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The Light Around the Body
Award-winning poetry focuses on politics, the Vietnam War, and the events in the America of the late 60's
- GenresPoetry
63 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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297 people want to read
About the author
Robert Bly
285 books410 followersRobert 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
December 5, 2019
This old book leaps to new to life in these days of Generalissimo Trump. Written during the Kennedy/Johnson years, it was fashioned, out of Spanish and Latin American materials (and maybe a few threads of Ginsberg too), into a protest poetry fit for the United States, a crazy new poetry that had what it takes to descend into the American darkness.
Their time was different from ours—the presidents were saner, their advisers smarter, their actions not nearly so reckless, never quite so close to summoning a nuclear cloud—but their time in many ways was similar too. White privilege, male privilege, economic privilege, corporate privilege, and the hatred of people with darker skin and darker hair, all conspired to bring death to the rice fields of Vietnam just as surely as today death roams the ruins of Syria, the hills of Puerto Rico, and the deserts of Niger.
What Robert Bly knew even then is that the modern age is too absurd for the usual lamentations, jeremiads, eulogies, elegies, sermons, and satires that make up most of our protest poetry. What we need is something surreal, disjointed, filled with fragmentary beauty and horror, something which embodies America’s brokenness, the widening gulf that separates war from peace, white from black, man from man, humanity from nature, the body from the soul. Nothing but a spiritual utterance beyond creed that cries out in the darkness while summoning “the light around the body” can encourage us now.
This is not a perfect book. It is filled with sudden shifts, abrupt shocks, and I’m sure not all the poems that worked for me will work for you. Some of them didn’t move me at all, and some of them I only liked in parts. But at its best, this is a surrealism that dives to the heart of the real, and makes me want to go out and fight to keep the United States I still care about.
Oh...the profits Bly received from this best-selling National Book Award winning collection? He donated them all to the antiwar movement.
Here’s three I like a lot.
THE BUSY MAN SPEAKS
Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of love, nor the mother of conversation,
Nor to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of tears, nor the mother of sorrow, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the suffering of death;
Not the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.
But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the father
Of cheefulness, who is also the father of rocks.
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Case National Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drown
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zeros;
And I shall give myself aways to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of rocks.
ROMANS ANGRY ABOUT THE INNER WORLD
What shall the world do with its children?
There are lives the executives
Know nothing of.
A leaping of the body,
The body rolling—and I have felt it—
And we float
Joyfully on the dark places;
But the executioners
Move toward Drusia. They tie her legs
On the iron horse. “Here is a woman
Who has seen our mother
In the other world!” Next they warm
The hooks. The two Romans had put their trust
In the outer world. Irons glowed
Like teeth. They wanted her
To assure them. She refused. Finally they took burning
Pine sticks, and pushed them
Into her sides. Her breath rose
And she died. The executioners
Rolled her off onto the ground.
A light snow began to fall
And covered the mangled body,
And the executives, asthonished, withdrew.
The other world is like a thorn
In the ear of a tiny beast!
The fingers of the executives are too thick
To pull it out!
It is like a jagged stone
Flying toward them out of the darkness.
COUNTING SMALL-BONED BODIES
Let’s count the bodies over again.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A whole year’s kill in front of us on a desk!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keepsake forever.
November 22, 2021
RIP, Robert Bly, 11/22/21, at 94.
I heard him a few times read or recite his own poetry, usually wearing a dramatic caftan. Once, at Grand Valley State U, in the seventies, it was so hot in the auditorium that he instructed people to turn out all the lights and he recited his own poetry (and others he had translated) in the dark for better than an hour. Many times I went to workshops at GVSU with his dearest friend James Wright.
This is one of his anti-war poems, and at that time I had never read anything in poetry this scathing, this political. I once read it to my high school students and (quietly) wept. It's admittedly disturbing, an anti-Vietnam War poem:
Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings
We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
A second time to new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters. “I saw the boy
being tortured with a telephone generator,”
The sergeant said.
“I felt sorry for him
And blew his head off with a shotgun.”
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!
Therefore we will have to
Go far away
To atone
For the suffering of the stringy-chested
And the short rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.
You can hear Bly read his poetry, including this poem, and others:
https://voca.arizona.edu/readings-lis...
I heard him a few times read or recite his own poetry, usually wearing a dramatic caftan. Once, at Grand Valley State U, in the seventies, it was so hot in the auditorium that he instructed people to turn out all the lights and he recited his own poetry (and others he had translated) in the dark for better than an hour. Many times I went to workshops at GVSU with his dearest friend James Wright.
This is one of his anti-war poems, and at that time I had never read anything in poetry this scathing, this political. I once read it to my high school students and (quietly) wept. It's admittedly disturbing, an anti-Vietnam War poem:
Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings
We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
A second time to new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters. “I saw the boy
being tortured with a telephone generator,”
The sergeant said.
“I felt sorry for him
And blew his head off with a shotgun.”
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!
Therefore we will have to
Go far away
To atone
For the suffering of the stringy-chested
And the short rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.
You can hear Bly read his poetry, including this poem, and others:
https://voca.arizona.edu/readings-lis...
December 25, 2022
4.5 stars
August 19, 2017
I did not enjoy this poetry. It was incredibly dark, and though a small book, and with "light" in the title - incredibly heavy. Death, cold, winter, the insignificance of human life in the expanses of nature on every page. I wrote a bunch of frowny faces in the margins to mark where extreme discomfort was elicited, or audible "BLEH" sounds. It just made me feel sad and cold. At least it was a short book, over quickly?
November 14, 2020
Rounding up from 3.5 stars.
February 21, 2019
[rating = C+]
First things first, Robert Bly always surprises the reader with beautiful lines: "A home in dark grass / And nourishment in death." However, this collection of poems is so political and anti-Vietnam, that I got a bit tired of it. (Really, his most successful poems are the nature poems, especially the last six or so at the end.) Maybe I didn't like most of them because they had this Ashberyan sort of abstraction that tends to plant several images in a collage and make the reader guess the idea they try to express. I am all for multiple ways of reading, but if the author has a specific intent (and obviously Bly has a serious anti-war intent), then he should be more helpful to the reader. I will say, though, that I did find some of these political writings funny and very imaginative. This collection holds some hidden gems, and it is worth going through the muck of politics to find them. "We make war / Like a man anointing himself".
First things first, Robert Bly always surprises the reader with beautiful lines: "A home in dark grass / And nourishment in death." However, this collection of poems is so political and anti-Vietnam, that I got a bit tired of it. (Really, his most successful poems are the nature poems, especially the last six or so at the end.) Maybe I didn't like most of them because they had this Ashberyan sort of abstraction that tends to plant several images in a collage and make the reader guess the idea they try to express. I am all for multiple ways of reading, but if the author has a specific intent (and obviously Bly has a serious anti-war intent), then he should be more helpful to the reader. I will say, though, that I did find some of these political writings funny and very imaginative. This collection holds some hidden gems, and it is worth going through the muck of politics to find them. "We make war / Like a man anointing himself".
Read
July 20, 2008I picked this up in a mini-survey of 'deep image' poets. Many of the poems were difficult to access because they were deeply concerned with contemporary politics and the historical moment when they were written; I had a better time with the poems that dealt with death, artistic renewal and other universal themes, where the imagery could find more space to resonate in this 2008 reader.
June 28, 2010
I'm a little turned off by Bly's criticism, so I had expected his poetry not to resonate, but I was wrong. As the poems steadily descend into pure 'image,' Bly proves he can navigate a forthright emotional poetry without lapsing into the vapid trippiness that characterizes some of his ideas.
January 21, 2018
Bly’s poems are rich in tangible, gritty details which give them a visceral jolt and thud. His sometimes desolate landscapes are alive in their silence.
November 15, 2021
A dark and disturbing look into the soul of an anti-war activist with his finger on the pulse of the nation at the height of the Vietnam conflict. As ever, Bly’s words resonate at a deep, symbolic level, and cast a spell on the attentive reader to drag us back in time as the psychedelic, free love, and peace movements gave way to the awful truth of maimed, blinded, and murdered young men coming back to a home that did not want them. Their suffering is made palpable through Bly’s unequaled pen.
Contemporary readers, comfortable in their posh environs and far removed from the reality Bly describes in symbols pregnant with bitter resentment, will miss the point entirely. The historically literate and pensive will find herein a sobering assault on the perception that today’s problems are always worse than those of the past.
This is not a book for the faint of heart or the casual reader. Most today will, unfortunately, be able to digest Bly’s brutal menu of terror, anger, and remorse.
Contemporary readers, comfortable in their posh environs and far removed from the reality Bly describes in symbols pregnant with bitter resentment, will miss the point entirely. The historically literate and pensive will find herein a sobering assault on the perception that today’s problems are always worse than those of the past.
This is not a book for the faint of heart or the casual reader. Most today will, unfortunately, be able to digest Bly’s brutal menu of terror, anger, and remorse.
November 23, 2021
I read this collection back in 1969 or 1970. Thinking about the author on hearing of his death. I met him in Ann Arbor. He was friends with the poet Donald Hall. At a reading he smugly placed a microphone into the pitcher of water next to him, rather than use it. Mark's Coffee House, I think the venue was called. I read aloud one of his antiwar poems in a class in high school.
On another visit to Ann Arbor he drew a funny sketch for me. He was offering sketches to people who suggested things for him to draw. Just a quick doodle.
I was bemused or maybe perplexed by the Iron John book (haven't read it) and thought it out of character to the Midwestern antiwar poet I knew back in my youth.
On another visit to Ann Arbor he drew a funny sketch for me. He was offering sketches to people who suggested things for him to draw. Just a quick doodle.
I was bemused or maybe perplexed by the Iron John book (haven't read it) and thought it out of character to the Midwestern antiwar poet I knew back in my youth.
November 3, 2018
I liked this book a lot. It's especially interesting in the Trump era. One poem struck me as teeming with sexism; so I knocked it down a star.
December 12, 2018
Dark protest poetry from the era of Kennedy / Johnson, including harrowing poems about the Viet Nam War.
Read
November 19, 2019One of the books that opened my eyes to poetry!
November 14, 2020
Rounded up from 3.5 stars.
September 3, 2013
I read the title of the book and anticipated something completely different than I encountered. I guess I was hoping for something spiritually uplifting, but Bly's The Light Around The Body is more "dark night of the soul."
The poetry is dark and violent - reflective, I suppose, of the times (mid to late sixties - Vietnam war, Bay of Pigs, Kennedy, Cold War, etc.)
Bly's collection is broken into five parts, and each part begins with a quotation from Jakob Boehme, a German Christian mystic and theologian who lived during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. (Interestingly, I liked these quotes better than the poems, especially this one that kicks off the book: "For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world ... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.")
Here is the poem that resonated the most with me:
The Busy Man Speaks
Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of love, nor to the mother of conversa
tion,
Nor to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of tears, nor the mother of the ocean;
Not to the mother of sorrow, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the suffering of death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets;
Not the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.
But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase National Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zeroes;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
rocks.
The poetry is dark and violent - reflective, I suppose, of the times (mid to late sixties - Vietnam war, Bay of Pigs, Kennedy, Cold War, etc.)
Bly's collection is broken into five parts, and each part begins with a quotation from Jakob Boehme, a German Christian mystic and theologian who lived during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. (Interestingly, I liked these quotes better than the poems, especially this one that kicks off the book: "For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world ... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.")
Here is the poem that resonated the most with me:
The Busy Man Speaks
Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of love, nor to the mother of conversa
tion,
Nor to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of tears, nor the mother of the ocean;
Not to the mother of sorrow, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the suffering of death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets;
Not the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.
But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase National Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of zeroes;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
rocks.
April 3, 2023
Robert Bly constructs his poetry with great care. Each section, epigram and title illuminates. The subjects range from nation-wide political commentary, filled with smoldering sadness for those trapped in despair, to images of nature, and meditations on death. These help to contrast the tragedy of violent death in war to the more healthy, and inviting subject of natural death.
The recurring imagery of fire similarly represents a wide range; a life-sustaining invention, a source driving the human spirit, visionary revelation, as well as a destructive tool of war.
The epigrams by Jacob Boehme provide focus and insight into some of Bly's sources of inspiration: philosophy, science and theology.
"As the Asian War Begins":
"Looking at New-Fallen Snow from a Train":
"Hurrying Away from the Earth":
The recurring imagery of fire similarly represents a wide range; a life-sustaining invention, a source driving the human spirit, visionary revelation, as well as a destructive tool of war.
The epigrams by Jacob Boehme provide focus and insight into some of Bly's sources of inspiration: philosophy, science and theology.
"As the Asian War Begins":
There are longings to kill that cannot be seen,
Or are seen only by a minister who no longer believes in God,
Living in his parish like a crow in its nest.
"Looking at New-Fallen Snow from a Train":
...
Each blade of grass is a voice.
The sword by his side breaks into flame.
...
"Hurrying Away from the Earth":
...
Seeing the night wheeling their dark wheelbarrow
All about the plains of heaven,
...
June 7, 2010
The Vietnam poems have aged best, even though they benefit the most from historical context. Bly's emotions are astoundingly palpable through sometimes pitch-black opacity (and often darkness describes these poems best). The book's arc is somewhat of a movement from outside-to-inside, an informing principle borrowed from Boehme, so most readers will either go from picking up to losing it's signal, or progressively tuning in to Bly's transcendence. Just let whatever comes at you with the most velocity collide with you, and let the others pass.
September 1, 2016
Deeply powerful cynicism spurred by American warmongering, but also a less successful striving for natural mysticism. At times the poems come unmoored amidst their wide-ranging imagery and a piling-on that sloughs thematic rigor, but sometimes the risk pays off, as below.
"That we should learn of poverty and rags,
That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,
And swim in the sea,
Not always walking on dry land,
And, dancing, find in the trees a saviour,
A home in dark grass,
And nourishment in death."
"That we should learn of poverty and rags,
That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,
And swim in the sea,
Not always walking on dry land,
And, dancing, find in the trees a saviour,
A home in dark grass,
And nourishment in death."
January 23, 2009
I particularly enjoyed the poems about Vietnam. Many of the others I didn't have enough knowledge of the era to understand, but the images of war seem to transcend time fairly well.
He quotes Jacob Boehme several times. One which was:
"When we think of it with this knowledge, we see that we have been locked up, and led blindfold, and it is the wise of this world who have shut and locked us up in their art and their rationality, so that we have had to see with their eyes."
He quotes Jacob Boehme several times. One which was:
"When we think of it with this knowledge, we see that we have been locked up, and led blindfold, and it is the wise of this world who have shut and locked us up in their art and their rationality, so that we have had to see with their eyes."
September 29, 2014
Robert Bly is a national treasure.
February 13, 2009
A unique poetic perspective on the '60s.
December 25, 2010
YES! First poem kicked my ass. Take that, THE MAN!
September 23, 2015
I usually like Robert Bly poetry although this isn't my favorite I did enjoy it.
August 26, 2015
I very much like his similes -- "[we] drift / Like a radish" "Like sunlight drifting onto the carpet / Where the casket stands, not knowing which would it is in."
September 7, 2016
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14185763
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14185763
March 28, 2017
I'm suspicious of political poems, but if there's a way to do them, this is it. Bly's images are so good.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews