A Poem For Friday

by Matthew Sitman

Alice Quinn, executive director of the Poetry Society of America and the Dish’s amazing poetry editor – she brings you the poems we feature every week – has shared the news that Robert Bly will be presented with the Poetry Society’s highest award, the Frost Medal, at the Society’s annual awards ceremony in their home at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York City tonight. Details about the ceremony, which is open to the public, can be found here.

To celebrate, we’ve decided to highlight Bly’s poetry this weekend. All three poems will be taken from his most recent book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, published by W.W.Norton & Company. Here’s the first of Bly’s poems we’ll be sharing, “The Teapot”:

That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot.
The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound.
But all at once, I knew you loved me.
An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.

The citation for Bly’s award was written by his fellow poet, Billy Collins, and should provide a sense of the man and his work:

From rural Minnesota to the U.S.Navy, to Harvard, to Iowa, then to Norway on a Fullbright, then New York and back to Minnesota—these were a few of the stops in the travels of the younger Robert Bly, and whatever else he discovered along the way, he learned then to listen to poetic voices not yet clearly heard in America such as Vallejo, Trakl, Kabir, and Rumi. Thus began Bly’s mission to expand the vocabulary, the tonal range, and the imaginative freedom of American poetry by mixing into it the sounds and techniques of other countries and cultures. Jiminez, Neruda, Machado and others would not be so commonly recognized here today were it not for Bly’s enthusiasm for the good these writers could do to enrich our poetry, to correct “the wrong turn,” as he put it, our native poetry had taken before it found itself in a bloodless dead end.

But Bly’s most persuasive urgings for a more exciting and direct poetry are found in his own poems, beginning in 1962 with Silence in the Snowy Fields. By example, he showed so many poets how to jump from the small into a mystery, how to shuttle quickly between the inner and outer world, how to leap over the fence of logic into strange new fields. So many of us watched with our reading lips moving and our mouths open as he hopped from a teapot to the assurance of love, from the touch of a son’s or daughter’s hand on his shoulder to ‘shining fish turning in the deep sea.’

The Frost Medal celebrates the many roles of Robert Bly—protester, anthologist, translator, myth-maker, story-teller, chimer, image-maker, champion of the father, and citizen of the world inside this world. But what gladdens every alert poet is the good news that their teacher, their liberator is being honored once again.