Sleepers joining hands

by Robert Bly

His most important collection of poems.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sleepers Joining Hands (1973) seems at first an odd congeries of poems, consisting of a few fine nature meditations plus a few protest poems, followed by a savage surrealist jeremiad against the Vietnam War (“The Teeth Mother Naked at Last”), followed by a twenty-page Jungian essay (“I Came out of the Mother Naked”) asserting that America has identified too heavily with The Father and that The Mother is now coming to seek her revenge, which is followed in turn by another long poem (“Sleepers Joining Hands”) which charts the course of a spiritual journey from Father through Mother toward a new integration. Yet once I completed the collection and thought about it for awhile, I concluded that the disparate parts worked together just fine and that this was a strongly unified and spiritually compelling collection.

“Sleepers Joining Hands”, with its artful balance of male and female imagery, and its ability to express the almost inexpressible, may be the best thing about this collection, but, since excerpting does not do it justice, I will include a passages from “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” a passage which seems newly relevant now that Donald Trump is president, and even more relevant since William Barr became attorney-general:

II

….Now the Chief Executive enters; the press conference begins:
First the president lies about the date the Appalachian Mountains rose.
Then he lies about the population of Chicago, then he lies about the weight of the adult eagle, then about the acreage of the Everglades.

He lies about the number of fish taken every year in the Arctic,
he has private information about which city is the capital of Wyoming, he lies about the birthplace of Attila the Hun.

He lies about the composition of the amniotic fluid, and he insists
that Luther was never a German, and only the
Protestants sold indulgences,

That Pope Leo X wanted to reform the church, but “the liberal elements” prevented him,
that the Peasants’ War was fomented by Italians from the North.

And the Attorney General lies about the time the sun sets.

* * *

These lies are only the longing we all feel to die.
It is the longing for someone to come and take you by the hand to where they are all sleeping:
where the Egyptian pharoahs are asleep, and your own mother,
and all those disappeared children, who used to go around with you in the rings at grade school. . . .

Do not be angry at the President—he is longing to take in his hand the locks of death hair—
to meet his own children dead, or unborn . . . .
He is drifting sideways toward the dusty places

[Heath Creel]

He lost me on the Jungian shit; nonetheless, I might like this more later, I can tell the poems are good

[Orest Mercator · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first few poems are strong and seem confident, mature, and tight. Soon, however, one begins to tire of this cocksure, declarative voice as it again and again rehearses the same ur-poem it seeks to write (but cannot). Plus, there is this overuse of words like black, corpse, flesh, wing/ed, etc. And then Bly takes a quite political turn—admirable-hearted, certainly, but to me somewhat unsuccessful. He drifts in and out of a Ginsbergish register but marked by a greater, if necktie-loosening, classicism. His political poetics kind of reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s war poems from her middle period: there’s a similar imagery and bleeding heart, but Bly’s voice always speaks with a slower rhythm and tries to write with a larger, gnostic voice. In sum, I find Sleeper’s Joining Hands to be lesser Bly than I expected, especially knowing how heralded this collection is (and how admired his protest poetry was by people like Kenyon and Hall). I still think quite highly of Bly in a poet (and believe me, I don’t nurse a delusion of being able to outwrite him), but to me this collection feels like he hasn’t fully matured yet. That said, I am aware that I have less forbearance for Vietnam-era political poetry: not because I don’t agree with the politics or the politicization of art (both of which I’m wholly on board with), but because I’m still unconvinced of the ability of poetry to speak to these issues and to do it in this way. Surely, I deserve criticism for this reservation, but for the time being, I can’t change the way I feel.

[Steve Voiles]

It moved me.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of the themes of this book: dreams, death, witchcraft, female energy - are things that in Dylan Thomas I enjoy quite a bit but here come across more as a jumbled heap, and a little fetishistic of the images, even when Bly himself says he does not mean to do that. That beging said, "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last" is a pretty great poem about the chaos of war and its relationship to America.

[James Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are big, shaggy, loose, unruly, ugly, and beautiful poems with a big, shaggy essay about the Mother Goddess right in the middle. Bly later extracted several sections of these poems and incorporated them into later works, and those are pretty great too, but I love the sheer visionary thrust of these poems. They don't apologize for themselves.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

cold mess. I fucking love this - the poem "Hair" is a large bad picture.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 B661sj 1973

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My head responded to a book filled with rejuvenation of feminism, and a real appreciation of the mother, of the matriarch, of the complexities I knew not before this instance.