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The Garden Entrusted to Me collects Robert Bly’s essential writings on his life and practice of poetry, revealing his approach to technique and the experiences that formed him as a poet.
Robert Bly’s essays on the craft of poetry and the writing life—some previously unpublished—are gathered in one volume for the first. Three autobiographical essays highlight Bly’s origins on the family farm in western Minnesota and his early exposure to poetry as a high school student. Others broadly outline Bly’s approach to the vocation and discipline of poetry. At the center of this collection are a half-dozen pieces that focus on approaches to form and sound in poetry, revealing the originality of Bly’s method and process. The book concludes with the major
Paris Review interview summarizing biographical, artistic and philosophical themes of Bly’s life and work as they have appeared throughout this volume, while opening new avenues for further exploration; in that way it mirrors the continual unfolding of Bly’s thought and creativity.
List of contents
Introduction: The Playfulness of His Labor: Robert Bly’s Life in Poetry
I. The Life of Poetry
Being a Lutheran Boy-God in Minnesota
Tigers and Horses
When Literary Life Was Still Piled Up in a Few Places
“Snowbanks North of the House”
II. Vocation and Disciplines
The Vocation of Poetry
Six Disciplines That Intensity Poetry
What the Image Can Do
III. The Labor of Its Playfulness
Educating the Rider and the Horse
A Playful Look at Form
Form and Society in the Poem
Praising the Seven Holy Vowels
The Long Vowels
A Week of Ghazals
Writing a Poem While Listening to Music
IV. No One Writes Alone
The Paris Review Interview
Afterword
Remembering Robert Bly by Jane Hirshfield
About the author
Robert Bly (1926 - 2021) had a profound impact on the shape of American poetry. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and essays. 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. His honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as The Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. His recent books include
Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life,
Looking for Dragon Smoke and
Collected Poems.
Thomas R. Smith is an internationally published poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He worked as Robert Bly’s personal assistant from 1990 until the time of Bly’s death in 2022, editing three earlier books on Bly’s work,
Walking Swiftly,
Robert Bly in This World (with James P. Lenfestey), and
Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer.
