by Bill Moyers
I can’t imagine the world without Robert Bly, and fortunately, because of his long and prolific life, I don’t have to. Like the iconoclast H.L. Mencken, who went on working “for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs,” Robert Bly never ceases to think, write, and engage. Thankfully, we will always have his amazing legacy of work to nourish us. In fact, the University of Minnesota had to create special quarters to contain his eighty thousand pages of handwritten notes, journals spanning fifty years, audio and television programs—including several he and I have done together—and all the awards and other memorabilia accumulated over his long and creative life.
Bly’s international bestseller Iron Man, his interpretation of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, inspired men the world over to use those and other primal stories to probe deep and complex issues of gender. And apart from his own books, poems, and essays, there are the literary magazines he founded that introduced us to giants of poetry hardly known in America: Chile’s Pablo Neruda; the Spaniard Antonio Machado; Kabir, the weaver-poet of India; and of course the great Islamic mystic Rumi.
Behind the gruff exterior of a Norwegian woodsman, Bly is a sweetie; I can never forget the night he strummed his dulcimer and sang for our children at the dinner table, or the troubadour songs he performed at my wife Judith’s sixty-fifth birthday, a celebration shared with another kindred soul, the noted Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks. Above all, he is a man of courage and conviction. During the ’60s, Bly organized writers to oppose the Vietnam War, and when he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he donated the money to the resistance. “It’s quite appropriate to write poems against war,” he told me, “and it’s proper not to be disappointed if nothing happens.” Soon after his eightieth birthday he brought some of his recent poems to our studio.
—Bill Moyers
When we first met, you were barely fifty. Let me ask you to read some stanzas you read then.
I have wandered in a face, for hours,
Passing through dark fires ...
... and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of
zeros ...
I can’t tell if this joy
is from the body, or the soul, or a third place!
It’s good you remember that. Instead of talking about “the divine,” it’s much simpler to say, “There is the body, then there’s the soul, and then there’s a third place.”
Have you figured out what that third place is? Thirty years have passed since you spoke those lines.
It’s where all of the geniuses—all the lovely people and the brilliant women—go. And they watch over us a little bit. Once in a while, they’ll say, “Drop that line. It’s no good.” Sometimes when you do poetry, especially if you translate people like Hafez and Rumi, you go almost immediately to this third place. But we don’t go there very often.
Why?
I suppose it’s because we think too much about our own houses and our own places. Maybe I should read a Kabir poem here.
Kabir?
The poet from India. Fifteenth century. Here’s what he wrote:
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think ... and think ... while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten—
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City
of Death.
I was going through Chicago one time with a young poet, and we were rewriting this. His translation was: “If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with a suite in the Ramada Inn of death.” How about that?
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
See, they don’t use the word God. It’s capital-G Guest. He’s one of the true religious ones, Bill. One of the deep ones.
You’ve been working a lot lately in the poems of Islam.
Yes. Muslims have a great literature and fantastic poets. Rumi and Hafez, of course, have been the guiding lights—Rumi especially—of much of American poetry for some years now. It seems to me we should be able to give thanks for the genius that is there, despite what’s happened in recent years. Take this fourteenth-century Persian poem:
THE WORLD IS NOT ALL THAT GREAT
The stuff produced in the factories of space and time
Is not all that great. Bring some wine, because
The sweet things of this world are not all that great ...
The true kingdom comes to you without any breaking
Of bones. If that weren’t so, achieving the Garden
Through your own labors wouldn’t be all that great.
In the five days remaining to you in this rest stop
Before you to go to the grave, take it easy, give
Yourself time, because time is not all that great ...
You Puritans on the cold stone floor, you are not safe
From the tricks of God’s zeal: the distance between the
cloister
And the Zoroastrian tavern is not, after all, that great.
And the last stanza is:
The name of Hafez has been well inscribed in the books,
But in our clan of disreputables, the difference
Between profit and loss is not all that great.
You see how he is withdrawing all our obsessions? “I’ve got to get this done. I don’t have much time left.” He’s a tremendous spiritual poet. And as I say, I like geniuses.
Rumi was a genius.
Yes, he was. I’ll give you one I translated.
THE EDGE OF THE ROOF
I don’t like it here, I want to go back.
According to the old Knowers
if you’re absent from the one you love
even for one second that ruins the whole thing!
There must be someone ... just to find
one sign of the other world in this town
would be enough.
I feel that in Minneapolis. “Just to find one sign of the other world in this town would be enough.”
You know the great Chinese Simurgh bird
got caught in this net ...
And what can I do? I’m only a wren.
My desire-body, don’t come
strolling over this way.
Sit where you are, that’s a good place.
When you want dessert, you choose something rich.
In wine, you look for what is clear and firm.
What is the rest? ...
The rest is television.
What is the rest? The rest is mirages,
and blurry pictures, and milk mixed with water.
The rest is self-hatred, and mocking other
people, and bombing.
So just be quiet and sit down.
The reason is—you are drunk,
and this is the edge of the roof.
It’s a good poem, even for the United States right now. Somebody should say to George W. Bush, “This is the edge of the roof. And you’re drunk. Just be quiet and sit down.”
Your adult life has been bracketed by two long wars: Vietnam and Iraq. You wrote poems against Iraq, and you wrote poems against Vietnam. And bot
h wars went on, despite your poetry. Poetry didn’t stop the war.
No, it’s never been able to do anything of that sort. It merely speaks to the soul, so the soul can remember. It’s quite proper to have poems against the war. And it’s proper not to be disappointed if nothing changes. Is it okay if I read what is probably the first poem I wrote against the Iraq War in August of 2002?
This was before the invasion.
Yes.
CALL AND ANSWER AUGUST 2002
Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”
We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
I was thinking of Grenada. Remember we invaded Grenada? 1983. Why did we do that? Who remembers?
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
It’s a very bad pun, but I left it in. “We are silent as sparrows in the little bushes?”
Some masters say our life only lasts seven days. Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet? Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
And Sunday night came when we bombed Baghdad. “Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet? Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.”
Why isn’t there more outcry?
If there were a draft, the outcry would be just as great as it was in the Vietnam War. But Bush decided to use those with the least education in the country to fight the war. Many of the people getting killed are the sons of people in northern Minnesota—places like that—who don’t have any access to protest. And it was a disastrous choice.
Back in 1969, when you accepted the National Book Award, you gave your $1,000 prize to the resistance against Vietnam. You said, “As Americans, we have always wanted the life of feeling without the life of suffering. We long for pure life, constant victory. We’ve always wanted to avoid suffering, and therefore, we are unable to live in the present.” Still true?
Yes. Isn’t that amazing that it’s the people in Washington who make these decisions who aren’t suffering at all? The suffering ones are those young men with a poor education and poor opportunities for jobs who needed to escape somehow from the trap of American life, and so they go there and get their legs and arms blown off.
You went to Iran a few months ago.
Yes, we went to the gravesite of Hafez, the great poet. We got up early, and at about eight o’clock in the morning, children started to come. Maybe thirdgrade children. And they stood around the little tomb and sang a poem by Hafez. Really charming. And then they went away, and now some fifth graders came. And they stood around the tomb and sang a poem of Hafez. And of course, every poem of Hafez is connected with a tune, so you teach the children the tune, and then they have the poem. So I said to myself, “Isn’t that unbelievable? And why don’t we do that? Why don’t we go to the grave of Walt Whitman and have children come there?”
I don’t have an answer. Why don’t we?
Because we don’t love Walt Whitman, or we don’t love him in the way that the Iranians love their poets. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if children could go to Walt Whitman’s grave and recite little poems? You’d bring the poets into the heart, instead of having them in your head in graduate school. And that’s what you do with children. You bring children in, and get them associated with the heart when they’re very small, and then they can feel it all through their lives.
You told me many years ago that you tried to write a poem every day. Do you still do that?
Yes. It’s a joyful thing. Well, I get a few stanzas done every day, anyway.
Here’s one I like. Read it, please.
THINGS TO THINK
Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded or deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he is carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
And that’s for you, too, isn’t it? “When someone knocks at the door, think that he’s about to give you something large: tell Bill Moyers that you’ve been forgiven, that it’s not necessary for you to work all the time or that it’s been decided that if you lie down, then no one will die.” Well, that’s a beautiful quality, the feeling that it isn’t right for you to lie down, Bill, but I’m glad you’re still working all the time.
Thank you. But what about this one? You read this one to me many moons ago. I wonder if it still resonates with you.
FOR MY SON NOAH, TEN YEARS OLD
Night and day arrive, and day after day goes by
and what is old remains old, and what is young remains
young and grows old.
The lumber pile does not grow younger, nor the two-by-
fours lose their darkness;
but the old tree goes on, the barn stands without help so
many years;
the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.
The horse steps up, swings on one leg, turns his body;
the chicken flapping claws up onto the roost, its wings
whelping and walloping,
But what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night
and the dark,
and slowly the kind man comes closer, loses his rage, sits
down at table.
That’s the second stanza. When I was about thirty-five or forty or so on, and I had children, I realized that what is primitive in me should not be shot out all the time into the dark. “Slowly the kind man comes closer, loses his rage.” Some of it. “Sits down at table.”
So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided
tenderness,
when you sit drawing, or making books, stapled, with mes-
sages to the world,
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
This is for my son, Noah.
Or we sit at a table, with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together, calm and delighted.
I remember the first time I came to see you, back in the late ’70s. You were living in Moose Lake, Minnesota.
Yes. I still live there. Same cabin. We have a house in Minneapolis, but I sometimes go back up to Moose Lake when I want to be by myself.
What’s your favorite poem from up there?
From the North?
How about “After Drinking All Night with a Friend”?
Oh, that’s good. I like that one, too. I wrote it in the early 1960s. A friend—Bill Duffy—and I went up to a lake.
AFTER DRINKING ALL NIGHT WITH A FRIEND, WE GO OUT IN THE BOAT AT DAWN TO SEE WHO CAN WRITE THE BEST POEM
These pines, these fall oaks, these rocks,
This water dark and touched by wind—
I am like you, you dark boat,
Drifting over water fed by cool springs.
Beneath the waters, since I was a boy,
I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures,
Not of gold, or strange stones, but the true
Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota.
This morning also, drifting in the dawn wind,
I sense my hands, and my shoes, and this ink-—
Drifting, as all of the body drifts,
Above the clouds of the flesh and the stone.
A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass,
A few oars weathered by the snow and the heat,
So we drift toward shore, over cold waters,
No longer caring if we drift or go straight.
You make me think of those lines from a poem in your book My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. You write:
Robert, those high spirits don’t prove you are
A close friend of truth; but you have learned to drive
Your buggy over the prairies of human sorrow.
Oh, thanks for bringing that one back. I like it, too. Now I have to read it for you before we quit. “Stealing Sugar from the Castle”—this has the word joy.
STEALING SUGAR FROM THE CASTLE
We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.