ROBERT BLY, POET & WRITER

Robert Bly has changed the American literary landscape in numerous ways. He has published over a dozen highly-regarded volumes of poetry, including My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, Morning Poems, Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems, and The Light Around the Body, for which he won the National Book Award in 1968. His poems in My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, are written in his own adaptation of the Mideastern ghazal form in three-line stanzas. In 2008, a new collection will be published, Talking Into The Ear Of A Donkey. Bly has also established himself as one of the great translators of international poetry into English, with pioneering translations of Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomas Tranströmer, and Hafez, among many others. The best work of his long and varied translation career appeared recently in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations.

Bly has introduced poets of many cultures to American audiences by way of his literary magazine, successively known as The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, and now The Thousands.  As editor he has also produced the landmark anthologies News of the Universe, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (with James Hillman and Michael Meade), and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy.  He has also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry of 1999. In his wide-ranging roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called "the expressive men’s movement," Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half-century.  According to the Jungian psychologist Robert Moore, "When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution." And literary critic Charles Molesworth suggests that some of Bly’s importance and complication lies in the fact that he "writes religious meditations for a public that is no longer ostensibly religious."

Bly’s bestselling book-length essay, Iron John:  A Book About Men, sparked the men’s movement of the early 1990s and defined a whole generation’s view of masculinity.  His other influential books of social and psychological commentary include The Sibling Society and The Maiden King, the latter co-authored with Marion Woodman, with whom Bly co-leads workshops for women and men in the US and Canada.  He frequently conducts seminars with Gioia Timpanelli on European fairy tales.  His awards include two Guggenheims and the National Book Award.  He lives in Minneapolis with his wife Ruth.

Robert Bly Website

Robert Bly is featured on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, August 31, 2007. "The poetry of Robert Bly has touched on spiritual insights and deep truths about American culture." The full video will be available online after airing: www.pbs.org/moyers. 

To learn more about Robert Bly's Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, click here:
http://www.greatmotherconference.com/