Poet as Hero

Robert Bly, the male poet in America

#2 in the HUNDRED HEROES PROJECT


It’s February 15… President’s Day… and I think of the heroic statesmen our country has produced -- Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Roosevelt (Franklin and Eleanor,) but being by nature a contrarian I decide not to write about a heroic statesman. In fact, my mind goes straight to Plato and the philosopher kings and his arch opinion that the least qualified member of society for public office is the poet. I decide to write about the heroic poet. Welcome to the second essay in the HUNDRED HEROES PROJECT -- Poet as Hero. 

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Eighteen years ago a strange ‘yokeling of Jungians’ (think ‘gaggle of geese’, ‘pride of lions’, ‘exultation of larks’, etc.) gathered on the campus of Notre Dame University to celebrate and roast the brilliant, bad boy of Zurich, James Hillman. The public was invited to serve as congregation to this clergy of practitioner-preachers and I was among the choir of converts. Living into the spirit of Hillman’s own contrarian nature -- his unabashedly gleeful writings on taboo subjects like depression, suicide and masturbation having rocked the genteel society of proper analysts -- the speakers were going way out on their respective intellectual limbs and feeling free to initiate raucous arguments in sessions, in the hallways, in the cafeteria and even on stage. Saturday afternoon, the third day of the conference, had brought the wildest plenary session yet with Wolfgang Giergerich eliciting catcalls and outraged howls from fellow analysts when he insisted that actual bloodletting and animal sacrifice alone could evoke the numinous and that metaphoric rituals were all pathetic nonsense. It was with some relief, therefore, that we returned to the auditorium after supper for a simple evening of music, dance and poetry. 

Robert Bly -- the vested, white-haired, cantankerous Minnesota poet famous for jump-starting the men’s movement with his provocative book, Iron John -- closed the evening with rapturous readings from Sufi poets, Rumi and Kabir. His two “altar boys” strummed and drummed beside him as his perennially plaintive Norwegian voice rang out over the hushed house. Those of us familiar with his translations chimed in like proper Sunday School initiates:

Today, like every day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t go to the study and start reading –
Take down the stringed instruments!
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground!

We swooned in joy at the absence of intellectual jousting and bathed in the beauty of the language.

At 10:00 PM sharp, a German (this is just a guess) janitor announced from the side door that our time for jollity was over and that he had orders to close up. There was collective protest and Bly tried to whip up a rebellion from the stage. But the organizers, sensing overtime fees and hassles with Notre Dame administrators who, after all, have god and football on their side, persuaded Bly to get off the stage and the houselights came on and most of the audience trudged off to their dorms and illegal stashes of wine and beer for late night gossiping. A small group of us sidled down to the stage door where Bly and his musicians were still bubbling with the energy of mystic poetry like a volcano with lava waiting to erupt. “Let’s take over a building!” shouted Bly. “I’m not ready to stop, are you?” With the adrenalin rush of adolescents on the prowl for a safe place for secretive sexual encounters we plunged into the night armed with the tablas and sitar, pillows and notebooks, checking doors and windows for any possibility. It was, delightfully and ironically, a science lab building with a back door left carelessly ajar that beckoned us into its steeply sloped, kiva-like interior for our continued verbal foreplay. Keeping the lights low to avoid discovery we re-set the stage and Bly took command of the group energy like an ancient shaman of the Eleusian mysteries.

And then the remarkable, heroic thing happened.

I have dwelt upon the sexual energy of the evening, not because it was obvious at the start, but because what followed made it clear that we had spawned something that was now coming forth, and this thing was the best and most pure, truthful and brave thing that can come forth from sex. We saw a man give birth that night, while another man midwifed him.

Bly had exhausted his repertoire of memorized poems and called into the audience for ideas and offerings. Timidly, one young man announced that he had a poem that he had written which he would like to share. The group solidarity made us generous and we called out our consent and encouragement. The young man came forth from the crowd and stood apart to read his poem – about the difficulty of becoming a man in America -- tentatively and awkwardly from the side of the stage. There were murmurings of assent, but the delivery was so mild that it was hard to feel the spirit of the poem. In the polite pause that followed his rendition, Bly suddenly sprang into action. He commanded the young poet to come up on the stage and sit beside him and “do it again!” Blushing with the genuine anguish of the introverted, the gangling, fuzzy-chinned, 20-something poet came with obvious reticence to sit beside Bly on one of the pillows on the stage floor. He read his poem again with even more stumbling and fumbling, and again we applauded and encouraged.

Still unsatisfied, Bly suddenly broke all remaining rules of etiquette -- the ones still standing after breaking-and-entering a building after hours and against orders -- and grabbed the young man around his waist and pulled him, pillow and all, between his own legs, so that he straddled the younger man, the way a mother might place a small child between her legs at the beach while letting him splash his feet in the breaking waves. The young man promptly broke into a sweat and went from pale to red-faced and back again.  “Do it again!” Bly roared. “Say it like you meant it. Say it the way it felt when you first wrote it.” Gasping for breath, the reluctant poet began again. “Do it by heart!” Bly roared and snatched the paper from his clammy hands. The young man stared out into the dim light of the kiva, wild-eyed with desperation, but choked out the poem from memory. It was definitely taking on some shape now. We felt the shift from intellectual poking around to real emotion. It wasn’t “a poem” anymore, it was a body of some sort -- a body of experience, a body of longing, a body of grief, a body of hope.  A hush came over the room. Any pretext of maintaining dignity had drained from the young man and he was visibly trembling and looked nauseated. Bly, more insistent than ever, yet with infinite tenderness, wrapped his arms around the waist of the young man and said again, in his ear, crooning like a nursemaid, “Do it again. Make it come alive. Give birth to it.”

And right there, on the stage of the science lab at Notre Dame University, a man gave birth to a poem. It was every bit as messy, arduous, exhilarating, bloody, horrible, wonderful and ecstatic as any human birthing. We all wailed and groaned in sympathetic travail as the young writer became a poet by virtue of giving birth to a real, living poem in front of all of us. Shaking and sweating and moaning he recited his poem again and again -- in a whisper, in a roar, as a scream, as a song -- with Bly rocking him back and forth with the instinctive wisdom of an old midwife. Through the masculine cervix of the larynx, the poem came forth from the fifth chakra of the throat and entered the world through our ears.

Glancing around the rows of chairs, I discovered I was not the only woman who had grasped the significance of the event. Several other women had wrapped their arms around their midsections in sympathetic memory of this process. My own bodily recollections of three childbirths made my insides writhe and spasm. I “got” that this was the same thing that comes to a woman through nature, but that the rare man must go out and hunt it down, and that -- contrary to Giergerich’s claim -- metaphoric birth, or the birth of metaphor -- is every bit as painful and numinous as the fleshly variety.

At the end of the ordeal, the young poet sank back, weeping, against Bly’s broad chest, and we all heaved our own sighs of relief and joy. There was no applause, we’d long ago passed that stage, but the spontaneous utterances of wonder filled the room with weird sounds -- human birdsong, purring, crooning. Someone threw open the door and turned out the light and let the night flood into the space. Moon and stars and night wind carried our satisfaction out over the unsuspecting grass and concrete and glass and blew it around the spire of the church that championed virgin birth, a church that would have been abashed to learn that such a birth had just taken place in a dim lab, between the lines of university protocol. Behold – unto us a poem is born!

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Now, what makes this scene of Bly’s intervention heroic and not just an act of spontaneous kindness or new-age male bonding? I’d like to delve further into the matter and tell you why I think this event is so critical to our understanding of the wider attributes of heroism and to our American situation in particular.  What Bly did that night was not an unconscious reaction to the presenting situation, but the result of decades of diving into a very murky place in the American collective unconscious. Think of the great symbol of yin/yang:

The feminine has been represented by the dark paisley -- things dark, cool, receptive, interior, emotional, earthly -- with a tiny bright spot of rational “male” energy at its center. The masculine is represented by the white side -- things bright, hot, assertive, extroverted, cerebral and metaphysical -- with a despised spot of feminine darkness lurking at the center. The way I see it, the male poet is the hero who has ventured most deeply into that speck of darkness within the white, shiny, masculine side of the American psyche, seeking the estranged feminine within the collective unconscious. Here, in an early poem, Bly voices the ego position of the young man born into patriarchy:

Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of the ocean, nor the mother of the snake and the fire;
Not to the mother of love,
Nor the mother of conversation, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the solitude of
    death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,
Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.

But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the
    father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase National Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of
    zeros;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
    rocks.

(A Busy Man Speaks, by Robert Bly, originally published in Contemporary American Poetry; Penguin Books, 1962)

Robert Bly appears to be one of those conscious human beings who has realized what his life is about even as he’s living it. Early in his career, Bly took on, as part of his mission, the drawing of attention to the great deficit in the American psyche of men blessing boys in order to make them men. In the ancient order of patriarchy, boys become men by killing something (or someone) else, or by sexually taking a female. Girls become women because their bodies make it possible for them to create new children. It takes a rare mind to realize that some boys want to become men by giving birth and making that impossible thing possible. Such an act is a full expression of the dark dot at the center of masculinity and as such is a powerful integrator of shadow and ego -- two things that cannot be together are together and so the mind must expand to take in the new reality. This is the process of integration.

But why is it heroically important for male poets to dive into the dark spot of the collective male identity? Bly is explicit in discussing the implications:

“…a decision taken privately, as part of one’s inner life, to fight the dark side of oneself -- and this fight the Protestants particularly recommended -- can cause ‘the conscious’ and ‘the unconscious’ to take up adversary positions; and the adversary positions can quickly spread to foreign policy and influence decisions…(So) one of the things we need to do as Americans is to work hard individually at eating our shadows, and so make sure that we are not releasing energy that can then be picked up by the politicians, who can use it against Russia, China, or the South American countries.” (from A Little Book on the Human Shadow)

Bly’s heroism -- and he would hate to be called a hero; I can feel his curmudgeonly soul recoiling at the label -- is a kind of willingness to surrender the light and enter into the darkness at the center of the collective masculine psyche. In a curious way I would call this kind of heroism the “virgin mother” of virtues, for it is the strength to accept the call of the terrifying angel who asks if you will bring to birth a new world by saying yes to the god-seed that grows inside. A real man would have to be crazy to say yes to that! -- and yet some of them do agree, and so we have the enormous boons to society born of Walt Whitman and e.e.cummings and Wallace Stevens and Wendell Berry and Robinson Jeffers and Robert Bly and many others who drag us unwillingly to the reflecting pool where we can gaze at the monstrous face that is our national identity and try to learn to love the stranger that is us.

We cannot become better than we are unless we learn to recognize and love that face, so this is an essential task and one of the most thankless. You will not yet find this country offering congressional medals, lifelong pensions and government housing to its poets. This is still reserved for military heroes. Yet the work of the poet is every bit as harrowing and necessary, though the enemy is within rather than without and the wounds to the soul invisible though deadly. The heroic poet allows the shadow, the projected evil, to enter into himself, in order for it to be redeemed through love and language.

~ Rebecca Armstrong ~  2/15/10

 

Robert Bly, photo by Lynn Saville

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I’d like to dedicate this essay to my friend, poet and archetypal psychologist, George Viney, who was there at the festival in Notre Dame and will remember…. Also, to two dear friends who well understand the agonies of giving birth to words – Keith Cunningham and Phil Cousineau.