MonthFebruary 2022

Art as Our Priceless Exchange of Gifts

The poet, essayist, translator, and magazine publisher and editor, Robert Bly, died toward the end of last year.  I think it’s unfortunate that he became best-known as a father of the “men’s movement,” because in the public’s mind that overshadows his tremendous contributions to American literature.  His literary work in all the capacities that I just listed had a tremendous and priceless effect on me and others, opening up the cloistered world of an American poetry controlled excessively by stiff-minded academics to the timeless and global world of a poetry of imagination and spirituality, of what Bly called “news of the universe.”