This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life—all life—of which mankind is only a part.
Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819571830
Category: Poetry
Page: 60
View: 571
The poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now—these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life—all life—of which mankind is only a part.
In this 1979 collection, Bly revisits the western Minnesota terrain and plainspoken style of his first collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields.
Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: UOM:39015054091411
Category: American poetry
Page: 64
View: 718
In this 1979 collection, Bly revisits the western Minnesota terrain and plainspoken style of his first collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields. While in many ways a sequel to Snowy Fields, the poems here reflect a deepened awareness of Sufism and Jung that relates them spiritually and psychologically to Camphor and Gopherwood and Black Coat. --http:/www.robertbly.com/b_poetry.html.
( rev . of Silence in the Snowy Fields ) Hughes , D. J. “ The Demands of Poetry . ”
The Nation , CXCVI ( January 5 , 1963 ) , 17-18 . ( rev . of Silence in the Snowy Fields ) Leibowitz , Herbert . “ Questions of Reality . ” The Hudson Review , XXI ...
Collected Poems gathers the fourteen volumes of his impressive oeuvre into one place, including his imagistic debut, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962); the clear-eyed truth-telling of his National Book Award-winning collection, The Light ...
Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 0393652440
Category: Poetry
Page: 576
View: 740
An extraordinary culmination for Robert Bly's lifelong intellectual adventure, Collected Poems presents the full magnitude of his body of work for the first time. Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation; every stage of his work is warmed by his devotion to the art of poetry and his affection for the varied worlds that inspire him. Influenced by Emerson and Thoreau alongside spiritual traditions from Sufism to Gnosticism, he is a poet moved by mysteries, speaking the language of images. Collected Poems gathers the fourteen volumes of his impressive oeuvre into one place, including his imagistic debut, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962); the clear-eyed truth-telling of his National Book Award-winning collection, The Light Around the Body (1967); the masterful prose poems of The Morning Glory (1975); and the fiercely introspective, uniquely American ghazals of his latest collection, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011). A monumental poetic achievement, Collected Poems makes clear why poets and lovers of poetry have long looked to Robert Bly for emotional authenticity, moral authority, and artistic inspiration.
In Talking All Morning Bly explains that he had written “ snowy fields ” poems “
without pause , maybe eight or nine a year ” since the publication of Silence in the Snowy Fields . He published twenty of these “ snowy fields ” poems under the
...
Author: Leonard Unger
Publisher:
ISBN: 0684197863
Category: American literature
Page: 418
View: 491
The four volume set consists of ninety-seven of the pamphlets originally published as the University of Minnesota pamphlets on American writers. Some have been revised and updated.
Deborah Baker says that "The tenor of Bly's poetry changed drastically" (58)
between Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light around the Body. As with
Gary Snyder, however, Bly sometimes holds poems back in the process of
constructing ...
Author: Bernard W. Quetchenbach
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813919541
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 189
View: 898
Many poets writing after World War II have found the individual focus of contemporary poetics poorly suited to making statements directed at public issues and public ethics. The desire to invest such individualized poetry with greater cultural authority presented difficulties for Vietnam-protest poets, for example, and it has been a particular challenge for nature writers in the Thoreau tradition who have attempted to serve as advocates for the natural world. Examining the implications of this dilemma, Bernard W. Quetchenbach locates the poets Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry within two traditions: the American nature-writing tradition, and the newer tradition of contemporary poetics. He compares the work of two other twentieth-century poets, Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke, to illustrate how the "contemporary shift" toward a poetics focused on the poet's life has affected portrayals of nature and the "public voice" in poetry. Turning back to the work of Bly, Snyder, and Berry, Quetchenbach assesses their attempts to reinvent the public voice in the context of contemporary poetics and what effect these attempts have had on their work. He argues that these poets have learned from their postwar generation techniques for adapting a personalized poetics to environmental advocacy. In addition to modifying what critics have called the "poetics of immediacy," these poets have augmented their poetic output with prose and identified themselves with long-standing traditions of poetic, ethical, and spiritual authority. In doing so, Bly, Snyder, and Berry have attempted to solve not only a problem inherent in contemporary poetics but also the larger problem of the role of the poet in a society that does not recognize poetry. While it would be an overstatement to suggest that these three figures have found a place for the poet in American life, they have reached audiences that extend beyond traditional readers of poetry. At the end of the twentieth century, Quetchenbach concludes, poets have begun to identify, and direct their writing to, specific audiences defined less by aesthetic preferences and more by a shared interest in and dedication to the work's subject matter. Whether revealing a disturbing trend for poetry or an encouraging one for environmentalism and other political causes, it is one of many provocative conclusions Quetchenbach draws from his examination of postwar nature poetry.
( review of Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl ) Howard , Richard . “ Poetry Chronicle .
" Poetry 102 ( June 1963 ) , p . 182 - 92 . ( review of Silence in the Snowy Fields )
“ Robert Bly . ” Alone With America ( New York : Atheneum , 1969 ; 1980 revised )
...
—William Carlos Williams Vision in the Dark Silence in the Snowy Fields Bly
wrote his first book , Silence in the Snowy Fields , while living on a farm near his
birthplace in western Minnesota . " I worked in the Snowy Fields poems to gain a
...
Author: Victoria Frenkel Harris
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809317311
Category: Poetry
Page: 222
View: 824
Victoria Frenkel Harris traces the aesthetic journey of poet Robert Bly from his early structured works of mystical imagery and lyrical landscapes to his recent explorations of intimate relationships and male socialization. Examining the various ways Bly’s prose poems articulate his opposition to the Vietnam War and his recent writings manipulate more formal patterns in detailing the intricacies of human relationships, Harris labels this evolution in form, subject, and imagery the incorporative consciousness, incorporative because it assimilates Jungian psychological categories, international poetic traditions, and a compelling breadth of topics. Harris relies in part on contemporary feminist theory to throw revealing new light on Bly’s recent works. Though sympathetic to Bly, Harris finds that—in spite of his affirmation of the interaction of psychic, creative, and intellectual energies in both sexes—the poet’s later, erotic poems tend to objectify women in counterproductive ways. Bly’s idealization of woman as a Jungian universal, Harris contends, can blind him toward actual women. Harris is at her best as she delimits with balance and precision the full complexity of the poet’s work.
From 1950 through the present, this collection of monumental work from the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation celebrates the uncanny beauty of the everyday.
Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393240078
Category: Poetry
Page: 378
View: 894
Selected from throughout Robert Bly’s monumental body of work from 1950 through the present, represents the culmination of an astonishing career in American letters.
Presents literary criticism on the works of poets of all nations, cultures, and time periods. Critical essays are selected from leading sources, including published journals, magazines, books, reviews, diaries, newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets, and scholarly papers.
( review of Silence in the Snowy Fields ) " Robert Bly . " Alone Wish America (
New York : Atheneum , 1969 ; 1980 revised ) . p . 57 - 67 . Hughes , D . J . “ The
Demands of Poetry . " Nation 196 ( January 3 , 1963 ) , p . 17 - 18 . ( review of
Silence ...
For Bly , in Silence in the Snowy Fields , this is memory of experience irradiated
by meaning and significance — always in danger of being lost . And the poems
continually put us in contact with an urgent sense of the numinous , out of which ...
This book is a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, many of Bly's most famous early poems, and in some instances to see how they have changed over the years.
Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: Harper
ISBN: 0060175621
Category: Poetry
Page: 288
View: 523
Robert Bly has had many roles in his illustrious career. He is a chronicler and mentor of young poets, many of whom he presented in his series of edited books -- The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies. He was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men's movement virtually by himself, and published the bestseller Iron John. All through these activities, he has continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Now, in Eating the Honey of Words, he presents the best poems he has written in the last three decades, including favorites from his earlier books such as Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Too Worlds. Joining these timeless classics are a number of poems from these past decades never published before, as well as a complete section of marvelous new poems from the last two years. This book is a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, many of Bly's most famous early poems, and in some instances to see how they have changed over the years. In this new selection, one can see more clearly than ever the powerful undercurrents that carry this poetry from one book to the next. Eating the Honey of Words is a brilliant collection that confirms Robert Bly's role as one of America's preeminent poets writing today. The Face in the Toyota Suppose you see a face in a Toyota One day, and you fall in love with that face, And it is Her, and the world rushes by Like dust blown down a Montana street. And you fall upward into some deep hole, And you can't tell God from a grain of sand. And your life is changed, except that now you Overlook even more than you did before; And these ignored things come to bury you, And you are crushed, and your parents Can't help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota Becomes a part of the world that you don't see. And now the grain of sand becomes sand again, And you stand on some mountain road weeping.
Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields . The National Guardian ( March 28 , 1963
) . Mc Pherson , Sandra . " You Can Say It Again . ( Or Can You ? ) " The Iowa
Review , 3 : 3 ( Summer , 1972 ) , 70 - 75 . " Notes on Current Books . " The
Virginia ...
Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields . The National Guardian ( March 28 , 1963
) . Mc Pherson , Sandra . " You Can Say It Again . ( Or Can You ? ) " The Iowa
Review , 3 : 3 ( Summer , 1972 ) , 70-75 . " Notes on Current Books . " The
Virginia ...
Antonio Machado, a school teacher and philosopher and one of Spain's foremost poets of the twentieth century, writes of the mountains, the skies, the farms and the sentiments of his homeland clearly and without narcissism: "Just as before, ...
Author: Antonio Machado
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819572101
Category: Poetry
Page: 187
View: 359
Antonio Machado, a school teacher and philosopher and one of Spain’s foremost poets of the twentieth century, writes of the mountains, the skies, the farms and the sentiments of his homeland clearly and without narcissism: “Just as before, I’m interested/in water held in;/ but now water in the living/rock of my chest.” “Machado has vowed not to soar too much; he wants to ‘go down to the hells’ or stick to the ordinary,” Robert Bly writes in his introduction. He brings to the ordinary—to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams—magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. “The poems written while we are awake…are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams,” Machado said. In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco’s army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way. This selection of Machado’s poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master’s first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936–1939).
In Silence in the Snowy Fields , before Bly ' s intensive translation of Neruda ,
there are some indications that he had already begun to read Neruda ; but in this
book , even with disperse elements , either there is a haiku - like unity or Bly
holds ...