Stephen Kessler | Robert Bly, poet, teacher, provocateur

By the time I met him, in 1967 when he visited Bard College for a reading, Robert Bly, at 40, was already a significant force in American poetry. His little magazine, The Fifties, then The Sixties, was probably the most provocative and polemical journal of its kind in the country, fearlessly and irreverently attacking various poets and poetic establishments while agitating for fresh imaginative energy from his Minnesota farm, a Midwestern complement to the Beat movement centered in San Francisco and the New York School and Black Mountain poets of the East. The Vietnam War had kicked Bly’s career into overdrive as an incendiary poet of political protest after an early start as a pastoral lyricist whose first book, “Silence in the Snowy Fields,” established him as a proponent of what he called the Deep Image.

Decked out at that Bard performance in what would become his signature Indigenous poncho, Bly, a large, big-boned blond of Norwegian ancestry, cut a formidable figure, and the vehemence of his denunciation of the war and its makers, combined with his startling imagery and explicit spirituality, made a powerful impression. The manuscript he read from, to be published soon thereafter as “The Light Around the Body,” won a National Book Award and vaulted him into stardom, which he sustained over the next 40 years or so with his poems, essays, translations and cultural criticism, culminating in his 1990 book, “Iron John,” which hit a nerve in the moment’s psychosexual politics and became a bestseller that injected him into the mainstream and launched the men’s movement, with Bly as its colorful and controversial leader.

“Iron John,” which I read only much later, mostly out of skeptical curiosity as to what all the excitement was about, is actually a good book, a work of subjective cultural anthropology and social psychology by way of mythology, that explores the formation of boys in their transition through adolescence into manhood. As a non-joiner of movements and an adherent of Bob Dylan’s admonition “Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters,” I never did buy Bly’s therapeutic retreats where men with lousy fathers beat drums in the woods and got in touch with their inner “wild man.” All such cultish collective hysterias give me the creeps. But I found his book to resonate usefully with my own development as an American male coming of age while women were forcefully claiming their power.

Bly had always been something of a blowhard, even as a poet, and his sudden popularity as a masculinist guru naturally provoked a backlash among feminists who saw him as a promoter of a kind of New Age machismo, and thanks to his overbearing (some would say bullying) personality, there was a grain of truth to this characterization. With his cultlike following of emotionally repressed and needy men given permission to feel OK about feeling their feelings, it was easy to perceive the men’s movement ideologically as antifeminist. I think it was more a matter of Bly working out his own bad-father issues in a way that unfortunately replicated the patriarchy he was rebelling against.

The last time I saw him, in Santa Cruz in 2007, he was already showing signs of what would become the dementia of his last years, lapping up the adoration of his acolytes and recklessly invoking gunplay as a way of battling the toxicity of television and, worse yet, suggesting that someone should shoot the warmongering then-president George W. Bush. You could chalk it up to hyperbole, but even such exaggerated joking-around sounded to me at best inappropriate and at worst dangerously bordering on incitement.

Robert Bly died last Monday at 94. I will remember him mostly for his earlier modeling of creative courage to shake up the status quo. His poetry at best is very good, his work as a translator and editor introduced many important international poets to U.S. readers, and his ideas inspired me to think harder about what I was doing and wanted to do as a writer.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays. His new collection of poems is “Last Call.”