What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?

by Robert Bly

Book by Bly, Robert

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Robert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. 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 and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, 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, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl 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.
In 1966 he 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.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.

Reviews

[Rudolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prose poetry is still a somewhat seldom sight to see in contemporary poetry and in the mainstream, remains a relatively enigmatic genre. Robert Bly's prose poems evoke the senses to a more natural setting, drawing the senses towards the works of Frost and the olde Romantics. This work is contemporary and each description is like droplets of blood falling off the side of a rare steak: from the caterpillars to the octopus, the curiosity of children and saintly prayers.

A fine example of the freedom given to prose poets, a freedom that should be extended further still to the world.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always hesitate to rate or review poetry. For one thing, I myself write poetry. Well, I say I write it. Not sure how others feel about it. I’ve never let others read it. And even when it appeared on a blog, no one knew who I was. Pseudonym and faceless.

But Bly writes about grass and caterpillars and love. The water he names in letters spills through your fingers and lands gently among your thoughts. And he is pictured amongst his words.

I just read this while at The Harvard Public Library.

[Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prose poems, each focusing on one type of animal or one landscape.

"It is not our life we need to weep for. Inside us there is some secret. We are following a narrow ledge around a mountain, we are sailing on skeletal eerie craft over the buoyant ocean."
- "November Day at McClure's Beach"

"How slowly and evenly it moves! The starfish is a glacier, going sixty miles a year!"
- "The Starfish"

"These steers do not demand eternal life; they ask only to eat the crushed corn and the hay, coarse as rivers..."
- "Opening the Door of a Barn I Thought Was Empty on New Year's Eve"

"Ants working have heaped up this earth hill overnight...The Japanese story says that if a woman drops a pancake, and then climbs down through the hole to retrieve it, she will meet the green and yellow giants, and will have to cook for them for five years."
- "An Ant Hill"

"How large, sensuous, and Italian—Florentine—are his tender, alert, impatient, brave, I-may-soon-die eyes."
- "The Slate Junco"

[W.B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes Bly really connects with the prose poem and gives it the supernal torque it needs to make it more than just a paragraph of words. Sometimes he gets mired down too much in the work of mere description and the hall of mirrors of description-via-similes. That's Poetry Lite. Similitude does not a great prose poem make. But occasionally he writes a prose poem whose flesh of words raises goosebumps in ours. Then he comes closer to what James Wright did with the prose poem, what Franz Wright did with the prose poem.

[Zarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven't quite accustomed myself to prose poetry. I didn't enjoy these very much, but there were a few I liked.

[Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first section was filled with good lines and interesting images, but most of the rest of this just didn’t grab me.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Robert Bly's prose poems! There is so much about nature and everyday life in these poems, yet there is fantasy and a transport into another realm with his comparisons that I find touching.

A favorite line from "In Praise of a Grain of Rice:"
It seems to contain hope, and to be made of hard light.
From that line, he continues to compare the rice to the moon, and so much more, and finally he lets the grain sit on his tongue and notes how it will not dissolve.
And so of our children--it must be that they will not dissolve. Each child is a grain of engendered light, threshed from thousands of feathery plants, and did not come from us, from father and mother, at all.
Just beautiful.

[Denise Ballentine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and different. The form used here is called prose poetry. The poems are written in paragaraph form, like mini-stories. At first I wondered if this should be called poetry at all. They seemed more like journal entries and musings. They are like that, but more if you dig around in them and take your time. I read many of them more than once and found new insights each time. Of course, there are some that I honestly "do not get." But over all, I really enjoyed picking this slim volume up and reading a few at a time. Not all are great works of art, but some of the astute parallels and observations stick with me. Check out "Finding an Old Ant Mansion" to see what I mean.

[Jay Woodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Essay on the Prose Poem as an Evolving Form was particularly helpful back when I first read it. I greatly admire Robert Bly's work as a translator, for making so many other poets more accessible to us - and his whole body of writing, not just his poetry, has been of great interest to me. I write prose poetry myself and do find it to be a very organic form for the reasons he describes in this essay. I can do very different things with it than with any other poetic form, and it certainly is not just prose, make no mistake - it certainly must have the music of poetry in it to work.

[Alane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am unable to review this for some reason. Perhaps because it's not very good in spite of some beautiful moments? Or because one always wonders if he is a complete sexist or only a great big sexist? Maybe I just don't know how to classify it - which would be a plus for it? Who knows?

It did make me want to wander around in the woods with my children. That brought it the third star.

I guess the major problem is that his imagination in the hands of a better writer would have been a great read. ?

Or maybe not. Nice to be stumped. I'll give it that.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bly is a fine poet, and he's a great thinker about poetry, and he's written some prose poems I love--even in this book (section 3 of this book, in particular). But there's a stunted diction, an emphasis at the sentence level too much on the prose and too little on the poetry, and fewer leaps (cognitive, imaginative, emotional) that surprise. I was often bored which is not what I want to say about reading the prose poem.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first books of poetry I ever bought, way back when, as a high school student struggling to make sense of life through poetry. I was challenged and changed by Bly's cunning use of poetic devices, and it remains one of the most impactful books I've ever read as a poet.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm especially enamored with his attention to the natural world in this collection. I long to spend a week in a cabin by the sea, or in the woods, or a long a farming road, with many long walks and close studies.