Robert Bly Interview Page

LSC - Montgomery Library 3200 College Park Dr. Building F Conroe, TX 77384 http://mclibrary.lonestar.edu/ 936-273-7390

Interviewer Kevin Power: Silence in the Snowy Fields  [Bly's first published book of poetry] shows a preoccupation with sinking into things--water, darkness, death. By the time you got to your second book, did you feel that these poems were too inward, too much of a reflective statement, and failed to serve as a bridgehead between the individual and the outside world?

Poet Robert Bly: No, as a matter of fact, many of the poems in the second book, the political poems, were written before the first book. My first book was a book of more classical poems which I didn't publish, and the second one was called Poems for the Ascension of J.P. Morgan, and those were political poems....*So I then did Silence in the Snowy Fields. I don't believe that a bridge has to be made between the individual and society--if he goes inward far enough, he'll find society.

Kevin Power: Silence in the Snowy Fields  is dominated by the use of the natural object as image, a practice that is much more deeply ingrained in the European cultural tradition than it is in the American one. Images from the landscape, words such as horse  and snow , have acquired their own patina and history, and remain central to, say, a Spanish or Italian society. In the States, the exploitation of land and the dominant urban ethos seem to have undermined the centricity of these images. Did you feel that in any way?

Robert Bly: I don't know. It's not my business really to make sure that there are objects that can have a force inside the society. In other words, the place where I wrote these poems is the place where I grew up, and I believe that our inner feelings cannot become clear to us until we see them in outside objects. Invariably the outside landscape in which they become clear to us is almost always the place where we were born. So this was a book which tried to make clear to me some of the feelings I had. Some people can feel it and others can't.

Power: Could you define what you consider the deep image  to be? Would it still be a direct communication with the unconscious?

Bly: I don't use the term deep image..  I don't like it. In my opinion all images are deep. The subjective image  I don't like either….*All images are subjective; that is to say, I make a distinction between the picture, on the one hand, in which there are simple objects from the outer world, and an image. An example of the former might be Ezra Pound 's line when he saw the people coming out of the Paris metro and compared them to "petals on a wet black bough"--where one object is being compared to another object--whereas an example of what I'd consider to be an image would be Bonnefoy 's "an interior sea lighted by turning eagles" .

Power: You've made a distinction between surrealist image and what you term "negative surrealism.." Could you clarify this distinction?"

Bly: More and more, I'm thinking there may be something called a false unconscious which we're not quite aware of. For example , we have young poets in the U.S.A. who turn out image after image after image, and yet the images do not refer solidly to anything in our inner psyche, so, evidently, they're not coming from the unconscious. This kind of false surrealism that we all know--light verse surrealism, you can call it--is all around us. They appear to be images, they appear to be connected with the poet's unconscious, in which the rational mind of Western man is so terrified of losing control and allowing itself to sink into depth that it makes up images imitating the unconscious. It's the same process as when manufacturers make a plastic table imitating a wooden table. We know that such processes are going on all the time in the outer world, and I think they're going on in the inner world too….

Power: Would you think that this might be an explanation of that kind of surrealism that different cultures produce? If the poet is living in an urban environment, then his imagery is a consequence of that fact. For example, the New York school of poets would be throwing up similar false images according to your definition, possibly because they live in an environment which is antagonistic to man finding himself or finding his realized imaginative self. But isn't this more natural to, more organic to, an extension of American culture?

Bly: I like the idea. One of the problems I see in urban things is that the true unconscious always links itself with feelings and emotions. These emotions first start to move out into the landscape, then they turn and come back, thus forming an intricate circle. With William Wordsworth they move out into the hills, and with Juan Ramon Jimenez they move out into the landscape of Andalusia. But what you see in the city is quite different, especially in an American city, which is so incredibly ugly. The feelings start to go out and then they hit these ugly parking lots and horrible buildings and they can't complete the circuit. They reach out but then they suddenly have to retreat and come back inside. I don't know what can be done about that. We have one great city poet, David Ignatow; I wouldn't exactly call him a surrealist poet, but he does complete this circuit, and how he manages it I don't know. He doesn't really go out into the city, but he goes out into people. He's about the only great city poet we have; most of the kids born in the cities find it not only very difficult to write poetry but even to become aware of their own actual feelings….

Power: What would your attitude be to somebody who appears diametrically opposed to you, i.e., Tadeusz Rosewicz, who says, "What I produced is poetry for the horror stricken. For those abandoned to butchery. For survivors. We learnt poetry from scratch, those people and I." What do you think of his antipoetry and his distrust of the image?

Bly: That's a pity, in my opinion; the issue is to try to heal oneself first. He's wrong in his assumption that everyone in society is maimed. The society itself may be maimed, but there are still many whole people in it. Therefore my feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and that when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes. Another way one can put it is that in preclassical times the society was so strong and spiritually healthy that you could be healed by it. Even an antipoet would then write poems of beauty. But our society is blind and spiritually bankrupt, so that every person is responsible for his own spiritual well-being.

Power: In your earlier poems you appear to concentrate on a single perception and make a jump within the poem, which in a sense is its inner register though not in any outward conscious form. Would you agree that now you're writing what appears to be more an accumulative series of images and that you're moving toward a more ecstatic form?

Bly: Yes, I think poetry is a form of energy, and I'm consequently interested in having as much energy as possible in the poem. When we begin sensing energy we just feel it a little at a time. When we're young we may feel energy in the third line of the poem, say, and it may not appear again until the seventh. In the process of writing, your energy gradually begins appearing in every line; eventually the lines don't resemble anyone else's because they're all composed of your energy. Then what happens after you've written for ten years is that you may have one poem which could be only seven lines long but in which every line has energy which you can feel is yours. It isn't yours, but it has some mark of your unconscious or conscious on it. At that point you can begin to intensify if you want to, and what the Buddha is always saying is that intensification comes through a move toward ecstatic experience. The Sufis especially saw this again and again….I've been reading poems by Rumi and Mirabai, and they have more energy than any poems I've read, and it's because the ecstatic is allowed to enter, together with other kinds of intellectual energy.

Power: You've mentioned this idea of energy and also the Buddhist idea of immersion in the flux. These concerns make me think of Charles Olson's work. Yet your attitude to Olson has always been that he's overintellectualized; you've said that he removes personality too much from experience. But wouldn't such depersonalization in fact be integral to Buddhist philosophy?

Bly: I like Olson's intellectual energy; I like the way he moves around in an intellectual world simply ignoring what the academics say. He goes down to South America to the Incan and Mayan ruins an simply makes up his own mind as to what happened there. I like his idea of poetry being connected with energy, but I feel that , in the end, what you have here is a man who is too extroverted and who, in some strange way, does not want to go back to the roots of poetry. One of the possibilities is that poetry cannot go forward unless it goes all the way back into biological time, archaic time, so that somehow we come in contact with all these elements inside us--that's the implication of Freud and Jung.... Yet when I look at Olson I find that he says that we can have a new form if we think a lot about what words look like when working with a typewriter, but I'm interested in poetry that goes back before the typewriter was invented….

Power: Would you agree that in Silence in the Snowy Fields  one of the problems for the American reader is that they don't have this kind of full relationship to landscape?

Bly: Yes. Let me tell you a strange story. A man telephoned me about ten years ago and said, "May I come to see you? I'm about a thousand miles away and I'm hitchhiking." I told him he could. When he arrived, it turned out that he'd been born in New York across from the Museum of Modern Art. He'd been in Germany once, and one New Year's Eve he happened to be in a bookshop. There were only two English books in the shop: one of them was Silence in the Snowy Fields  and the other was a book on chess. So he bought Silence in the Snowy Fields,  and after he'd read it he made a vow that he would come and visit the place....When he arrived he was astonished, and he said that he didn't understand this at all. I asked him what was happening, and he said it's just that in Minnesota there are trees and barns and cows and things. I asked him why that surprised him, and he said, "Well, I thought you'd made up the whole landscape. I thought the whole thing was a literary thing and that you'd invented all those things."

Power: That reminds me of Simpson's criticism [The reviewer is probably refering to Louis Simpson]. He accused you of borrowing iconography from Lorca--the horse and the policeman, for example. He said that they didn't have any direct relevance to the American situation and weren't naturally a part of its landscape. I guess you'd think his examples were particularly unfortunate and that they both have a precise weight?

Bly: How funny! I did in fact have a horse at that time, and now I have four, one for each of my children. I'm a farm boy and I was brought up with horses, so I didn't have to borrow those horses from Lorca.

Power: You start Light Around the Body  with a quotation from Boehme. Did you see his spirituality as a counter force to the puritanical streak in Americans?

Bly: Yes, Boehme is an exception to the [European] Protestant tradition…. he, I think, is the greatest European genius in the spiritual tradition. Both he and Eckhart are masters. One can describe all struggles in poetry, as in religion, as struggles between Mother consciousness, on the one hand, and Father consciousness, on the other. The early Gnoostics who represented Christianity included strong worship of the feminine principle and of Mother consciousness. But, actually, Saint Augustine, the patriarchal Father, was the one who won….all of my poems are Gnostic. That's the tradition in which I find the most nourishment, going from the ancient mystics through the Gnostics, through the people of brotherly love like Boehme, Eckhart , Blake, and St. John of the Cross, to Jung….

Power: So Teeth Mother Naked  is dominated by the tragically destructive figure of Kali?

Bly: Oh, certainly….

Power: So there's a move from Demeter in Silence in the Snowy Fields to Kali ?

Bly: Yes, because man is terrified of the Death Mother...

[This interview continues with a discussion of poetry viewed in the light of mythical, archetypal, political and neurological theory. Please see original sources listed above for more of this interview.]

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