ROBERT BLY: Minnesota’s first poet laureate
AP news item from St. Paul: Gov. Tim Pawlenty has named Robert Bly Minnesota’s first poet laureate.
The author of more than 30 books of poetry, Bly edited the Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies, offering up many translations and more to delight us for a long time. AP notes that he also translated Henrik Ibsen’s classic play “Peer Gynt,” now showing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
Bly may do what poets do in official positions, promote the reading and writing of poetry, preside over poetry awards and contests, and write poetry or select poets to compose works for significant state occasions. My guess is he will do much more. For those who wished the governor would have chosen a younger poet, remember, this man is astonishing!
The Legislature created the honorary position last year.
On the net:
http://www.robertbly.com/
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HOW WELL I remember getting my hands on Bly’s early collection of poems, “Silence in the Snowy Fields.” Back in the Sixties and Seventies, my friends and I read everything Bly wrote, and some of us still do, although we continue to find and refine our own poetic voices. This was all long before his “Iron John: A Book About Men.” One time some of us heard Bly read at the Library of Congress. We talked him into meeting us for breakfast the next morning, at a USO of all places. Turned out, it was a good place to meet. We had some privacy there. Bly would read a poem or two of ours, ask us a couple of simple questions. Then he would tell us relatively minute details about ourselves. We wondered how he knew all that. Still do. He was amazingly accurate in my case. He said I needed to find a good father to imitate, and, without telling you my life story right here, right now, that proved to be quite true.
