Poet Robert Bly Shares Work, Views on the Literary Scene

About 100 people gathered in Kirkland Junior Common Room last night to hear the poetry of Robert Bly '50.

Bly read from his recent collection,Morning Poems. All the poems in the collection, Bly explained, "were written as soon as I woke up every morning."

The staff of the Advocate, which sponsored the reading, introduced Bly, a former Advocate editor, as one of the "mythic antecedents" of the magazine.

Bly gave a vivid performance, according to many audience members.

"He was very dynamic, an exciting speaker," said Advocate Publisher Maxwell N. Krohn '99. "He was very in touch with his audience."

Krohn said his favorite poem from the reading was "The Russian," about a young man and his veteran father.

Bly, dressed in a purple vest and red tie, interspersed his readings with anecdotes about meeting with a dream interpreter "much different from Jung or Freud," receiving a letter from T.S. Eliot '10, and attending cocktail parties in Canada.

Bly also interrupted himself to share pearls of wisdom with the audience.

"When you're beginning to write poetry, you think it's all about self-expression," he said. "If only everyone could see how wonderful I am."

"As you get older," Bly added, "you realize it's all about grieving...You're writing poetry to grieve for people you haven't even met."

Many of the poems Bly read were about death, depression or aging.

In explaining the first poem he read, "Why We Don't Die," Bly said, "The soul is ready to die. The body is not."

He read most of his poems twice. "I learned that from [Robert] Frost," Bly said.

Bly also talked about the state of the literary world.

"There's so much change in the intensity of literary figures," he said. "When I was here [at Harvard], the people at the Advocate, we knew that we were going to be writers and that was it."

He said most young writers today do not have the same desire to write.

Many audience members said they were surprised at Bly's personality.

"I heard he was a misogynist," said Advocate editor Kirstin E. Butler '01. "I came expecting to hear a lot of gender poetry. I was impressed that his poems are more universal, they're life lessons for every person."

Butler's impression probably came from another one of his books, Iron John, Bly said.

"I wrote that book about man's initiation into the masculine world," he said. "When you write about men, people assume you don't like women."

Bly is currently working on a book about man's initiation into the feminine world with Marian Woodman, a Canadian psychologist.

"We're trying to explore how men learn about the feminine world," Bly said. "It's about time, isn't it?"