Praising the Soul in Women and Men:
Robert Bly and the Men ’s Movement
by  Thomas R.Smith

Reprinted here with permission of the author and
 The McKnight Foundation © 2000.

Nineteen-ninety, the watershed year for the men’s movement in the U.S., was also, not coincidentally, the year that rocketed Robert Bly, along with his best-selling book Iron John, to international media visibility.

Interviewing Bly for New Age Journal, Jeff Wagenheim asked a question apparently puzzling many: Why a poet leading this men’s movement, and not a politician, say, or a sports hero?

Characteristically deflecting emphasis from himself, Bly replied, "One reason poetry is at the center is because the language that men use to communicate with each other has gotten very damaged." Bly’s answer, though utterly consistent with his fifty-plus-year career as a defender of the beauty, depth, and nourishing power of language, begs the question, Why this poet?

In fact, Bly’s intellectual engagement with gender matters reaches back at least to his 1973 essay, "I Came Out of the Mother Naked." Building on Jung’s theory of the coexistence of both masculine and feminine traits in the psyche, Bly’s essay stands as a touchstone for much of his subsequent thought on the sexes. He wrote: "All my clumsy prose amounts to is praise of the feminine soul, whether that soul appears in men or women." He added, tellingly, "The masculine soul . . . also needs praise, but I am not doing that here."

Although the ’70s for Bly were very much a time of "praising the feminine soul," his attention would soon swing toward the masculine in the ’80s. Bly had taught the spiritual and cultural values of matriarchy at his annual Conference on the Great Mother since 1975, but in 1981, by request, he taught a group of men for the first time at the Lama Commune in Taos, New Mexico.

Perhaps this new men’s work became Bly’s way of dealing with midlife crisis, or facing more directly the emotional legacy of a kind and upstanding but alcoholic father. He told Clarissa Pinkola Estés in 1991 that he’d at first thought, "My male side was developed, and my feminine side was not developed. . . . [But] what I developed is the shallow form of the masculine, and what I need now is to develop the deeper form of the masculine, of which feeling is a part."

That quest, of course, led directly to Iron John, Bly’s often brilliant exploration of the Grimm Brothers’ tale in which a boy discovers, in the person of a "wild man" covered with rust-colored hair at the bottom of a pond, a powerful teacher. Emphasizing the tempering of a man’s psyche through grief work, Iron John proposed an expressive alternative to the stoicism of traditional masculinity. Beneath the colorful mix of poetry, mythology, psychology, and social commentary lay a brooding conviction that the emotional isolation and violence of American men masks a hunger for fathering and male mentoring, diminished in a time of multiplying divorce rates and single-parent households.

In the year that Iron John unbudgingly roosted atop bestseller lists, small "mythopoetic" men’s groups sprang up by the hundreds nationwide. Newsweek’s cover for June 24, 1991, displayed a grinning, bare-chested CEO holding a toddler in one arm and a conga drum in the other. Probably no one was more surprised than its author when the book Bly described as simply "an amplification of a fairy story" became a de facto bible for what appeared to be a genuine mass movement. In Esquire (October 1991), Bly maintained caution: "A movement implies a doctrine. I just say something is stirring."

Something else that stirred, perhaps inevitably, was hostility from women and men who feared that Bly’s activity on behalf of men must also be against women, a kind of reasoning Bly has often skewered as "oppositional thinking." In an inflammatory and ill-conceived tirade in the March/April 1992 Ms., Sharon Doubiago even accused Bly of supporting the Persian Gulf War, choosing to ignore his courageous and well-documented record as a peace activist.

Despite such attacks, Bly continued to fill lecture halls and retreat centers, appearing often with the psychologist James Hillman and the storyteller Michael Meade into the mid-’90s. To further stress the importance of poetry as an essential inner resource for men, the three co-edited the massive poetry anthology The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, arguably the best of its decade.

Since that time, Bly’s men’s conferences, though fewer and no longer deemed newsworthy by the media, have taken on a more activist tone, with a shift of focus from personal or internal to societal concerns. Part of Bly’s genius lies in his ability to open these conferences to such remarkable teachers as the Mayan artist and shaman Martín Prechtel and the innovative prison reformer Bob Roberts. Bly has also introduced to the mostly white middle-class participants outstanding teachers of color such as poet Haki Madhubuti, healer Malidoma Somé, and percussionist Miguel Rivera.

Ten years down the road, the issues that ignited Bly’s burst of high visibility in the early ’90s have not gone away. In fact, they have intensified. Incidents such as the tragic shootings in Littleton chillingly corroborate Bly’s observation that the souls of boys, as well as girls, are under siege in consumer society. Many women seem to agree now with Bly’s contention that socializing younger men is primarily the job of older men, a source of bitter gender controversy in the early ’90s.

Meanwhile, Bly continues writing poems and essays praising the soul in men and women, some of which revisit his abiding interest in the ancient matriarchal civilizations. His 1998 collaboration with Marion Woodman, The Maiden King, examines a Russian story about a young man’s initiation not into the masculine but the mysteries of the feminine, "which through long years of patriarchal culture we have forgotten." In his 1973 essay, Bly wrote: "[In the matriarchies] each man was once with the Mother—having gone out into masculine consciousness, a man’s job is to return." Indeed, that is the arc that his life and work appear to be following.

While the ideas and images of the movement for which Bly was chosen unlikely spokesman have been superficially absorbed by mainstream society, meaningful change has lagged behind. In a Paris Review interview, Bly quotes a recent Dewar’s ad ("You don’t need to beat a drum or hug a tree to be a man") and remarks: "The corporate world dares to say to young men, knowing how much young men want to be men, that the only requirement for manhood is to become an alcoholic. That’s disgusting. It’s a tiny indication of the ammunition aimed at men who try to learn to talk or to feel."

This spring, when asked by the Minneapolis Star Tribune which activities he would propose for a national day for boys equivalent to Take Our Daughters to Work day, Bly suggested that fathers take their sons to the library and show them the books they love. Noting that women have often been excluded from the work world, Bly said, "I think it’s just as likely now that men will be shut out of the inward world, the literature world." That is at the heart of what Robert Bly has been saying these past decades, to the many or the few.
by  Thomas R.Smith © 2000

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and essayist living in River Falls, Wisconsin. His latest book of poetry is , Holy Cow! Press (2000) and the second edition of his selection of the Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, , is now available from Thousands Press. 

MENSIGHT

MENSIGHT About Archive Links Advertise Library TMC Home The 2000 McKnight Distinguished Artist Robert Bly, one of America's most influential literary figures, has been chosen to receive the third annual McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. The $40,000 award is given each year to a working artist who has had a significant impact on the arts in Minnesota over a lifetime. Awardees for the two previous years were ceramicist Warren McKenzie (1999) and composer Dominick Argento (1998). Bly, has long been internationally recognized for this poetry, translations, and editorial work, as well as his unique contribution to American Literature. He is credited for helping to introduce into poetry a fresh "American" voice that celebrates the lyricism of Midwestern vernacular. At the same time, his acclaimed translations have provided English-speaking readers the opportunity to discover a new world of poetry ranging from the works of Pablo Neruda to Rumi and Kabir. His essays on poetry, participation in poetry events worldwide, editorship of major anthologies, live and recorded readings, and far-reaching mentorship have not only helped define the genre of poetry, but have exerted powerful influence on aspiring writers. In 1968, Bly won the National Book Award for his volume of poems The Light Around the Body. During the '70s, he published 11 books of poetry, essays, and translations celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published another nine books in the '80s, and was the subject of a television documentary by Bill Moyers and one by KTCA-TV. In the '90s, Bly continued publishing poetry, and gained additional readers through his two large prose books, Iron John: A Book about Men and The Sibling Society. His new selected poems, Eating the Honey of Words, was published recently, and last year he edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999. To commemorate the 2000 Distinguished Artist Award, McKnight also published a book about Bly's work. You can order it free by calling or download the entire publication here. (Note: This file includes many photos and is about 1.2 MB. All contents © The McKnight Foundation. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required; free download.)