Robert Bly's "The Moon"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Robert Bly (born December 23, 1926, in Madison, Minnesota) is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2013); Talking into the Ear of a Donkey: Poems(W. W. Norton, 2011); Reaching Out to the World: New and Selected Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2009); My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 2005); The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001); Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (Dial Press, 1985); This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (Harper & Row, 1977); and The Light Around the Body (Harper & Row, 1967), which won the National Book Award.

As the editor of the magazine The Sixties (begun as The Fifties), Bly introduced many unknown European and South American poets to an American audience. He is also the editor of numerous collections including (Beacon Press, 2007); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems(Beacon Press, 2004), co-authored with Jane Hirshfield; The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (HarperCollins, 1995); Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (Beacon Press, 1975); The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (HarperCollins, 1992); News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (Sierra Club Books, 1980); and A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (American Writers Against the Vietnam War, 1966). Among his many books of translations are Lorca and Jiminez: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1997); Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Wesleyan University Press, 1983); The Kabir Book: Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 1977); Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets—Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (Beacon Press, 1975); and Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1971), co-translated with John Knoepfle and James Wright.

Bly’s honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Bly lived on a farm in the western part of Minnesota with his wife and three children until his death on November 21, 2021.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, June 12, 2024.
0:09.7	Today's poem is by Robert Bly, and it's called The Moon.
0:15.1	I'll read it once, which won't take very long, for a few comments, and then read it once more.
0:22.6	Here is the moon.
0:32.3	After writing poems all day, I go off to see the moon in the pines. Far in the woods, I sit down against a pine. The moon has her porches turned to face the light, but the deep part of her house is in the darkness.
0:45.3	And there you have it. It's a nice little poem here.
0:49.8	With some nice symmetry, both structurally and conceptually.
0:56.8	It's just five lines long, and it begins with a hint of a larger world or a larger reality.
1:11.5	After writing poems all day, the speaker begins.
1:15.4	So we immediately, uh,
1:17.3	understand the speaker to be the poet,
1:20.1	or at least a poet very much like Robert Bly,
1:23.7	who might spend some of his days writing poems all day.
1:27.0	Uh, but we don't know what kinds of poems they are,
1:31.3	what the poems were about.
1:33.9	In fact, the more you think about it,
1:37.9	the more you realize probably they were very much unlike the poem we're reading now.
1:43.7	Otherwise, in what way would this be
1:46.8	a break or a departure? Or maybe not. Maybe the alternate or the inverse is true that after a day
1:56.0	of writing poetry, the poet goes out into the pine to look at the moon and then on the following day,
2:02.2	he writes more poetry about how he went out to the pines to look at the moon. But that actual
	...

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