Robert Bly on Thomas McGrath: the Church; the Literary Elite; Poetic Language

Robert Bly

p. 53-64

Résumés

In this discussion, complete with eclectic digressions, Robert Bly addresses issues related to McGrath’s literary reputation and to the force of his political vision. Using personal anecdotes, including an account that references poets David Ignatow and John Ashbery, Bly raises the question, vis-à-vis Ignatow’s insights, whether the American republic can survive with a poetry devoid of political substance, setting McGrath’s prosody in opposition to the pared-down aesthetic he describes. Bly also offers a miniature critique of contemporary American culture where, he argues, “the heat of family, of love, the heat of political opinion, the heat of concern” are being destroyed. McGrath’s poetry, he insists, contains this “heat” and is thus marginalized by dominant American literary forces, while a diminished poetic vision prevails. Additional topics include the effect of the American South on McGrath’s writing and Bly’s assertion that McGrath’s use of language is as “eloquent” as that of T. S. Eliot.

Au cours de cet entretien aux digressions parfois très éclectiques, Robert Bly évoque des questions liées au renom littéraire de McGrath et à la force de sa vision politique. À travers des anecdotes personnelles, dont l’une fait référence aux poètes David Ignatow et John Ashbery, Bly, se faisant l’écho d’intuitions d’Ignatow, pose la question des possibilités de survie d’une république américaine à la poésie vidée de tout contenu politique. La prosodie de McGrath, dit-il, est à l’exact opposé de cette esthétique du dépouillement dont parle Ignatow. Bly propose également un raccourci de critique de la culture américaine contemporaine dans laquelle, selon ses propres termes, “la chaleur de la famille, de l’amour, la chaleur des opinions politiques, la chaleur du souci” sont en passe d’être détruites. La poésie de McGrath, dit-il encore, a cette chaleur en elle et c’est ce qui explique sa marginalisation par les forces littéraires américaines dominantes où prévaut une vision poétique rabougrie. D’autres sujets encore sont abordés, notamment l’influence du Sud sur l’écriture de McGrath et ce fait, affirmé par Bly, qu’en matière d’utilisation des possibilités de la langue, l’‘éloquence’ de McGrath n’a rien à envier à celle de T. S. Eliot.


Texte intégral

1Sund: A New York Times writer, some time ago, asked the question, “Is North Dakota necessary?” Evidently, this writer has not read Thomas McGrath. Given that there is an American literary tradition that embraces an Emersonian aesthetic, what is one to make of the urbane dismissal of the natural world when it isn’t Massachusetts, when it’s North Dakota and not somewhere in the East?

2Bly: It’s just ordinary snobbery. The American Academy of Arts and Letters sent me a list the other day of its members. I have it here somewhere, and something like sixty-four are from Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, and so on... and from the Middle-west, there are about three or four... from Wyoming, none at all... from Montana, none, none, none...

3Sund: If the iconography of human existence is the iconography of regions, why then has regionalism often gotten such a bad rap?

4Bly: Well, in literature, it’s very much an old boys’ network, and the United States has always been turned toward England in that way and the rest of the United States is turned toward New York; so, it’s the same kind of thing. Tom wasn’t a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters; they didn’t have brains enough to do that. Just for fun, I want to read you something. The Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez came to the United States in 1916...

5Sund: The year of Tom’s birth.

6Bly: Was it?

7Sund: Yes.

8Bly: And here’s his little prose poem called “Author’s Club,” which I’ll just read for you:

I had always thought perhaps there would be no poets at all in New York. What I had never suspected was that there would be so many bad ones, or a place like this, as dry and dusty as our own Ateneo in Madrid, in spite of its being on the 15th floor, almost at the altitude of Parnassus.
Tenth-rate men, all of them, cultivating physical resemblances to Poe, to Walt Whitman, to Stevenson, to Mark Twain, letting their soul be burned up with their free cigar, since the two are the same; bushy-haired men who make fun of Robinson, Frost, Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell and who fail to make fun of Poe, Emily Dickinson and Whitman only because they are already dead. And they show me wall after wall of portraits and autographs in holograph, of Bryant, of Aldrich, of Lowell, etc., etc., etc., ...
... I have taken a cigarette from the fumidor, lighted it and thrown it into a corner, on the rug, in order to see if the fire will catch and leave behind it in place of this club of rubbish a high and empty hole, fresh and deep, with clear stars, in the cloudless sky of this April night.1

9Sund: Oh, yes!

10Bly: Isn’t that gorgeous?

11Sund: Gorgeous, yes, and it answers the question, at least in part.

12Bly: All right, so someone called me today, and we were talking about this. His name is Leo Connellan, and he said, “I’ve always liked you because you’ve defended Thomas McGrath.” He said, “I remember that you had a problem with a prize.” And I said, “Yeah! You remember that?” Maybe it was ten years ago or so, and I think it was maybe the prize given by The Nation, a prize given every couple of years or so. I was on the jury along with Helen Vendler and Robert Pinsky, so I suggested Thomas McGrath, and neither of them had ever read him.

13Sund: Our poet laureate and Vendler had never read McGrath?

14Bly: So I said, “You’ve never read him?” So I said to Pinsky, “You’re only about four blocks from a library, why don’t you go read him?” “Well,” he said, “I don’t think we have time to read McGrath.” That was very typical; they’re both deeply interested in poetry, but... So the only one we could agree on was Gary Snyder, which was all right, but without him, I don’t know what we would have done.

15Sund: Isn’t this amazing? I’m wondering if it might not have been the Lenore Marshall Prize because Tom did receive that award.

16Bly: Maybe it was. It was a five or ten thousand-dollar prize.

17Sund: I’m thinking now of a conversation I had with Joseph Brodsky a number of years ago during which he asked me who my poetry teacher was and I said, “Tom McGrath.” And Brodsky said, “McGrath the Traitor?!” And when I was talking with Tom and brought up the name Brodsky, Tom said, “That right wing reactionary bastard!” Well, the day before Tom died, I had a conversation with Brodsky, and he said, “By the way, I read McGrath while I was in Italy this summer and the work is tremendous. Would you please tell the poet hello from me when you see him again?” But Tom, who was very ill at the time, died before I got back to the hospital.

18Bly: Well, Brodsky was intelligent, but you know... one of the things that happened with him that was a very strange thing was that in Russia, the people in favor of communism wrote in free verse, Yevtushenko, for example. The ones that were opposed to communism wrote in old iambic material.

19Sund: Traditional form?

20Bly: Yes. So I was once at a party of Russians in California and as happens after fifteen minutes of conversation at a party, someone has to read a poem, so this old Russian got up, and he read this poem, which was not only in traditional meter, but it was like an 18th century diction, and they just loved that! And when Brodsky came to this country, he thought that the forward poets were Wilbur, for example, who wrote in traditional form, and people asked him about—I know he had an copy of a book of mine—several poets, and he said, “Oh Robert Bly’s a shee-it!” “How about James Wright?” “He’s a shee-it!” “How about James Dickey?” “He’s a shee-it!” So everybody who wrote non-iambic poems is a shit. That’s very funny. Isn’t it strange how that could work? He didn’t think about it; he just applied the same standard. But later, Brodsky learned much more...

21Sund: Yes, that’s very strange... and funny, as you say... I must ask you now about Tom’s famous line, “Dakota is everywhere.” Nearly every critic who has written about McGrath has interpreted this often-quoted phrase from Letter to an Imaginary Friend. I want to know how you would analyze this intriguing statement.

22Bly: What does he mean, “Dakota is everywhere”? Well, I don’t know; but you know, one of the first things that Tom taught me had to do with what the leftists called false consciousness.

23Sund: Good. That is one of the questions I intended to ask: what did Tom mean by and how would you define false consciousness?

24Bly: Well, false consciousness implies that capitalism works to install false consciousness, which it does by radio, television, movies, and so on. False consciousness means that you don’t have a grasp of the grief in the world, that you don’t have a grasp of the suffering that’s going on. False consciousness has to do with optimism; it shows up in those preachers that are so encouraging to everyone, like Robert Schuller. His glass church is a suburb example. So one way to interpret his statement is that North Dakota is full of false consciousness, so North Dakota is everywhere. Everyone in capitalism is affected. It’s everywhere. New York has just as much as North Dakota.

25Sund: Conversely, if this statement has a double meaning, if we could put this statement in a positive light, how would you do that, or wouldn’t you?

26Bly: Well, you could say that there are intelligent people everywhere, if you want to do that, whatever, that his father and mother were intelligent, that just because they were in North Dakota doesn’t mean that they weren’t part of the high consciousness in the country.

27Sund: Along similar lines, the narrator in Letter returns repeatedly to his early family experiences, it seems to me, for sustenance, for renewal; he returns, also, in the poems, to the prairie values that shaped him. In contemporary letters, the largesse of McGrath’s humanist work, which has the ability to uplift the human spirit, gets lost, while less complex works are embraced. What accounts for this?

28Bly: Well, first of all, we have sunk a long way in culture since Tom’s time, and what we’ve experienced is... I would relate it to a story about the maiden king... the story (looks for a manuscript) hmm, that’s not it. Well, that story says that a soporific pin is being inserted somewhere between the head and body of every person in the culture, and that pin has the object of putting every person to sleep. We’re not experiencing a drive upward into intensity, but a drop into cultural sleep, and the pin is becoming more and more vicious; wherever it senses heat, it moves. The production teams of the entertainment industry lightheartedly preside over the degradation of human beings. We are witnessing an appearance in the United States of millions of children who are receiving nothing fruitful from our common life. I’m saying that this pin, which is moving, is moving toward sleep and false consciousness; wherever it feels heat it moves, so therefore, you can feel heat in Tom’s works and... (makes a sound that indicates the pin has moved in to destroy the “heat”).

29Sund: And how would you define heat?

30Bly: Well, heat is human intensity.

31Sund: Goodness?

32Bly: Goodness, yes, plus the heat of passion, the heat of family, of love, the heat of political opinion, the heat of concern.

33Sund: Exactly. I see. You talk in The Sibling Society about our losing the ability to “shudder.” Would you agree, that Tom was a great shudderer?

34Bly: Yes, that’s right.

35Sund: I remember being with Tom and E.P. Thompson one afternoon, and we were talking about the movie Blue Velvet...

36Bly: I hate that film!

37Sund: Tom said that he had turned on the television one evening and that to his shock, this film was airing. He was upset by the fact that any child in America whose parents had this premium channel could have tuned in to it.

38Bly: Oh!

39Sund: Isn’t this sort of thing just awful?

40Bly: Awful...

41Sund: It makes one believe that there’s a palpable force of evil in popular culture.

42Bly: Yes, I agree.

43Sund: It wants to grab our children into itself...

44Bly: Absolutely. Well, they say that there’s a force in outer space that doesn’t like human beings... and you know you’re in the presence of that when the temperature drops, the coldness doesn’t like life, and...

45Sund: How do we stop this?

46Bly: Well, no one knows, no one knows, because the money is where the coldness is...

47Sund: Money, and, or, a lack of traditional principles—can I say this—a lack of love?

48Bly: Oh, yes...

*

49Sund: Tom states emphatically, “I was an atheist when I was thirteen and I will be an atheist when I die; I am militantly anti-religious.” David Pink and others have insisted on a theological component to Tom’s work because of his concern with reincorporating the presence of spirituality into the world. What do you make of the dichotomy between McGrath’s rational anti-God assertions and his use of spiritual symbolism including confession and the Host in his long work?

50Bly: Oh, I don’t think that’s a problem because things like confession and the Host go way down deep in the human psyche, and as Jung would say they are really archetypal. They appear no matter what culture you’re in or what you believe. But I don’t think any of us now realize just how much the consciences of people, when Tom was young, were burned by the church, just how much evil they saw in the church. It’s interesting when you go to Europe, when you go to France, you see that the people tore down those churches, broke down those enormous walls. You say, “Man, there must have been a lot of hatred to do that.”

51Sund: But the Gothic cathedrals are still standing.

52Bly: I know, but we’re just talking about... that in our culture, the church seems vaguely good. You know, the Pope might be kind of stupid, but that isn’t the way they felt. They felt that the church was on the side of cruelty... blocking development. So you’ve got to say that the modern part of Tom’s mind was completely burned by what he saw of Christianity, and so therefore, he said, “I am an atheist.” But he didn’t mean that; he meant that his mind was anti-Christian for very good reasons.

53Sund: It’s interesting to me that you describe his atheistic position in this way. To move on, Tom deeply understood Octavio Paz’s idea that political regeneration must include the resurrection of love. Auden, as we know, said, “We must love one another or die.” What would you say regarding Tom’s insistence upon love as an absolutely essential element or quality in life and in art?

54Bly: Well, I would just say that that’s a very sensible thing to say. It’s that heat, the love between the mother and the son that brings fertility into the mind, and it’s the love between the father and the son that brings in the sense of justice, so, if your mind doesn’t have any fertility and doesn’t have any sense of justice, then you know that the mind hasn’t experienced a loving father or mother.

55Sund: Now that we are on the subject of justice, Tom, on occasion, said that in some cases, he was in favor of capital punishment. Are you?

56Bly: I am. Well, there are several things to be said. From Tom’s point of view, to be born into a community is an immense gift, and if you do something, if you murder, etc., you are not entitled to that gift any more. That’s one way to look at it. That means that you really value what it means to be a person in the human community. And another point of view, of course, is: what’s so bad about dying, you know, what’s so bad about dying? I mean in one point of view, every one is going to be born again and again anyway, so what’s all this about dying? What’s the trouble?

57Sund: Are you saying that to the person on death row, or to...

58Bly: To anybody. You see, one of the things you could say is that, what do they say? In the United States, eighty-five per cent of the money spent for medicine and medical stuff is spent in the last six months of the person’s life. That means that they have no faith at all in the other world. They’re going to fight to the last, to...

59Sund: To stay in the material world?

60Bly: Yes, to stay in this material world. So what’s so good about the material world?

61Sund: That makes me think about something a literary critic said: that Americans can’t face death because death is the ultimate unprogressive thing. Isn’t that funny?

62Bly: Yes, (laughing) that’s very good.

63Sund: In asking the question, “What is poetry that does not save/Nations or people?” Czeslaw Milosz lays the foundation for what he calls the “salutary aim” of poetry. I believe, in part, that because Tom focuses on salvation for the collective, his poetry has the ability to work to save the collective.

64Bly: That’s reasonable. But I believe, as you don’t, that the small poem with the spiritual base can save also.

65Sund: Oh, I do believe that.

66Bly: So I don’t want to contrast those ideas.

67Sund: Tom was a revolutionary who believed in fighting conformity. Why is there such complacency in American Letters? Where have all the revolutionaries gone?

68Bly: I don’t know if you’ve seen the New Yorker this week. There’s a little section on the sixties. What I would do is to look at that and you’ll see a picture of Bob Dylan when he was twenty and one of him now, and he made a statement a couple of years ago, and he says something like, you know in the sixties when we went around, and it didn’t matter where we went, to North Dakota or wherever it was, St. Louis or wherever, there were always people who would welcome a part of us, but that’s been killed. It isn’t there any more.

69Sund: So conformity has taken over?

70Bly: So what Tom hoped for has not taken place.

71Sund: Tom is so hip. I would think that he would appeal to the young idealists.

72Bly: Yes, but if they have had enough of Beavis and Butthead,2 they are not idealistic anymore.

73Sund: Yes, exactly. Here’s a question that’s a bit technical maybe, but what would you say McGrath’s concept of poetic language is?

74Bly: I don’t think I would call it a concept. He wanted a texture of language which would include language from politics, as well as from ancient politics, as well as contemporary freshness, and zany language. But that was to be included in a texture of dignified and ancient rhetorical language. Some of the people I know respect McGrath because he carried forward the epic love of flowering eloquence, and he mixed that strongly with very contemporary harsh political opinions, but what stands out is the eloquence. And in that respect, he is more eloquent than anyone. T. S. Eliot is very eloquent, too, in his insistence on bringing in layers of language: religious, church language, all that stuff in The Wasteland. So let’s say that McGrath has an idea of eloquence that resembles that of T. S. Eliot’s; that will drive people nuts.

75Sund: Fabulous. As a follow-up, what do you think his idea of the poem was or is, or is that too...

76Bly: Too big.

77Sund: Okay, let’s move on. In your own poem, “Gratitude to Old Teachers,” were you thinking of McGrath?

78Bly: In some of it, but I was thinking of old grade-school teachers, too.

79Sund: But you would include Tom as an influence?

80Bly: Yes, I would include Tom McGrath, Rilke...

81Sund: Lorca?

82Bly: Yes, Lorca and Jung.

83Sund: Have you seen Tom’s LSU Master’s Thesis?

84Bly: No, what did he do it on?

85Sund: Five Leftist writers.

86Bly: Who were they?

87Sund: Auden, Spender, Isherwood, Lewis, and Rex Warner. He dedicates his thesis to his advisor, Cleanth Brooks, and to a “nameless educator” who first insisted that a Master’s thesis be required. Does that sound like vintage teacher McGrath to you?

88Bly: Yes indeed. That’s wonderful! So that shows the quality, which was not a deconstructionist rejection of great literature. But people like me, they had to force us to read this stuff, which was typical in the 60’s, but when they forced us, as Tom would have forced students, we said, “Thank You!”

89Sund: You had to be forced because you were looking for “the new?”

90Bly: That’s right.

91Sund: McGrath has been criticized by some for creating disciples out of his students...

92Bly: That’s nonsense. Every teacher develops disciples. He wasn’t unusual in that regard.

93Sund: Since war is one of the subjects for poets, and because Tom writes the most remarkable antiwar, protest poems, “Gone Away Blues,” for example, or “Ode to the American Dead in Asia,” why haven’t these poems been widely anthologized?

94Bly: Well, they have been. Some poems have been in the New Poets of England and America...

95Sund: That’s true, but I’m thinking about the standard anthologies used, say, the Kennedy/Gioia, the Bedford, etc.

96Bly: Well those are put together by academics, and academics get very nervous when you talk about things that happen outside the academy. Maybe they should be doing something besides teaching English.

97Sund: That makes me think of Tom’s poem in which the speaker is the academician who says to the bard: “Your feet are muddy, you son-of-a-bitch, get out of our ivory tower.”3

98Bly: Right! Exactly.

99Sund: Frost says that it doesn’t take the test of time for us to know whether a poem is great or not. He says that one knows immediately if one has been “immortally wounded.” Why aren’t Perloff or Vendler, for example, right now, writing about McGrath? As you said earlier, there is no sign that the major critics are even reading him.

100Bly: It’s the same question again, and there’s no answer for it. People are looking for something smaller. Here’s an example, I was talking to David Ignatow shortly before he died and he said: “You know, John Ashbery is the perfect poet for us now.” I said, “Why?” And he said, “It’s exactly like Rome at the time when it became very clear that they could not have a Republic. That all of that was finished, that there would be dictators from here on. At that point, the poets stopped having any political content in their work, like John. John never mentions anything that would disturb anybody, and that’s why he’s a perfect poet for us right now.” So Tom doesn’t understand that you’re not supposed to talk about these things. McGrath is just wiser.

101Sund: What effect do you think the South, his years at LSU, had on Tom?

102Bly: The thing that I feel in relation to the South was that the South was hospitable to some great writers, like Cleanth Brooks and others, so Tom met them in the South, so that Southern literary tradition became a part of his life, thank God.

103Sund: Robert Penn Warren?

104Bly: Yes.

105Sund: Can I presume that you believe in precognition, seeing something before it happens, for example?

106Bly: Yes.

107Sund: In his poem “In Dream Time,” Tom ended with the following lines: “As for me/I seem to spend many nights/Walking a perimeter of rotten ice/Around a bad break/Where someone less lucky/Just had a last fall.”4 As we know, Tom fell, outside a Minneapolis café, and the consequences of that fall led to his death. He seems to me to have been given a glimpse of what was going to be. Mr. Bly, how and why does this happen? You’ve investigated this type of phenomenon.

108Bly: It can be said in hundreds of ways. One is that there is a person inside of us who is wiser than we are and who knows what’s going to happen and isn’t particularly upset by it.

109Sund: Is that person inside of us connected to something transcendent?

110Bly: I don’t know, but probably. I just saw a letter of Jim Wright’s in which he referred to cancer long before it appeared.

111(This June 2000 interview with Robert Bly took place in his Minneapolis writing studio.)

Notes de bas de page

1 Federico Garcia Lorca & Juan Ramon Jimenez, Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997, translated by and copyright: Robert Bly).

2 Beavis and Butt-head is an American animated television series created by Mike Judge. . . . It aired from March 8, 1993, to November 28, 1997. The two characters’ lives revolve around TV, nachos, heavy metal music, their utterly fruitless efforts in trying to ‘score with chicks’, making money, and other stuff that’s ‘cool’. Since their parents are never to be seen, it is implied they were ‘raised’ by the TV” (Wikipedia).

3 “Ars Poetica”. Thomas Mcgrath, Selected Poems 1938-1988 (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 1988), 40. Originally published in Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesie (New York: International Publishers, 1949), 8–9.

4 Thomas McGrath, Selected Poems 1938–1988 (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 1988), 176.


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