Robert Bly

Robert Bly has changed the American literary landscape in numerous ways. He has published over a dozen highly regarded volumes of poetry, including Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey; 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.

Bly has also established himself as one of the great translators of international poetry into English, with pioneering translations of Nobel Prize winners Tomas Transtromer and Pablo Neruda, and Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hafez, among many others. The best work of his long and varied translation career appeared in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations. In 2008 his translations of Hafez were published in Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door. Air Mail, a book of Bly’s correspondence with Tomas Transtromer, was published in 2012.

By way of his literary magazine, successively known as The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, and now The Thousands, Bly has introduced poets of many cultures to American audiences. In his American Poetry Review article, “The Village Troublemaker,” Tony Hoagland writes “It may be as a maker of communities, literal and virtual, that Bly has made some of his greatest contributions. Bringing American readers into intimate contact with European and Eastern poetries has irrevocably enlarged the scale of our literate worlds.” Hoagland also writes, “Only a few individuals in American poetry seem comparable, in longevity and energy, as bridge builders and identity-creators.” As editor, Bly 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.

In 2013, Poetry Society of America awarded him its highest honor, the Frost Medal, which is awarded annually for “distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.” Bly lives in Minneapolis with his wife Ruth.