Posted by Sage Van Wing

I went to see Robert Bly last night at the University of Washington’s annual Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading. Like a concert, a reading is a moment for the artist to communicate directly to their audience. The experience can either be transcendent (a band you never really heard of suddenly shows how quirky and wonderful they are in person) or banal (you might as well have stayed at home and hit ‘play’ on the stereo). Bly’s performance last night landed squarely in the transcendent.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Bly’s work— it often struck me as preachy about spirituality and somewhat simplistic in its imitation of others. I’ve always loved his translations, though, and his importance as an activist poet is what got me to the reading last night.

Bly began the night by reading from Roethke and it was immediately clear that he was not there simply to read. After the first stanza of the first poem, Bly stopped and asked “Can you feel that?” He went back and read the stanza again.

The entire evening was punctuated by such moments of emphasis. He read nearly every poem twice. He frequently stopped to ask “Am I saying anything to you?” “You hear me?” “Do you have anything to say about that?”

After reading some Roethke, he went on to read from James Wright. And though he did stop to tell personal stories, what Bly mostly did was dissect the poetry itself. The entire evening was not so much a reading as a lecture. A defense of poetry.

But it wasn’t a boring lecture. Bly was gruff and sarcastic and quite hilarious. He’s 81 years old and looks every bit of it. But he swore frequently, calling Johnson and Bush “assholes” and telling the whole audience we’ll be “fucked” if we sit around watching too much TV. He read a poem about that punky fragrance you get when your balls have been resting in your pajamas for too long. I haven’t laughed so hard in quite a while.

I’ve spent the morning going back through the two books of his poetry on my shelf— reading them again with new eyes. I could hear his gruff voice interrupting me– “Am I saying anything to you?”— and I read the stanza again.

I tried to note down some of his best quotes from last night:

When you’re beginning to write poetry, either you complain about your mother and father, or you don’t mention them— you just talk about the world and what a good time you had last night. There has to be something in between. A poem should dip down and find something deeper. It should be like you’re going to a therapist. Except you’re the therapist.

Your job as an audience is not to make the poet think well of himself, but to take away a bit of the loneliness of being up here on stage.

When you die, the question is going to be: “Where you conscious of what you were living through?” If the answer is “No, I wasn’t, I was watching to much TV,” well, then you’re going to Hell. We must feel the pain. We must take that sadness of the times into our bodies. But we must live through it to. That’s what poetry is for.