This Is Your Wake-Up Call

Mystical, political, irascible, brilliant, Robert Bly is one of those uniquely difficult American poets who rejects the expectations of his audience and, in defying easy categorization, pushes and pulls the culture into a confrontation with its best and worst characteristics.

First coming into the national spotlight in 1968 with his anti-war book of poems, The Light Around the Body, Bly caught the public eye again in Bill Moyers' A Gathering of Men, filmed here in Austin, where the Chronicle first interviewed him. That PBS special sparked such interest in his Iron John, the controversial fairy tale on male initiation, that it became a bestseller and paved the way for a media backlash that put a premature end to the strongly vilified men's movement. He next took on the mall mentality of consumerist entitlement in another controversial bestseller, The Sibling Society. In it, he declared television thalidomide.

Television is still one of his favorite targets even as his interest has returned to the mystics Rumi and Hafez (with a bit of Kabir). He uses those poets to emphasize the cultural shallowness he sees as keeping America in a trance.

Austin Chronicle: Last time we talked, you said that basically society was pretty much shot.

Robert Bly: Yeah. I think it's declined even more since that time. It's horrifying -- the drop in reading, the decline in the demand for good thinking books. I remember when I began doing things in the 1960s and 1970s, there was really an intense interest in new books and new kinds of thought, which has almost disappeared. One of the reasons that poets of our generation worked hard is that we felt a desire for it and that Americans, not a huge number but 5 percent, 10 percent, wanted this. We did a lot of our work translating, as a response to that longing for better poetry. But now, I don't think young women and young men would embark on the long studying required to take on Rumi or Hafez because there isn't a feeling in the universities. There isn't a feeling in the book reviewers; there isn't a feeling in the citizens at large that they want something better. You know, when the average American spends six to seven hours on TV, well, where is the time left for asking young people to do such work?

AC: Yet, you and Barks do very well in your presentations of these poets.

RB: I don't know why that is. I did a few poems of Kabir, and I was amazed at how much people loved that. So I did more, and the Kabir book finally came out [Kabir: Ecstatic Poems, Beacon Press] and sold an amazing number of copies. He really speaks with tremendous wit and spiritual energy about things which we don't take seriously. I mean, he's sleeping, and he says, "Why do you go on sleeping?" So you can say that the last 15 years Americans have been in a state of sleep. Does that make sense to you? Why do you go on sleeping? The night is over! Do you want to live the day the same way? Other women who managed to get up early, they had an elephant or a jewel; so much has been lost already while you slept. And that was so unnecessary. And he said the one that loves you understood that you've got to make a place in the bed next to you. Instead, you spent your life playing in your 20s. You did not grow because you did not know who your lord was. Wake up! Wake up! There's no one in your bed. He left you alone. Kabir says, "The only woman awake is the woman who has heard the flute." Now, that's just lovely. Now the issue is, there's so much in your ears already that you can't hear the flute. I suppose that's one reason why the whole culture wants television every day.

AC: We are terribly afraid of looking at the shadow of America.

RB: Rumi and Hafez are geniuses who get to the underside of the mind. Which really isn't exactly as Freud said. Somehow if you go to the underside of the mind, there are huge depressions down there, and maybe you need a therapist to get you out, and that's a good warning, but with the Hafez people, there's an ocean of cultural joy underneath all that one does and underneath all language. And so, the joy is to stick a little straw down there and see if you can suck up some of that material, which apparently the soul of every living being needs. But sometimes, you know, many people feel it only in a funeral. You go to a funeral, and you hear these Christian words that the church has put together with the soul lying there. I've seen people weep again and again at a funeral, because they're touching into something that the daily life doesn't normally do. And maybe television provides a protection, so they don't have to weep at a funeral anymore. I don't know.

AC: "I don't know" is a perfect way to start and end.

RB: Hafez says, "Take this moment as a gift, for the distance between the lip and the mouth isn't all that great."

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Robert Bly and Coleman Barks will be at the Texas School for the Deaf (1102 S. Congress) on Aug. 11, 7pm. For admission information, see www.texasnafas.org.