Mark Gustafson Raises a Glass to Robert Bly

Literary Hub shares Mark Gustafson's recent remarks at an event paying homage to Robert Bly sponsored by Literary Witnesses and Rain Taxi: "Minnesota Celebrates Robert Bly." "We in Minnesota are fortunate in our vibrant literary ecosystem," said Gustafson. "[T]his diffuse body of interconnected organisms—a host of organizations, presses, programs, bookstores, and individuals. It seems we long ago achieved a certain level of sustainability." More: 

It seems we long ago achieved a certain level of sustainability. Whatever combination of factors we ascribe our good fortune to, I’m here to say, sketchily, there was a prime mover.

Robert Bly graduated from Madison High School in 1944, class valedictorian and a member in good standing of the Future Farmers of America. His yearbook included a so-called “Senior Class Prophecy,” written from the imagined vantage point of twenty-five years in the future. It goes like this: “Well, the Bly boys… started farming years ago and now… they’ve got a beautiful crop of corn down the middle of Main Street.” By 1969, his brother had taken over the family farm, while Robert was an unruly farmer of disruptive and salutary ideas. As one of the country’s most well-known poets and activists, he had planted those ideas and himself smack in the middle of American consciousness.

Despite the vast reach of his impact, and his endless comings and goings, Bly always knew that Minnesota was his place on this planet. Rooted here, he became a steward, a community builder, an unusually magnanimous if sometimes gruff encourager of young poets. His work was generous and generative, and it spread rapidly, so that others—many of whom are here tonight—did their important work in turn, and so on, with feedback loops, chains of cause and effect, sowing and harvesting, successions and disturbances, to bring us to today.

Three efforts Bly undertook were fundamental to the growth of this complex network.

First, in 1958, was the little magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies), which Bly started with his friend William Duffy. (Incidentally, in keeping with the farming metaphor, he first thought of calling the magazine The Savage Plough.) He wanted “to clear ground for [himself] and other poets,” and aimed to show those others the possibility of a new poetry. He called for “a sustained raid on modern life,” while trusting in the currents of imagination springing from the unconscious. With its far-ranging translations, its fire-breathing polemic and harsh but usually constructive criticism (most of which he wrote himself), its biting and hilarious satire and parodies, its political and social commentary, and of course its poetry, this gutsy journal, together with a small press, brought renewed fervor and ferment to American literary life, quickly becoming required reading.

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