Rhyme and Sense

Rhyme and Sense

An interview excerpted from the conversation led by Paula Gordon and Bill Russell of The Paula Gordon Show: Conversations with People at the Leading Edge

Atlanta / November 13, 2005

Paula Gordon: Nature and culture are equally worthy subjects for poems, says Robert Bly, an eminent American poet, translator of poetry and literary editor. Fifty years ago, Mr. Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields established his fame, now he celebrates European culture in the ancient Islamic ghazal ("GU-zul") form.

Robert Bly: One of the things I love about the Islamic world is the amount of praise that's in it. A little poem "Shabistari and The Secret Garden" ends like this:

Robert, those high spirits don't prove that you are
A close friend of truth, but you have learned to drive
Your buggy over the prairies of human sorrow.

One thing that both reading and great art helps us to do is to '...drive our buggies over the prairies of human sorrow.' And at the same time, we're not caught in that sorrow, we drive our buggies over them and pass them. But our children KNOW if we are able to feel the depths of the sorrows of our ancestors and even those of our parents. And they appreciate that.

PG: Mr. Bly is deeply concerned about those children.

RB: What you are witnessing is a loss--losses of what our grandfathers and grandmothers knew. One of those losses is reading. Another is the idea that there's nothing else beside the rotten marketplace. We've lost the idea that there is a depth, something below and something above.

The adults have betrayed the children. We've sacrificed the young ones to this stupid idea that the media deserves attention. Television dumps junk into the minds of the young. What is it, three hours a day is the normal amount children today watch television? It's human filth, being poured in by these optimistic idiots who run the television shows and don't care about humanity. Do not care at all. You should allow your children a maximum of 20 to 30 minutes a day of television viewing. The rest of the time, you say, 'If you don't read, you don't eat, make up your mind.'

What will it be like to live in a country where no one reads? Adults have simply copped out of their responsibility, become children themselves. It's very hard to find an adult any more, when the adult would be a person who says, 'The children need to learn to read!' Instead, the children simply sit there, absorbing that television, without having to do ANYthing. It's a murder of the human psyche!

PG: Can poetry save us from the error of our ways?

RB: No. Poetry is a reminder. It's a small thing. But it insists on the important things in life. Rainer Maria Rilke says,

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
And walks outdoors. And keeps on walking
Because of a thing that stands far in the East.
And his children say blessings on him,
As if he had died....

I LOVE that poem of Rilke's because it says that at a certain point in everyone's life, you need to get rid of the washing machine and your obsession with the washing machine, and you need to head toward that place in the East. And that's not what's happening. What we need to do is do a LOT of grieving.

PG: And when the grieving is complete?

RB: Some form of praising takes place. Those who are unable to grieve cannot praise. If you grieve your parents enough, then you're able to praise them and not hold all those miserable little angers you had against them.

One problem with philosophers -- they don't laugh enough. I was VERY surprised to find out, as my poems pick up more and more of the past of human beings, the ancient culture, more and more of the grief and the suffering of human beings -- the poems become funnier! I don't understand that, but I LOVE it. I feel that there's some way that as the mind gets more mature, in the midst of a lot of grief, it's able to dance a little!


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