Yesterday's first column featured a translation of Basho by Robert Bly, which got me wondering about Bly himself. Turns out Robert Bly is one of the great 20th century American poets, founder of the Mythopoetic Male movement, and is still writing and lecturing today. If we were to meet, I would have much to ask. There are so many differences in his opinion and aesthetic philosophy and my own (his famous essay "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry" denounces the sleek beauty of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams in favor of the anguished and overwrought work of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo, for example) that it would seem unlikely that his work would appeal to me. But in just less than an hour's search through some anthologies and his own website, I have already found it difficult to narrow down the field of excellent pieces to just one that I want to post. There was one from the book "Silence in the Snowy Fields" that is about Wallace Stevens that would have made a strange double-connection to yesterday's column, but that will have to wait, because this poem just muscled its way to the front of the line after reading it a couple times. And 'muscled' is the term for it - this poem is direct, rippling, while still remaining effortlessly lithe.
THE EXECUTIVE'S DEATH
Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day:
The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.
The crane handler dies, the taxi-driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile, high in the air, executives
Walk on cool floors, and suddenly fall:
Dying they dream they are lost in a snowstorm in mountains,
On which they crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus.
Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles
Or hares flying from a fire behind them,
And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs;
Their trains come through the air like a dark music,
Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.
- Robert Bly
It's also interesting that today's poem should namecheck Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It's Goethe's birthday.
Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.
THE EXECUTIVE'S DEATH
Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.
Half the population are like the long grasshoppers
That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day:
The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.
The crane handler dies, the taxi-driver dies, slumped over
In his taxi. Meanwhile, high in the air, executives
Walk on cool floors, and suddenly fall:
Dying they dream they are lost in a snowstorm in mountains,
On which they crashed, carried at night by great machines.
As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,
A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus.
Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles
Or hares flying from a fire behind them,
And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs;
Their trains come through the air like a dark music,
Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.
- Robert Bly
It's also interesting that today's poem should namecheck Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It's Goethe's birthday.
Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.
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