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Spokane, Washington April 15-23, 2005 |
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|  Robert Bly Legendary poet Robert Bly will read from a collection of his work spanning more than 40 years at the 7th Annual Inland Northwest Literary Arts "Get Lit!" Festival on April 17, 2005. Bly is one of several poets to appear on the Festival's opening Night of Poetry. Bly's recent books of poetry include What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? Collected Prose Poems, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul and Eating the Honey of Words. His collection, Morning Poems, named for William Stafford's practice of writing a poem each morning, revisits the western Minnesota farm country of Bly's boyhood with marvelous wit and warmth. His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. Born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock, Bly enlisted in the Navy in 1944 for two years. After one year at St. Olaf College, he transferred to Harvard and joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, including Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton and John Hawkes. Bly graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth. Beginning in 1954, Bly enrolled in the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he discovered his relatives and the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so began The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of Bly's generation. Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War in 1966 and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the "resistance". During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation and storytelling. During the 1980s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau, The Man in the Black Coat Turns and A Little Book on the Human Shadow. In the early 90s, Bly edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work with James Hillman and Michael Meade, Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures. His second large prose book, The Sibling Society, has been the subject of nationwide discussion. Bly has recently published The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine in collaboration with Marion Woodman and The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib, a book of translations of Ghalib. He has also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999. Salman Rushdie | Rita Dove | David Sedaris | Bob Edwards | Robert Bly |  | ||||||||
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