With Bly, it's all about the sound

When poet Jim Lenfestey introduced poet Louis Jenkins (who was there to introduce poet Robert Bly) Lenfestey got his name wrong. For years, Lenfestey said, he thought that Jenkins called himself "Louie," rather than "Louis." And after he was done praising Jenkins' work, he did it again. "Here's Louie," he told the crowd, and Jenkins got up, approached the mike, and said, with great seriousness, "Thanks, Jimmy."

Bly, Jenkins told the crowd gathered on Monday night at Plymouth Congregational Chuch in Minneapolis, "invented reading poems twice."

"He experimented with masks and music, he accompanied himself on the bouzouki. Fortunately, he later found Marcus and David," Jenkins said. (Marcus Wise and David Whetstone have been accompanying Bly on drum and sitar for 37 years.)

And then it was Bly's turn, walking slowly and with dignity to the front of the church, where he settled himself in a big wooden chair and then flapped a stackful of books at the audience. "I'm going to read all of them,' he said.
But some in the crowd were so adoring, so happy to be there, that the shouted response came: "Yes!"

Bly began by reading from Indian poet Mirabai and Persian poet Hafez before moving on to his own work. ("I have to read a couple of my heroes first or I can't read my own," he said. "The old ones who lived before us knew what the whole damn thing was about. ... That's awfully wise of you, Robert.")

He's 84 now, but his reading was energetic and strong. He tapped his feet, beat out the rhythm with his left hand, sometimes in mid-air, sometimes on his knee, and read lines twice, three times, and then entire poems, sometimes, twice. It is clear that he so loves the sound of the words, the simple and sometimes sparklingly humorous meaning of them, that he can't let go. And so he reads them again, with delight.

("Hmmm," he said, after reading one line from a poem in "My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy," "That's a good line." And he read it again.)

The occasion, of course, was the launch of his latest collection, "Talking into the Ear of a Donkey," which comes out this month from Norton. ("If you're going to buy one of my books, buy this one," he said.)

He read "The Teapot," a poem of love, and he looked right at his wife, Ruth, while he read it, and she looked back, smiling, and nodded gently.

He read about reading Longinus while snow fell outside, "and the world is calm."

He launched suddenly and spontaneously into Yeats, reciting "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," drawing out the words loud and long--not an Irish accent, surely, but an exaggerated sound. ("And liiiive alooooone in the beeeeeee looouuuddd glaaaaaade.")

And toward the end, he read from another new poem, "Ravens Hiding in a Shoe": "Robert, you've wasted so much of your life sitting indoors to write poems. Would you do that again? I would, a thousand times."

He smiled. And he liked it so much that he read it again.

You can watch a video of Bly reading "Longing for the Acrobat," last night in Minneapolis. (And I am sorry but I wasn't quick enough and didn't capture the first line, which is "There is so much sweetness in children's voices"):