|
Life Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He graduated from Madison High School. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard University and joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Harold Brodkey, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living hand to mouth. Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children. His first marriage was to award winning short story novelist Carol Bly. One of Robert's daughter is Mary Bly who is a Literature Professor at Fordham University. He has been married to Ruth Bly for last twenty five years. He has four children from his first marriage and a step daughter from his marriage to Ruth Bly. Career In 1966 Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow. Among his most famous works is Iron John: A Book About Men (1990 ISBN 0-201-51720-5), an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. The book is credited with starting the Mythopoetic Men's Movement in the United States. Bly frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman, Michael J. Meade, and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman, and has taught at the annual Great Mother Conference since 1975. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estés author of Women Who Run With the Wolves. (ISBN 0-345-37744-3) Bly was the University of Minnesota Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received The McKnight Foundation's Distinquished Artist Award in 2000. He has published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from such languages as Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. His book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners). In 2006 the University of Minnesota purchased Bly's archive which contains more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his "morning poems"; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such as James Wright, Donald Hall and James Dickey. The archive will be housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota Campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors. Bibliography Poetry Anthologies Translations Nonfiction | ||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||
 |
|
| |