My poetry efforts bloomed burgeoned in two periods. The first was in the decade after I left the ashram, culminating in my four years in the Pacific Northwest. The second was in my first two decades in New England.
Bly came center stage for me in that second round as I began working increasing in Deep Image directions, without yet having heard the term.
Bly, as it turned out, was a major proponent of the concept. I did find his essays very helpful, especially the idea of riding a dragon or even the dragon smoke, along with the ways we humans think with three brains and his criticism of most English poetry as being miniature sermons.
His own work and much of what he translated is infused with a darkness I hadn’t found in the Beat-based poetry of the San Francisco renaissance, including the Northwest.
The majority of the writers I’ve most admired possessed a strong sense of place, and Bly was no exception. His return to rural Minnesota after Harvard and Norway is a prime example.
While he’s also lauded as a founder of the men’s movement, I had been working in other fronts of the issue and found Iron John rather forced as an argument. Gary Snyder’s earlier Dimensions of a Haida Myth impressed the importance of folktales on me much more.
Reading that his examinations of male identity sprang from the emotional crisis he encountered after being divorced by his first wife, Carol, leads to the questions of how much she shaped his earlier work and quite possibly what followed. Her short stories are memorable. When she died in 2007, she was hailed as Minnesota’s lioness of letters.
A public reading he gave with his close friend Donald Hall in Concord, New Hampshire, remains memorable. Throughout their careers, they mailed new work to each other for critique before showing it elsewhere. Their styles were so different. The reading itself came shortly after the death of Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and was in her honor.
Jnana's Red Barn 