When I was an undergrad at Queens College (CUNY), my poetry professor reviewed an anthology for the liberal arts-and-politics magazine The New Leader–maybe The New Modern Poetry edited by M.L. Rosenthal? I don’t remember the book, but I do recall that the review ended with my professor asking why the editor left out certain promising young writers, all of whom were his students. My name was mentioned in the review, but not a reason for my exclusion: I hadn’t yet published a word.
Robert Bly read the review. Sometime after, I received a letter asking me to submit work to The Sixties. I was astonished. I’d admired Silence in the Snowy Fields, the promise of the “deep image,” his rants against American poets’ “old fashioned” formalism, and his founding, with David Ray, American Poets Against the Vietnam War. Soon I’d search for the translations of Neruda, Vallejo, Transtromer, and Trakl that would figure the weft of late 20th century American poetry against the warp of its English strands.
I never published anything in The Sixties, but Bly wrote comments on my poems in a tight, unmistakable hand. Get rid of the distance, he said. Too many lines read as if I were looking at the world through a window. Soon I would raise the sash, moving from New York to California, Boston and Ann Arbor. At Michigan I met Bly’s close friend Donald Hall (the two scions of farming families met at Harvard). Later, Don would ask me to edit a collection of essays about Bly for University of Michigan Press.
Don was a Freudian and Bly a Jungian. Both could be categorizers: Goatfoot/Milktongue/Twinbird; mind-poetry/sense-poetry/spiritual-intuitive-poetry. For years they shared an editor at Harper & Row, but it was Addison-Wesley that would publish Bly’s mythopoetic Iron John, which Don would refer to as “Tin Dick.” Was he jealous? Poems flew back and forth from Minnesota to New Hampshire; the friendship endured through the silence that came, later, with Bly’s dementia.
It was Bly who famously introduced Jane Kenyon to Anna Akhmatova. After reading the manuscript of her first book, Bly advised Jane to apprentice herself to a master. “I cannot have a man as my master,” Jane replied, and so the translations that would buttress Kenyon’s later work began.
The headline of Robert Bly’s New York Times obituary singles him out as the “Poet Who Gave Rise to a Men’s Movement.” I would rather cite the translations he midwived. The cross-pollination of American verse with Spanish, South American, and German surrealism, Scandinavian humanism, and Sufi mysticism (Bly translated Kabir, and encouraged Coleman Barks to translate Rumi) brought hybrid vigor to many strains of late 20th century poetry. I keep the Seventies Press edition of Transtromer: 20 Poems on my desk, published when the Nobel laureate was not yet forty. “It is [Transtromer’s] incredible sensitivity to the hands lying under the earth and under water, holding messages for us, that most of the time they can never deliver, that gives his poems their sense of depth and their freshness,” reads the jacket copy.
Bly too brought readers messages that resisted delivery. His antiwar poetry was often dismissed by critics, but here’s an excerpt from Arrowsmith Journal #17 that’s a direct descendant–just substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam, and imagine Mark Pawlak’s poem in the pages of The Seventies.
“NATION BUILDING”
Entire neighborhoods of California-style mansions
are replacing farmers’ huts
on the outskirts of Kabul.
Government officials after work now relax
with family members watching
American sit-coms on satellite TVs.
Mark Pawlak, from Official Versions