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One Day While Studying A Yeats Poem I Decided To Write Poetry The Rest Of My Life. I Recognized That A Single Short Poem Has Room For History, Music, Psychology, Religious Thought, Mood, Occult Speculation, Character, And Events Of One's Own Life. I Still Feel Surprised That Such Various Substances Can Find Shelter And Nourishment In A Poem. A Poem In Fact May Be A Sort Of Nourishing Liquid, Such As One Uses To Keep An Amoeba Alive. If Prepared Right, A Poem Can Keep An Image Or A Thought Or Insights On History Or The Psyche Alive For Years, As Well As Our Desires And Airy Impulses.

-Robert Bly

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One Day While Studying

Robert Bly

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One Day While Studying A Yeats Poem I Decided To Write Poetry The Rest Of My Life. I Recognized That A Single Short Poem Has Room For History, Music, Psychology, Religious Thought, Mood, Occult Speculation, Character, And Events Of One's Own Life. I Still Feel Surprised That Such Various Substances Can Find Shelter And Nourishment In A Poem. A Poem In Fact May Be A Sort Of Nourishing Liquid, Such As One Uses To Keep An Amoeba Alive. If Prepared Right, A Poem Can Keep An Image Or A Thought Or Insights On History Or The Psyche Alive For Years, As Well As Our Desires And Airy Impulses.

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One Could Say The Higher The Spirit Goes, The More Deeply The Soul Sinks Down Into The Waters Of Melancholy And Tragedy. Drowning In That Water Is As Sweet As Rising.

In Ordinary Life, A Mentor Can Guide A Young Man Through Various Disciplines, Helping To Bring Him Out Of Boyhood Into Manhood; And That In Turn Is Associated Not With Body Building, But With Building And Emotional Body Capable Of Containing More Than One Sort Of Ecstasy.

There's A Quality We Could Call Vertical Attention, Which Is An Attention Upward Toward Ancestors, Spiritual States, Angels, Gods.

If You Want To Know What It Will Be Like When We Are More Deeply Into The Horizontal, Simply Go To One Of The Indian Casinos. The Native Americans, Who Stand For Vertical Thinking More Than Anyone Else In Our Culture, Have Been Setting Up Totally Flat Casinos For Honkies.

Native American

Every Part Of Our Personality That We Do Not Love Will Become Hostile To Us.

Hierarchy, As In The Catholic Church, Has To Do With Power, And Vertical Attention Has To Do With Longing.

I Knew This Friendship With Myself Couldn’t Last Forever.

If You Want The Truth, I Will Tell You The Truth: Friend, Listen: The God Whom I Love Is Inside.

When An Elder Turns To Face The Dead, That Means He Turns Away From Facing The Future And His Own Retirement In Phoenix, Let's Say. He Turns And Finds Himself Facing The Children.

Vertical Attention Is Not The Same As, And Doesn't Evolve From Nor Imply, Hierarchy. We Could Say That Hierarchy Is Associated With Power, And Vertical Attention With Longing For The Divine Feminine, For The Divine Masculine, For What The Sufis Call 'wine.'

Divine Feminine

Male Initiation Does Not Move Toward Machoism; On The Contrary, It Moves Toward Achieving A Cultivated Heart Before We Die.

Siblings Tend Not To Care Much About Boundaries And Borders. Having Worn Each Others' T-shirts, It's Unlikely That They'd Go To War Over A Border.

Rumi Is Astounding, Fertile, Abundant, Almost More An Excitable Library Of Poetry Than A Person.

Transcendence Or Detachment, Leaving The Body, Pure Love, Lack Of Jealousy-that's The Vision We Are Given In Our Culture, Generally, When We Think Of The Highest Thing. . . . Another Way To Look At It Is That The Aim Of The Person Is Not To Be Detached, But To Be More Attached-to Be Attached To Working; To Be Attached To Making Chairs Or Something That Helps Everyone; To Be Attached To Beauty; To Be Attached To Music.

Tragedies Are About The Depths That Call Up To Certain Men And Insist That They Descend.

The Door To The Soul Is Unlocked; You Do Not Need To Please The Doorkeeper, The Door In Front Of You Is Yours, Intended For You, And The Doorkeeper Obeys When Spoken To.

Wherever There Is Water There Is Someone Drowning.

Grief Is The Doorway To A Man's Feelings.

If We Call The Young Ones, Say 10 To 30 Years Old, 'siblings,' We Can See They Tend To Be Naturally Ecological. They Regard Whales And Owls As Siblings Too. That's A Great Advance.

I Have Spent Many Years Trying To Recover A Common Language, One That Can Cross The Distance Between People.

Sociological Prose Is Generally Written Without Images In An Exact Form For An Academic Audience.

The Older I Get, The More Beauty I See In The Word Renunciation.

An Elder Is Someone Who Understands That The World Belongs To The Dead.

I Felt A Longing To Compose A Radical Or Root Poem That Would Speak To What Has Its Back Turned To Me.

Reclaiming The Sacred In Our Lives Naturally Brings Us Close Once More To The Wellsprings Of Poetry.

My Life Failed On The Very Day I Was Born.

To Me, The Hope Lies In Adults Forgetting About Their Retirement And Turning Toward The Adolescents And Helping Pull The Adolescents Over That Mysterious Line Drawn On The Ground Into Adulthood. If We Don't Do That, The Adolescents Are Going To Stay Exactly Where They Are For The Next 30 Or 40 Years.

There Is No Hierarchy In Japanese Buddhist Poetry.

I Wanted To Spend All My Time Writing Poetry. But When I Had Children I Couldn't Do That Anymore.

I Have Daughters And I Have Sons./when One Of Them Lays A Hand/on My Shoulder, Shining Fish/turn Suddenly In The Deep Sea.

When Anyone Seriously Pursues An Art - Painting, Poetry, Sculpture, Composing - Over Twenty Or Thirty Years, The Sustained Discipline Carries The Artist Down To The Countryside Of Grief, And That Descent, Resisted So Long Proves Invigorating. . . . As I've Gotten Older, I Find I Am Able To Be Nourished More By Sorrow And To Distinguish It From Depression.

There Are Years From My Childhood That I Cannot Remember And I Cannot Forget.

A Person Who Discreetly Farts In An Elevator Is Not A Divine Being, And A Man Needs To Know This.

You Say To Yourself, Well, This Poem Isn't Going To Be Any Good, But I'll Write It Anyway.

Poetry Keeps Longing Alive.

I Think That Poetry Is Important When You Are Shipwrecked, When The Ordinary Structures That Hold You Up Are Gone.

We Did Not Come To Remain Whole. We Came To Lose Our Leaves Like The Trees, Trees That Start Again.

The Models Of Adulthood Are Disappearing Fast. How Can Two People Have A New Marriage If Neither Of Them Is An Adult?

... Where A Man's Wound Is, That Is Where His Genius Will Be.

I Have Risen To A Body Not Yet Born, Existing Like A Light Around A Body Through Which The Body Moves Like A Sliding Moon.

My Feeling Is That Poetry Is Also A Healing Process, And Then When A Person Tries To Write Poetry With Depth Or Beauty, He Will Find Himself Guided Along Paths Which Will Heal Him, And This Is More Important, Actually, Than Any Of The Poetry He Writes.

I Want Nothing From You But To See You.

Every Noon As The Clock Hands Arrive At Twelve, I Want To Tie The Two Arms Together, And Walk Out Of The Bank Carrying Time In Bags.

Don't Go Outside Your House To See Flowers. My Friend, Don't Bother With That Excursion. Inside Your Body There Are Flowers. One Flower Has A Thousand Petals. That Will Do For A Place To Sit. Sitting There You Will Have A Glimpse Of Beauty Inside The Body And Out Of It, Before Gardens And After Gardens.

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Adolescents Are In Just As Much Trouble In Native America As They Are In The White Community.

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It Is Surely A Great Calamity For A Human Being To Have No Obsessions.

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The Inner Boy In A Messed-up Family May Keep On Being Shamed, Invaded, Disappointed, And Paralyzed For Years And Years. "i Am A Victim," He Says, Over And Over; And He Is. But That Very Identification With Victimhood Keeps The Soul House Open And Available For Still More Invasions. Most American Men Today Do Not Have Enough Awakened Or Living Warriors Inside To Defend Their Soul Houses. And Most People, Men Or Women, Do Not Know What Genuine Outward Or Inward Warriors Would Look Like, Or Feel Like.

It's Good To Have Poems That Begin With Tea And End With God.

The Roman Catholic Church Early On Simply Adapted The Hierarchical Structure Of The Roman Empire And Confused The Whole Thing. Vertical Attention And Hierarchy Were So Entangled, That When The French Killed The King During The Revolution, They Lost Much Of Their Vertical Attention Too.

The Sibling Society Is The Flattening Out Of The Previously Democratic Society.

Democratic Society

The Dead Made This World. We Didn't Make It. They Made The Poetry And The Songs And The Customs.

I Got About Half The Time I Wanted To Write Poetry. I Got About Half The Time I Needed To Be A Father. So There Is Something In Adulthood That Has To Do With Accepting The Half Of Things, Allowing A Renunciation Of The Other Half, Accepting Half A Basket Instead Of A Full Basket.

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What You Feel In Japanese Poetry Is Always Entirely Longing.

Myth And Poetry Represent A Reservoir Of Vertical Thinking, Which We Could Also Call Longing And Gratitude To Ancestors. We Need That Gratitude Desperately.

The Deeper Question... Is Not Whether Ancient Religious Forms Can Reform... But Whether New Forms Of Nature-related Spirituality Might Emerge.

Adolescents Believe That The World Belongs To The Living, Or More Particularly To Living People Their Age, So They Feel Within Their Rights If They Destroy The Canon Or Rewrite The Fairy Stories Or Act Like Red Guards.

The Language You Use For Your Poems Should Be The Language You Use With Your Friends.

One Man Wrote Me, Saying, 'you Know Who You Are? You're Nothing But A Captain Bly Pissing Up A Drainpipe!'

One Day While Studying A Yeats Poem I Decided To Write Poetry The Rest Of My Life. I Recognized That A Single Short Poem Has Room For History, Music, Psychology, Religious Thought, Mood, Occult Speculation, Character, And Events Of One's Own Life. I Still Feel Surprised That Such Various Substances Can Find Shelter And Nourishment In A Poem. A Poem In Fact May Be A Sort Of Nourishing Liquid, Such As One Uses To Keep An Amoeba Alive. If Prepared Right, A Poem Can Keep An Image Or A Thought Or Insights On History Or The Psyche Alive For Years, As Well As Our Desires And Airy Impulses.

A Lazy Part Of Us Is Like A Tumbleweed. It Doesn’t Move On Its Own. Sometimes It Takes A Lot Of Depression To Get Tumbleweeds Moving.

What Does It Mean When A Man Falls In Love With A Radiant Face Across The Room? It May Mean That He Has Some Soul Work To Do. His Soul Is The Issue. Instead Of Pursuing The Woman And Trying To Get Her Alone, Away From Her Husband, He Needs To Go Alone Himself, Perhaps To A Mountain Cabin, For Three Months, Write Poetry, Canoe Down A River, And Dream. That Would Save Some Women A Lot Of Trouble.

Falling In Love

As The Saying Goes, You Might As Well Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Taken.

The Lead Either Forges An Instant Connection With The Reader, Or The Package Fails.

The World Belongs Primarily To The Dead, And We Only Rent It From Them For A Little While. They Created It, They Wrote Its Literature And Its Songs, And They Are Deeply Invested In How Children Are Treated, Because The Children Are The Ones Who Will Keep It Going. The Idea That Each Of Us Has The Right To Change Everything Is A Deep Insult To Them.

What I Am Trying To Do Is Bring People Into Grief In Relation To The Society We Have.

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