Our Master, Robert Bly

Robert, you are still the teacher, and I am forever your pupil, sitting on a log in a sun-streaked woods or on a hard metal chair at a formal reading, or sprawled on a living room carpet. Anywhere or everywhere, you raise your baritone voice and regale us with poems. You separate us from our usual comforts, make us squirm and wonder, "Is he still talking about that same subject from last year, and the year before, or the time, remember it? when the last glacier sliced through southern Minnesota, and in an impromptu poem, Robert named the three new lakes it had carved." But a silence greeted your latest poems about grief as the flip side of joy. Where did you first find grief and joy so perfectly meshed? At your other house on the far side of the River? Where you live with badgers, deer, a great horned owl, unfettered horses, stray dogs, even a lone wolf, who howls when you recite. And what is that dark creature sunning itself on your front porch? Robert, when will you stop surprising us? I saw your writing tools on a table in the Great Hall of the Poetry Building. A pen was spilling blue ink wantonly over piles of pure white pages, a PC was furiously revising new poems, even an old typewriter was making an inventory of past poems. And then I saw you, walking swiftly through the tall grass, pausing only long enough to write in a small notebook. But the Book, Robert, the Book! Some say it can't be closed. You keep expanding it. Others say it has burst into spontaneous life. Imagine that! I remember meeting you over fifty years ago at a Poets Against the War reading at St. Cloud State University. An exchange student from Vietnam was in the audience, and he came to the podium and recited one of his English-language poems, imitating your vocal inflections with pitch-perfect intonation. It was very moving. Even five decades later, that memory brings tears to my eyes. That brave young man, his country ravaged by war, still trusted poetry, and he chose you as his master. Poetry was the Joy, War the Grief, and the two were knotted together like Fire in the Lake.