A Poet of the Midwest: Robert Bly, 1926–2021

Abstract

A Poet of the MidwestRobert Bly, 1926–2021 David R. Pichaske Internationally renowned Minnesota native Robert Bly died on November 21, 2021, twelve years after telling us in a poem: "I know that each of us will die alone."1 After a decade of dementia, he may have felt alone, but Bly did not pass unappreciated. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Washington Post announced his departure with obituaries focusing mostly on his opposition to the Vietnam War and his prose book Iron John: A Book About Men. The real story, however, is the rise of a farm kid from flyover country—who did not publish a book of poems until his thirty-sixth year—to a spot in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, fourth edition (1974). Bly's grounding in the Minnesota Middle West made it "natural for him to emphasize the land and animal life over people" and sent him, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune headlined on November 22, 2021, "From Minnesota's Prairie to the Best-Seller List."2 Robert Bly was born December 23, 1926, near Madison, Minnesota, where he worked on his family's farm and attended the District 94 country school with half a dozen classmates. After graduating high school, Bly enlisted in the Navy; however, rheumatic fever kept him quarantined until the war ended. After a year at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, Bly transferred to Harvard and joined writers of the emerging East Coast generation like Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O'Hara. After graduating in 1950, Bly returned briefly to Minnesota, then spent a couple of years in New York City, where, he once told Bill Moyers in an interview, his poems were "a complete failure" because they were too "cognitive" and lacked feeling.3 (David Ignatow found Bly's city poems lacking in "city rhythms and tone," missing the city's kinetic anarchy.4) In 1955 Robert married Carol McLean (from Duluth) and in 1956 received a Fulbright fellowship to Norway to translate poetry. There he discovered a surrealist "deep image" poetry very different from what he had encountered at Harvard. The work of Tomas Tranströmer, [End Page 128] Rolf Jacobsen, Pablo Neruda, Georg Trakl, César Vallejo, and others resonated with his rural background. Looking back, Bly told Kathy Otto: "I felt avenues opening into kinds of imagination that I sort of dimly sense somewhere off on the horizon."5 In 1958 Bly returned to the family farm in Minnesota, where he worked to support himself and his family with entertaining readings and lectures (he occasionally played a dulcimer and performed his poems wearing a mask).6 With William Duffy, Bly began publishing a magazine called The Fifties, later to become The Sixties and then The Seventies. He offered detailed (and honest) critiques of all submissions, for the magazine targeted poets more than readers, intent on reshaping American poetry. (The inside cover of The Fifties read: "All the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned."7) He brought to the farm an abandoned one-room schoolhouse as an office, and the chicken coop became his private study. In the barn, he and Carol constructed a stage where their children performed plays. Bly's life on the Minnesota farm shaped his poetry almost as much as his fellowship in Norway: in a 1966 interview he told Cynthia Lofsness: "My advice to anyone if he wants to write is to go and live by himself for two years and not talk to anyone … The poet must have experiences of deep solitude."8 Bly found that his true self—long buried beneath the snowy cover of Minnesota life—could be recovered in silent meditation, in nature, and in connecting with a "dark, feeling side" that men, in his experience, seemed to deny.9 Bly's first book of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), was a presentation/celebration of his rural Minnesota place. It established Bly's reputation as a regional poet of solitude and self-awareness. The poet, Bly suggests, grounds himself in place. So, in that Norton Anthology of American Literature, just ahead of Allen Ginsberg...