Passion from the Praine
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Passion from the Prairie By Phoebe Pettingell Before Minnesota could boast of Garrison Keillor, it had already produced an engagingly folksy teacher: Robert Bly. Just as Keillor...
...With another nod to the Romantics, "On Looking into Lattimore's Homer" memorializes four men the poet has known, all dead in the course of a month...
...Once such speakers traveled from town to town, inspiring audiences with talks about literature's power to make us wiser and more sensitive...
...He never treats evil as melodrama, but is sensitive to the way our lives constantly absorb tragedy and horror...
...Tranströmer's verse is compared to "a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building...
...Eliot...
...Have you noticed The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting...
...Hamster Hotel" juxtaposes an outraged newspaper headline about the abuse of pet rodents with pictures of massacres in Rwanda on the facing page...
...Hurry, cn> now...
...now it read ? ? as if more were to come...
...happy times are to be succeeded by disaster...
...This alternation, so strong that it can even be felt slightly in the translation, gives the poem great strength and fiber": At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound Of the weapons of death, golden fields And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun Rolls down...
...Now certifiably a Grand Old Man, Bly will celebrate his 80th birthday in 2006...
...For almost 40 years, Stephen Sandy has been writing elegies that weave together the disjointed sights, sounds, actions, and thoughts of daily existence...
...Despite the elegiac tone that creeps into a few poems, Stephen Sandy's outlook is generally hopeful...
...But like the scribe illuminating amedieval Book of Hours, Sandy makes each detail glow: The toad in his socket of mud like a lump of tiger s-eye pudding His acute observation, in "Iris," captures the amphibian's odd texture, gelatinous yet shining with surfaces variegated like agate...
...Weathers Permitting displays Sandy's mastery of forms with quiet subtlety...
...Occasional" recalls the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima from the point of view of an American in Japan sitting in a noodle shop watching a broadcast of a temple bell tolled to commemorate the event...
...Nevertheless, Bly touches upon one Horatian quality often lost in English—the poet's sharp tongue and caustic imagination...
...He writes of himself in My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Robert, those high spirits don't prove you are A close friend of truth...
...My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 97 pp., $22.95) contains a collection of his "ghazals," an Islamic poetic form adopted by some English-speaking writers...
...It topped best-seller lists in the early 1990s, right after women learned to run with wolves...
...Yet as they put away childish things, they forget the reminders in the Christmas story that Jesus was born homeless, among the poor...
...In the orotund language of Georg Chapman's Elizabethan translation of the Iliad John Keats caught a glimpse of classical splendor...
...only some cattle and a Bengal tiger took the air —toy horde that kids crosslegged on a sweatshop floor all day in India whittled then lacquered there— ranged in procession on a table, heading to no stable...
...Here, the poet ponders the death of his parents and the growing up of children, the passing of friends and changes brought by the seasons—all rather humdrum subjects...
...In discussing Horace he remarks, "The English used him for years to educate young men toward an even temperament...
...Names like Tomas Tranströmer and Pablo Neruda were little known in this country before Bly stumped for them...
...The book underscored another important aspect of the poet's beliefs: Although he is against the rationalist tradition, he equally rejects "art for art's sake...
...Some masters say our life lasts only seven days...
...He has not slowed down...
...Richmond Lattimore's sparer music leads Sandy to contemplate Hades—the dark underworld where even heroes must descend...
...Though he eschews conventional narrative progression, his poetry remains accessible to the general reader...
...His turns of phrase in describing other writers can sound like poems themselves...
...My favorite, "Botfleshard," begins with a woman unearthing a jagged fragment of broken glass in her garden: She held the octagon, extracted bit of green bottle, letters embossed on its side, ? W, as if to warn her of its blade points...
...Horace was a master of illuminating the commonplace...
...He shares the fervor of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon, whose outrage about the waste of lives on the Western Front rang out in clarion calls for an end to war...
...It is hard to resist the impact of a poem at once so musical and so transparent in its meaning...
...Consider these stanzas from the ghazal "Call and Answer: August 2002": Teli me why it is we don't lift our voices these days And ay over what is happening...
...White hair flying, he sometimes accompanied himself on a bouzouki brought back from a recent trip to Greece as he declaimed ecstatic works by W.B...
...Bly's take on his subjects can be controversial...
...Sandy parses such heavy topics with a deft touch...
...Soon Sunday night will come...
...sliced grin...
...If we don't lift our voices, we allow Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house...
...His conflicted feelings about his country's role in that destruction are suggested, but not spelled out, in the particulars he mentions...
...Home Reel" evokes the ghostly flickers of family movies—parents, childish selves, and long-gone pets still moving in silent black and white...
...but vou have learned to drive Your buggy over the prairies of human sorrow...
...Still, he takes comfort in the ancient bard's imagined "cool baths, unstinted portions/ of roasted meats and wine for feasting" which...
...Pause over one of Sandy's poems and you glimpse bits of natural history, philosophical and literary ideas, and echoes of Wordsworth or Emerson or Frost...
...The ground can open up any second...
...Iron John, derived its title and controlling myth from a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm...
...He argues that straightforward, logical, "Cartesian" poetry is in conflict with lyrics that arise from the subconscious...
...In an era when critics complain that poets are too obscure, Bly certainly makes himself clear...
...The "deep image'- communicates with a logic that operates on an unconscious level, leading to verse that speaks to our innermost comprehension...
...His manner can be deceptively easygoing, as if he were thinking aloud...
...Reflecting the changeable skies of his title, he segues in a moment from sadness to wonder, or from the grotesque to the glorious, the way thunder clouds wisp away instantly to let the sunshine through...
...A family is "outgrowing" holiday customs kept up for "little ones': the make-believe of Santa Claus and the legend of the child in the manger...
...These diverse elements have been woven into the sort of stories Midwestern voices tell in a deadpan way—until the restive listener suddenly catches the point, or the joke, and realizes the teller has granted him a fresh perspective that will make the world look a little different from now on...
...The Winged Energi' of Delight: Poems from Europe, Asia, and the Americas (Perennial, paper, 405 pp., $15.95) collects his translations of 22 poets whose work has inspired him, along with brief summaries of their careers...
...But here we're not in a typical Oxford mood...
...Since the 1950s, Bly has maintained a large presence in small magazines and writers ' workshops with his "deep image" poems and essays explaining his principles...
...Most classicists would disagree...
...In practice, this stance has yielded poems expressing passionate opposition to the Vietnam War and later political quagmires, sentiments he echoed on the lecture dais...
...The renderings from unfamiliar languages— Swedish, Urdu or Japanese—are particularly enchanting...
...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...
...Ever compassionate, Sandy spots such disjunctions and renders them sympathetically...
...One train may have some Russian snow still lying on the undercarriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers still fresh in the compartments, and Ruhr soot on the roofs...
...This volume contains seven impressive odes...
...She held it to the light this way and that...
...I hope most of the censure has been motivated by the kind of loving exasperation we feel for a teacher who has taught us so much, yet from whom we must finally break free...
...In "Cardinals," a birdsong recalls Sandy's mother's habit of whistling back and forth with her favorite birds...
...Although it was soon filled in and her brothers continued to play where it had appeared, she suddenly came to view solid ground as uncanny and dangerous...
...Homer believed, await gallant warriors after death...
...Yeats and Jalal un-din Rumi and exhorted us to open ourselves to the imagery of our inner psyches...
...They range from the Roman Horace, born in 65 BCE, to the Swedish Tranströmer, born in 1931 and still living...
...As they say in Minnesota, "Ya betcha...
...Like Coleridge in "Frost at Midnight" or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," Sandy's voice sounds conversational...
...His rhetoric and manner evoked a kindly old circuit preacher, passionately exhorting his flock to personal salvation—though in this case the gospel was poetry...
...glint of intellect scanning darkness like a flashlight, as if from one of the pumpkins guarding your street like votives leading to a presence...
...The poem teases out the paradoxes of wasting illnesses...
...His self-help book on healthy masculinity...
...Just as Keillor recreates the spirit of old-tune radio shows, Bly has revived another American tradition—the schoolhouse lecturer...
...Discussing Trakl's "Grodek," Bly notes how "A short passage suggesting the whole of German Romantic poetry of the 19th century appears, and is followed instantly by a passage evoking the mechanical violence of the German 20th century...
...Bly's Introduction explains that he has arranged the authors "in the order in which [I] first loved them...
...Two recent books provide an opportunity to take stock of him again...
...The reader notices the occasional sonnet or ghazal only on second reading, having been occupied the first time around by the poet's train of thought...
...There is also a suggestion of the Romantics, who understood nature to be sublime only when it seems both beautiful and terrifying...
...In "Halloween Away," about a friend's painful decline, as the dying man's body deteriorates, his intelligence and feeling come into sharper focus...
...Weathers Permitting (Louisiana State, 58 pp., $16.95) is his 10th collection of verse...
...He is mindful of the small animals and birds that populate our backyards and aware that those who own no pets still share their houses with flies...
...we're really in the mood of some Russian story with Baba Yaga in it...
...Is it Thursday yet...
...I remember listening to Bly speak in a rural high school auditorium in the 1980s...
...Initially, he crafted translations of Georg Trakl, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Juan Ramon Jimenez in collaboration with the late James Wright, whose energizing touch remains evident...
...In "Rain Crow," a bird soaring in a storm becomes "Cruising elohim/ in a black coat, wings hovering like temple eaves"—a raucous god of nature we live with but do not fully comprehend...
...Like the sonnet, a ghazal's compactness provides a structure for punching up ideas and images...
...His mood is truly serene, with none of the spookiness of Russian fairy tales...
...Later she climbed down an empty manhole and looked up from the bottom "at the circle shard of sky...
...I would be curious to know whether the 16th-century Hindu poet Mirabai sounds as ardent in her native dialect, or whether Rolf Jacobsen is as appealing in the original Norwegian...
...Bly employs the three-line stanza and an entire poem contains six of these...
...To illustrate his thesis, he introduced his own translations of surrealist poets from South America, Scandinavia and the Far East to generations of American readers brought up on the reasoned tones of Robert Frost and T.S...
...Though horrible to contemplate, they offer the occasional eerie epiphany: in autumn's dusk the sun split open, orange slices backing a skeletal tangle of branches...
...a candle burning in each skull...
...Yet when you focus on the waving buffalo grass, you notice iridescent beetles, darting dragonflies and thousands of plant and animal species about their business...
...A stoic, Horace expects Fortune to spurn her former favorites...
...Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't Escape from silence...
...In "Stable," the poet contemplates the implications of Christmas ornaments: That year the children abandoned the mossy crèche in its pasteboard box...
...The boat can sink...
...Like Bly, Sandy grew up on the Minnesota prairie— a landscape that can seem peaceful and undifferentiated at first glance...
...each eye a slash...
...Bly's enthusiasm for works he loves becomes infectious...
...Wliere are we in the week...
...turning it over she read outWO as if to marksome end, then ? M as if to set her down, grounded in prayer...
...This prompts memories of a threatening sinkhole in her backyard when she was a child...
...he discusses rather than lectures...
...Over the years, Bly has been criticized as much as admired for his tireless zeal in proselytizing for the poetry and values he upholds...
...Well after they are gone, the dead continue to possess our thoughts...
...Each two- or three-line stanza (there are several types of ghazal) stands alone, but also forms part of a larger work...
...His expansive long poems have always been his most persuasive...
...Sandy does not spell out what mysteries she fathomed, but he allows us to share in her anxieties, which involve enigmas of female sexuality...
...but she probed with trowel and found no more...
...Bly reminds us that we ought to ponder why so few important writers in the United States today raise their voices to express outrage, patriotism or whatever views lie in their hearts...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
