Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Robert Blyis an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His most commercially successful book to date was Iron John: A Book About Men, a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement, which spent 62 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 December 1926
CityLac Qui Parle County, MN
CountryUnited States of America
Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy-that's the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the highest thing. . . . Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached-to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music.
If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it; the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea.
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.
Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.