Airmail

by Robert Bly

  4-20-66

  Dear Roberto,

  congratulations! I assume that the switch from Wesleyan Univ. Press to Harper’s implies a great triumph—a sort of Oscar for poets. Your check for 50 dollars was as welcome as it was unexpected. There was a certain amount of discussion before I could get the bank to give me the money, but they did and I immediately bought a little bottle of Seagram’s VO—the rest of the money goes to the family: paper dolls, oranges, socks etc.—It’s hard to get hold of a Chicago newspaper here in Västerås. How did the read-in go? I eagerly await a report. Greetings to the family!

  Tomas

  29 April, 66

  Dear Tomas,

  The Three Presidents translation looks wonderful! A note on your questions: Roosevelt wants to run around at night, with totally senseless energy, rushing all over the grounds, like a murdered chicken.

  The descriptions of the air are really a description of Kennedy: he was “invisible” in the sense that he loved to act in secret, even act nobly in secret, and then announce it later with delight like a boy. The air around Johnson is not invisible—it is full of soot, hurricane clouds, and ordinary Texas mud. “Resilient”: you might shift a little to a meaning of “resilient” that applied to Kennedy: he was mentally agile and flexible—he had not only one rabbit in his bag, but a number of rabbits of various colors. He was rarely at a loss for an act: he could usually think of something (at a press conference as well as in foreign relations). For the “skapet” choose any form of furniture or even closet that suggests something aristocratic or at least wealthy. You are right: a middle class suggestion must be avoided. What do they call those huge pieces of oak furniture in castles? I see them sitting around in European castles, dark, lowering, with ornate doors, holding God knows what.

  The reading in Chicago and Milwaukee went well! Paul Carroll read a fifteen minute poem, called “Ode to the American Indian.” He had typed it all on one long sheet of paper, which lay in curls and heaps at his feet. Everyone turned pale. I’ll send you some clippings of them when I get home from this next group. The reporters, who were political reporters, seemed to be astounded that poetry was read all night. They couldn’t understand that.

  Tomorrow I go to the East for ten days of read-ins. Tuesday at Harvard, Wednesday, Columbia, Thursday three different schools in upstate New York—Jim Wright, and Galway and I go by airplane, hopping about like World War I aviators—Friday, Queens College, Saturday, Oberlin, Sunday, a big one in Philadelphia; Ginsberg will be there too with his long Indian beard and saffron Buddhist robe.

  I’m glad you like Joan Baez! I love her voice, so dark and well-like. And wonderful passion in the songs! She has refused for years you know to pay her income tax out of protest against the war.

  Write soon, our best to Monica and

  the little across the rivers!

  Robert

  4-6-66

  Dear Robert,

  I’ve forgotten whose turn it is to write, yours or mine. Thanks for your last letter in any case! I’m terribly curious about your experiences on those propaganda tours (saw something in the Times Lit. Supplement about them—the lead story). Among other things I’ve been uneasy at the thought of those airplanes you travel in “like World War I aviators.” Eric Sellin sent the program for Philadelphia—a splendid collection of names. Are there any poets or other cultural figures who take the other side, who do readings to express their support for an aggressive policy in Southeast Asia?—In spite of everything I have a feeling that a slight climate change has taken place in the U.S.; one can’t look upon developments so totally pessimistically anymore. Maybe it’s just that summer’s coming, I don’t know. It could also be McNamara’s speech on China. Naturally the Oregon primary was a bad blow; I was unhappy as a wet dog all the next day. When the Viet Nam anthology comes out (remember it should have appeared the 3rd of May) you ought to send me some copies that I can send on to some reviewers in the press here—we give all too little publicity to the American opposition to the war. There’s nothing to be done about the professionally anti-American intellectuals (of the Artur Lundkvist type) but the shy and shamefaced friends of the U.S. (me, for example) ought to have a little encouragement.—I also hope that you pull back now and then into idleness and silence, so that the YOGI gets a chance to blossom and not just the COMMISSAR.

  For the moment I’m developing a big activity, or at least that’s how it feels. The job here in Västerås is going fine; I’ve also taken on some probation work (I am on a small scale a probation officer), in order to reconnect with the old criminal psychology, and am writing the last two poems in my fall book, which will be called Klanger och spår and come out on October 13. I sent you that long poem about Grieg, didn’t I?—I’d been thinking all along that I’d write it in the third person: “he” did this and that etc., but while working on the translation of the three presidents I discovered that it would be more natural to say “I.”

  Thanks for your influences.

  From time to time I make a road trip up through the forest, which is completely different from forests down in Östergötland. A poem follows.

  Open and Closed Space

  With his work, as with a glove, a man feels the universe.

  At noon he rests a while, and lays the gloves aside on a shelf.

  There they suddenly start growing, grow huge

  and make the whole house dark from inside.

  The darkened house is out in the April winds.

  “Amnesty,” the grass whispers, “amnesty.”

  A boy runs along with an invisible string that goes right up into the sky.

  There his wild dream of the future flies like a kite, bigger than his town.

  Farther to the north, you see from a hill the blue matting of fir trees

  on which the shadows of the clouds

  do not move.

  No, they are moving.

  “drake” = “kite.”

  Best wishes in every way to you and the family. And write for God’s sake!

  Your friend,

  Tomas T.

  11 July, ’66

  Dear Tomas,

  Thank you for your letter! Yes, I have dropped back into my old solitary habits now with great joy, brooding by reedy lakes, and reading unreliable psychoanalysts in the grass. The poem you sent, “Oppna och Slutna Rum,” was lovely. I had a note from Printz-Påhlson the other day asking for some of my translations of your poems, which I’ll send soon. (I heard that small pamphlet of your poems had been printed in Kansas—a friend of mine saw one—but the pigheaded Frankensteinian three legged printer did not send me one.) Göran Sonnevi wrote in a letter recently that your “impact upon younger poets has been great and maybe a bit dangerous.” I love that word “dangerous”—they’re afraid they might be drawn too close to poetry—as to the oven door! Sonnevi said he thought your new book would be very good, judging from your reading at Lund.

  How did you like the new Sixties? Jim Wright grumbled a little over my joke that in his nature poems even the ants are well-read, but I think he’s forgiven me now. He is staying here with us now, and Louis Simpson is arriving tomorrow. We haven’t entirely finished the roof yet on the little shack in the woods where Louis will sleep. He just wanted to come and talk about poetry for a week, so I’ll have to go back to talk for a week! Jim is fine as a guest—he just broods silently, and wanders about like a rock with hair.

  The mood on Vietnam darkens. Galway wrote me an anguished letter today. We had said a lot of harsh and wildly insulting things about Johnson during the read-ins, and Galway mentioned that he had always had some reservations about that, maybe Johnson did have a streak of honor. But now, he said, I see that all that we said was flattery.

  Johnson is going to try to win this summer. But the disgust for him is so deep now in the country that he may be the first president in Am. history not to be reelected w
hile in office.

  Do write! My best to Monica.

  Affectionately, Robert

  Runmarö 20 July ’66

  Dear Robert,

  How happy I was to hear from you, to hear that you hadn’t been cast down by all the hellishness that’s been going on. It seems from your letter as if people in general in the U.S. were against the policy of aggression against Vietnam. It seems that way in Eric’s letters too. But then these damned polls, as soon as Johnson announces some new escalation there’s actually a big jump in his popularity. I had so set my hopes on the Buddhist uprisings, that they would indicate to the American people how hollow the talk is about South Vietnam’s being a little country that is asking for the protection of the USA. But no. Then came the primary in Oregon. New cold shower. Then the bombs rained over Hanoi-Haiphong. Strong popular support. Now the reporters are saying that 90% of the American people are going to insist that North Vietnam be turned into a moonscape if the poor aviators are put on trial. You can understand that it feels good in many ways to get a letter from you when one lives in this atmosphere.

  I’m on vacation and have retreated to the island in the Archipelago where I spent all my childhood summers and where my forebears have their roots. (I’m descended from pilots and other sea-folk.) The family’s doing fantastically well. They all swim, fight mosquitoes, get lost among tall trees or lie babbling in the sun.

  I have now turned in the whole manuscript of my fall book and am sending you the last two poems. There’s a section in the first of the poems that touches on my transatlantic relations in a very personal way.

  [-----] On another topic, I’m waiting impatiently for The Sixties, which you apparently think I’ve received. No. I really hope the pigheaded etc. printer has sent it. But if it’s been sent by surface mail it’ll be awhile longer before it gets here. I have in fact discovered that the boats bringing the mail from the States obviously ply their way with the help of oars. Not only is it heavy and laborious to row straight across the Atlantic, besides that the oarsmen are badly paid and go on strike from time to time en route.

  I read with surprise that Prinz-Påhlson has contacted you. Truly energetic! I only hope it doesn’t mean that I’m now appearing in the English magazine instead of in The Sixties. I mean that to be published in The Sixties now seems to me to be a significantly greater honor, fully comparable to arriving at Valhalla and drinking beer with the great heroes.

  I’m working on Lowell’s poem about the mouth of the Hudson. What is the Negro sitting toasting? Is it some sort of popcorn? What kind of atmosphere is there around this special food?

  Stafford is great, Simpson is good.

  Stafford is giving me a lot of trouble. He has a sort of genuine poetic spark even when the poems are a little bit bad. Hideously difficult to translate. Entirely too close to their own language to really be translatable. The word “swerving” for example in “Traveling through the Dark.” Simpson on the other hand would be rather easy to translate. I often think his poems are “better” than Stafford’s but they lack that mysterious quality, unfortunately. Perhaps he’s too much of an extrovert to suit me. I have only one of his books: The End of the Open Road. What do you like best in that?

  What’s become of John Haines? He might be something for Swedish readers—the nearness to the North Pole. Also your poem about the Oyster must have something to tell us. What a wonderful MAD-poem!

  In a few days the family and I are going to Gotland to visit some good friends. We’ll stay with a family with the prosaic name of Svensson. Svensson himself is Gotland’s only psychologist, but he is really less interested in psychology than in such subjects as music (he plays the organ, French horn, cello, oboe and trumpet flawlessly), birds (he instantly identifies by song every bird in this country), fossils (a rather useless knowledge) and the ornamentation of the Viking era. He was at one time very interested in Indians (particularly Rorschach-testing of Indians) and corresponded with a professor in Kansas. He is very modest and quiet. Monica sends her warmest.

  your

  Tomas T.

  8 August, 66

  Dear Tomas,

  Be sure to get the Life magazine from a couple of weeks ago (the date must be around middle July) with the article on James Dickey! He brags that he made $25,000 on poetry last year! The truth is Life could only find one poet in the U.S. who was in favor of the Vietnam war, so they wrote an article on him, instead of reviewing A Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War, which I know they were also debating doing.

  Thank you for your letter! I’ll try the couple of questions about the Lowell poem. I’ve never heard of toasting wheat-seeds. I think the attractiveness of the sound is one thing that drew Lowell to that food. It is definitely not popcorn. The scene is a wharf area, with some unloaded or abandoned freight boxes standing around. I knew a man in New York who used to sleep on the wharf in a large packing-crate. The Negro is probably in the same situation. The only food he is able to pick up on the wharf are some grains of wheat which have fallen out of torn sacks being loaded on ships. He has used some coal fallen out of sacks in the same way, and made a fire in an old barrel.

  The most alive word in the poem is the first use of the word “ticking,” which suggests the faint sound of ice-cakes rubbing against each other as they all float downstream.

  Stafford is marvelous. I love his poems.

  I intend to publish translations of your poems both in Stand and in The Sixties! Their readership doesn’t overlap very much, since very few people in the U.S. read English magazines. I’ll just postpone your publication in The Sixties a few months, and all will come out all right.

  I like “I det fria” very much, though I am not convinced yet if or how the third stanza fits into the poem. It seems to stand off a bit, but it’s possible I haven’t really understood the movement of the poem yet either. I have to think about it. The center section is strong, with its “rotter, siffror, dagrar,” and the wonderful line with the man leaning over the table. Is he simply shaking his head, as if to say “no” or is it a more violent motion? Or a more ambiguous motion—?

  I’m enclosing a translation of your fir forest poem. I’ve probably fallen on my head!

  Here is a new poem of my own:

  As the Asian War Begins

  There are things that cannot be seen,

  Or are seen only by a minister who no longer believes in God,

  Living in his parish like a crow in its nest.

  And there are flowers with murky centers,

  Impenetrable, ebony, basalt....

  Give us this day our daily bread.

  Give us this day a glimpse of the moon,

  Our enemies, the soldiers and the poor.

  Love to all in your family! Mary, who is four, just came out to my study (an old chickenhouse) and said, “Come back to the nest! It is supper-time!”

  So I close here,

  Yours,

  Robert

  Aug 17, 66

  Dear old Tomas,

  Thank you for the letter and translation! I have chained myself to the typewriter here, with a cache of carrots to keep me in foodstuff, and am going to answer your letter! “the drawn pilot”:

  “Drawn” is used in this sense only of the face, and it means a face that shows a lot of strain and perhaps fatigue. The face of the pilot shows both fatigue from his flying, and an emotional strain, perhaps from fear of being shot down while he was bombing, perhaps from his awareness of the people he has killed. The word “drawn” was probably applied to faces like that sometimes because when a man is under strain the skin of his face does seem sometimes to be drawn tight over the bones, stretched over the bones like a drum head. It suggests “pale” also.

  I have changed the title slightly, and you can adopt the new version if you think it best:

  “Asian Peace Offers Rejected without Being
Heard”

  Changing “without publication” to “without being heard” helps for some people to connect the idea of the poem with the owl at the end, who seems to be the only creature in the U.S. with good hearing, hearing good enough to hear a peace offer.

  If you like the earlier version: “Det finns fil kander in departemente” better than the repetition of Rusk, go ahead and use the earlier version for those two lines. Let the rest of the poem go as it is in the final version. I dropped “Liberal Arts graduates” because it was too long in English, a bad mouthful.

  The ghost train goes back to a legend of the west. One of the earliest trains that went through the Rockies was buried in an avalanche of snow. Now, when the snow conditions are such that another avalanche might be possible, trainmen swear they have seen the ghost train appear again on its tracks, heading toward the place the disaster occurred, as a warning to the trainmen.

  I like the translation very much!

  “Snurriga” is a wonderful word. I was thinking of the Walt Disney film about the eccentric or mad professor, and all those Hollywood movies, really anti-intellectual operas.

  Did I ever send you this one:

  Counting Small-Boned Bodies

  Let’s count the bodies over again.

  If we could only make the bodies smaller,

  The size of skulls,

  We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

  If we could only make the bodies smaller,

  Maybe we could get

  A whole year’s kill in front of us on a desk!

  If we could only make the bodies smaller,

  We could fit a body

  Into a finger-ring, like

  A Keepsake Forever.

  (A Keepsake Forever is the way a diamond engagement ring is advertised in the U.S. So it is as if the Asian body in the ring were something for Americans terribly sentimental, “your bit of eternity.”)