Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Robert Blyis an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His most commercially successful book to date was Iron John: A Book About Men, a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement, which spent 62 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 December 1926
CityLac Qui Parle County, MN
CountryUnited States of America
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.
That's what I liked best about him. He put his body where his mouth was,
I know a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty than they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
My life failed on the very day I was born.
You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.