An Interview With Robert Bly

The sixties seem to have been a disaster period as far as relationships between men and women go, though one thing did come forward. Women began to feel much more confidence in their own energies.

An Evening With Robert Bly

Every poet, when he grows up in this country, has to face that issue. Is he going to go with the English or is he going to go against them? It takes a long time to fight that out. I, myself, was with the English three or four years after I got out of college. I was writing sonnets.

Tarnished Gold

Our Seed Stock Is In Jeopardy, But Do The Seed Companies Care?

Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.

Tobacco Town: Durham’s Beginnings

The rising lust for smoking tobacco made Durham and Duke. In 1870, a year after it was incorporated, the one-square mile village had a population of 256. There were 3,000 residents by 1884, 6,679 by 1900, and an estimated 18,000 by 1907.

An Appreciation

He is a poet of immediacy, of the nearness of all things to us in the inner and outer worlds, and of those things we bury, by our blindness, in the rich compost of our lives. When I experience a Bly poem, I enter the miraculous energy of life and the awesome closeness and beauty of death.

That Little Guy In The Corner Needs A Drink

Book Review

His novels are often wildly funny, with a kind of humor that is even more striking on a second reading, once it has had time to sink in. He is not the life of the party, but the enormously funny little man off in the corner whom only a few people know about.

Whether Blind Or Seeing

When I was still young I experienced a look which opened deeply, darkly, vitally inward: I knew then that infinite reality does not work only by extension outward, but, also, inward.

The Last Barrier

A Journey Through The World Of Sufi Teaching

“Today we are going together to meet the Perfect Man, the Master who has come to love God so perfectly that God’s attributes pour out through him into the world with no veil between.”

What Is A Poet?

The poet has a mind capable of raising for us all crops of words, dense with meaning, rich in symbols, exactly expressive for us all of what our lives are like, what our human condition means, what we feel, why we keep struggling, why we sometimes can’t go on.

I Never Noticed They Were Poems

His poems entered his conversation almost unannounced, and you were unsure whether he was still talking or had started on a poem, a seeming change in his bodily weight sometimes the only clue (he began that weightless dance with every poem).

Stories

Hitched to the University of the South at Sewannee, Tennessee. School was out and there were few people around — my last visit I stayed at Beta Phi fraternity — so checked it out again — no one around, but back door conveniently open, so I made myself at home.

Photographs By Priscilla Rich Safransky

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Cartoons By Jim Thornton

The cartoons in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Photograph By Syd Nisbet

The photograph in this selection is available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Selected Poems

The Spider

Selected Poems

A Poem About Time

Every Man In The Crowd