wonders if perhaps it was Bly's political activism against the War in Vietnam that kept him from receiving the honor. Bly's known not just for his poetic eloquence, but also for his strongly-worded opinions.

ROBERT BLY: Well, our aim was to offend as many people as we could.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sitting in his Minneapolis living room on a sunny weekday morning, Robert Bly chuckles as he remembers back to the days when he published the poetry review, The Fifties with his friend James Wright. He says their goal was to combat dullness.

ROBERT BLY: And you're not old enough to know how dull the '50s were. A lot of the magazines we had, like Kenyon Review was good, but had a university background. And they did such and so and such and so. So we always tried to do something rude. And then, we'd get wonderfully insulting letters back, and we'd print those letters.

MARIANNE COMBS: Bly developed a reputation for searing criticism. In one note to an aspiring poet, Bly wrote, "We believe that all people who write sonnets should be hung to the nearest lamppost." In another note, responding to one author's offer to submit an essay on the poetic ear, Bly retorted, he'd prefer something on the poetic nose.

But alongside the snide comments was a deep love for really good poetry. Bly translated the works of many international poets that had yet to be heard in English, including Pablo Neruda. The Fifties was so popular that it eventually had to be renamed The Sixties and then The Seventies. Anne Mulford, Archivist for the Robert Bly Papers at the University of Minnesota says the back and forth between Bly and a generation of poets forged a whole new literary landscape.

ANNE MULFORD: He single-handedly transformed poetry because many young poets would write to him to get their poetry included into this magazine. And the correspondence shows this give and take of this analysis of poetry in mid-20th century that just blows your mind.

MARIANNE COMBS: Mulford even credits Bly with getting poets to abandon the rhyming meter. Some of Bly's original letters from his editorial days are on display in the University of Minnesota's Andersen Library. There are also magazine articles profiling Bly's creation of what is called the mythopoetic men's movement.

ANNE MULFORD: We've got letters from Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, John Densmore, the drummer for the Doors. We've got some people from all walks of life that have been so affected by the men's movement.

HUGH VAN DUSEN: In terms of his influence on other people, I think his great contribution has been the men's movement.

MARIANNE COMBS: Again, Bly's Editor, Hugh Van Dusen.

HUGH VAN DUSEN: And that in no way denigrates his abilities as a poet and a translator.

MARIANNE COMBS: In the 1980s and '90s, Bly led weekend retreats for men only, where they would read poetry and share stories. The retreats were criticized by some who believed them to be a backlash against feminism. But Van Dusen, who attended several of the retreats, says they helped men to recognize and express their emotions. Bly's book about men, Iron John, became an international bestseller. But Robert Bly doesn't mention the men's movement, when asked what he would like to be remembered for.

ROBERT BLY: Oh, for being beautiful, handsome, a good father, a good husband. Those things. And then, he wrote poetry, too. That was good. No. Of course, I'm happy to have lived so long is to do some good poems. And whether they're great or is not the issue, exactly.

MARIANNE COMBS: While the University of Minnesota is celebrating Bly's body of work, he is by no means finished yet. In recent years, he's been incorporating the formal structure of the great Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz into his own writing. He says the structure is most easily put to use by poets who've done a lot of reading and a lot of living. And at the age of 82, he thinks he qualifies. Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio News, Minneapolis.