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
The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.
My life failed on the very day I was born.
I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
The candle is not lit To give light, but to testify to the night.
A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge...
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.
I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.