The Insanity of Empire
A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War
by Robert Bly
Ally Press. $10
524 Orleans St.
St. Paul, MN 55107
www.catalog.com/ally
pferoe@comcast.net

“The calculated effort of a society to kill awareness helps explain why so few citizens take rebellious actions. But I’m not sure it explains why so few American poets have written political poems.” --Robert Bly-- “Leaping Up into Political Poetry”, TALKING ALL MORNING

My first real sense of him began like this:

Quietly. Somewhat of a moving meditation. His first book of poems, SILENCE IN THE SNOWY FIELDS (l962), sitting on the seat beside me. I’m driving through falling snow from ‘sweet (old) home Chicago’ to my new setting in Wisconsin: an old farmhouse stuck in the woods near the very tip of the Door Peninsula--where I was still not at home after two or three years of adjusting. Out of place, out of sorts. Abandoned. Exiled. Circa the early ‘70’s.

Chicago still in my blood, still my freelance writing livelihood, back and forth/back and forth and now headed north again--another winter in an alien landscape. SILENCE IN THE SNOWY FIELDS…a beautiful title…purchased and read about l965, stored in my father’s attic with boxes of other books…grabbed at the last moment early that same morning while looking for books to take back with me, Tossing SILENCE…on the front seat and hitting the road. ‘So long everybody, see you in a few weeks.’

I listened to music on the car radio for a long time, negotiated my way through the Westside of Chicago, on to the interstate, past the madness of O’Hare, anxious for the traffic to finally let up the further north I drove. I flipped the book from front to back cover, catching a line here and there…”How strange to think of giving up all ambition!”

The dualism of city/country occupied me then, which I was not ready to address, which would take a long time to settle into oneself. I was still feeding my city psyche heavy doses of Algren, Wright, Sandburg, Farrell, Petrakis, Gwendolyn Brooks. A love for lights, clamor, street talk, city corners and streets.

No doubt it was the title of the book that caught my attention at my father’s house that morning: the silence, the snow, the fields. (“Take me,” it seemed to say. “Read me again. I have things to reveal about living in the rural.”) I knew the weather that awaited me further north. The long drive back which would turn dark before I arrived. The stormy roads. The small towns of one or two lights, falling asleep at day’s end. The scattered farmhouses lost in snow.

Somewhere north of Milwaukee, a familiar deserted stretch of highway, freshly plowed, opened for miles and miles. I knew the direction and domain I was headed into not. Nobody. Nothing. Not a car or truck in sight. I could feel the tension release my body in the fading light. I settled more comfortably in the seat, lit up a pipe, turned the music down, and opened the book to the very first poem, stealing glances while still watching the white road ahead:

Three Kinds of Pleasure

I
Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin
Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles
One by one lift themselves out of the fence line
And slowly leap on the gray sky--And past them, the snowy fields.

The telephone poles kept lifting themselves out of the fence line, leaping on the gray sky. The snow kept falling slowly in the fields-and would continue to fall all the way back to that distant farmhouse in the woods, where so much uncertainty awaited me, though I was unaware at the time, that this was the beginning of my first love affair with winter. Which l kept hidden from myself for a long time. Something I wanted to love, in Robert Bly’s words and way, but wasn’t prepared to. Yet.

II
The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields
In Wisconsin: and on these black trees
Scattered, one by one
Through the winter fields-
We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,
And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the combine.

The image of the wheeltracks in the snow remains with me to this day-more than thirty years later. I cannot see that image every winter (which I do) without thinking of Bly’s poem. Or his book. And so go to it again.

III
It is a pleasure, also, to be driving
Toward Chicago, near dark,
And see the lights in the barns.
The bare trees more dignified than ever,
Like a fierce man on his deathbed.
And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.

Though the poet and I appeared to be going in opposite directions that morning,
we were both alive and in love with the same place: the silence, the private snow, the light in the barns.

SILENCE IN THE SNOW FIELDS, tattered and taped, occupies a special place on my shelves today, in the very same house I was coming home to then-along with fifteen other books (and still counting) on a Bly shelf of poetry and essays that fire one’s sense of being: SLEEPERS JOINING HANDS, THE LIGHT AROUND THE BODY, OLD MAN RUBBING HIS, EYES, EATING THE HONEY, etc. Books of prose poems: THE MORNING GLORY, THIS BODY IS MADE OF CAMPHOR AND GOPHERWOOD, WHAT HAVE I EVER LOST BY DYING? etc.; translations from Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, German poets; anthologies he has edited; essays from form to fairy tales (including his bestseller IRON JOHN: A Book About Men). Books of all shapes and sizes, from the smallest independent publishing house that may have cranked out a 100 copies of a Bly book, to his main publisher, Harper Collins. An incredible testament to a fecund mind, a poet in continual (yet silent?) motion. I doubt there is a poet in America today who has written more of what we need to know and love to survive than Robert Bly, who is heading now into his 80th decade, still spinning.

There are so many Robert Blys, I don’t know where to begin, aside from his first book, SILENCE IN THE SNOWY FIELDS, Almost everything that came after was different, especially THE LIGHT AROUND THE BODY, his second book, in the time of Vietnam. Few American poets have experimented more with their own lives in words. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor space here to even begin to chart the man’s incredible journeys into the heart of us all and the American psyche. That’s a journey I urge all readers to make for themselves. You will not be disappointed. Though at times you may be discouraged. Stay with him. Learn to make the “leap” which he expects from you.

WARNING TO THE READER

Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats or wheat are gone, and wind has swept the rough floor clean. Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks between shrunken wall boards, bands or strips of sunlight. So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.

But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries. The bird, seeing the bands of light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again. The way out is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat’s hole is low to the floor. Writers, be careful then by showing the sunlight on the walls not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out!

I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched in the corner with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed….They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwalk floor…
--from WHAT HAVE I EVER LOST BY DYING? (l992)

Sometimes in attempting to get a handle on Robert Bly, I think of Proteus, the god who had the power to predict the future and the power to change himself/his shape at will--if only one could catch him, hold him still.

“We’ve never cared for surrealism in this country,” Bly will tell you. He will also
explain that poetry is inner or outer, and that “Americans have always had this tremendous longing to stay in the outside life.” Interior, exterior. ”So a poem seems to suggest by something that happens in the outer world in the unconscious. If the unconscious responds and notices it, the poem is there.” (from TALKING ALL MORNING).

The poets who spoke most to Bly inhabited the interior. The South Americans--poets like Neruda and Vallejo. Machado, Lorca, and Jimenez out of Spain; Rilke, Germany; Transtromer and Jacobsen, Sweden’ Ponge, France.

This was the true territory for him, and where he seemed to want to take American poetry and where he still seems most comfortable today, be it personal or political poetry. Or the possibility that they may be one and the same.

“When a poet succeeds in driving part way inward, he often develops new energy that carries him on through the polished husk of the inner psyche that deflects most citizens or poets. Once inside the psyche, he can speak of inward and political things with the same assurance…the truth is that the political poem comes out of the deepest privacy.”

There is a poem from his National Book Award collection of poems, THE LIGHT AROUND THE BODY (1966) that addresses this:

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 makes the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keepsake forever.

There’s a poem that works for any war. One we might pass on today to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove…all the true believers. All the Washington chicken hawks so skilled in shielding Americans from the truth--any mention or image of dead and wounded soldiers, enemy casualties.

When Bly accepted the honor and prize money for THE LIGHT AROUND THE BODY, the country, perhaps, was not accustomed to hearing such a passionate response from one of its major poets:
“You have given me an award for a book that has many poems in it against the war. I thank you for the award. As for the thousand-dollar check, I am turning it over to the draft-resistance movement, specifically to the organization called the Resistance. [Whereupon Mr. Bly handed the check to Mr. Mike Kempton, who was representing the Resistance.] I hereby counsel you as a young man not to enter the United States Army, now under any circumstances, and I ask you to use this money I am giving you to find and to counsel other young men, urging them to defy the draft authorities--and not to destroy their spiritual lives by participating in this war.” ---March 6, 1969
A response not all America’s great poets give voice to: Biting the hand that feeds them. Call him a traitor. Call him a patriot. Call him a veteran. (He enlisted in the Navy in 1944.) Call him a poet who speaks his heart and mind. Unafraid to express self-evident American truths and rights.
Bly is on the threshold of old age now, close to 80. Yet still a major American poet of immense powers, still working his magic, still attempting to get us inside ourselves (for better) through words. Still impossible to hold fast, keep quiet, define. He’s the American Poet-Shaman of our times.

Unfortunately, he will never be honored by the powers-that-be as America’s Poet Laureate. He will not be invited to the White House for tea. He tells too many truths about the American psyche too well to receive any such distinction. We prefer to silence such poets. Dismiss them. (Remember Laura Bush’s first poetry reading at the White House? Cancelled. Fearful of what the poets might say about Iraq.

Let it be noted that along with all the other significant writing he’s doing these days (EATING THE HONEY OF WORDS, THE SOUL IS HERE FOR ITS OWN JOY, THE NIGHT ABRAHAM CALLED TO THE STARS), Bly continues to write the political poem that comes out of his own deepest privacy.

Last year (2004), a small press published a book of his poems against the Iraq War---to the sound of one hand clapping. To almost no one’s attention or acclaim. No major, few if any reviews. The book is called THE INSANITY OF EMPIRE. Wherein Bly explains in a brief introduction, “A Note About These Poems”:

“I was surprised the other day as I read “The Light Around the Body,” a book of my own poems, published in 1966, how little had changed since that time. We are still in blindfold, still being led by the wise of this world. I’ve taken a few poems from that old Sixties book and joined them with new ones for this collection. We are still causing endless suffering with our well-known nonchalance.”

The first poem may well go down in American literature as the single, most important poem to address our time. An honest poem that wrestles with the plight we are in. A perfect poem to end this piece and suggest a poet, a book, a practice of protest all America should honor and heed:

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.

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, Fredrick Douglas-and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.