The Newer Man Robert Bly Brings His Thoughts On Men And Relationships To Spokane

Quick: When you hear the name Robert Bly, what comes to mind?

Running through the woods? Beating drums by the light of the moon? Chanting odes to the spirit of ancient warriors?

Well, some, or all, of that may be true. But there’s much more to the man, too.

Besides being one of the founders, if not the virtual godfather, of the cultural shift called the men’s movement, Bly has written hundreds of poems that have been published in dozens of collections, he’s won a National Book Award for one of those books and he’s influenced a generation of free thinkers.

No doubt Bly will unveil his many sides this coming weekend when, with John Lee and Michael Gurian, he co-leads the three-day Conference on Men and Their Relationships at Spokane Falls Community College.

Until, then, here are the facts:

Robert Bly was born 69 years ago this December in Madison, Minn., a small town set near the South Dakota border. He grew up on a nearby farm and, like most of the town’s highschool graduates, he left after receiving his diploma.

Unlike most of his schoolmates, however, he went on to attend St. Olaf College, then Harvard where he earned his bachelor’s degree, then the University of Iowa where he took his master’s.

Even more against the grain, Bly returned to Madison in 1956, converted a chicken coop into a writing studio and began pumping out poetry. By 1968, he’d won the NBA, earned recognition as the editor of the literary magazines Fifties and Sixties and a reputation for writing penetrating criticism.

Still, despite publishing poetry collections that won him Fullbright and Guggenheim fellowships, teaching on occasion and conducting readings that reflected his growing affection for the rituals of primitive cultures, Bly did not become a household name until he met Bill Moyers.

And then in one 1989 program, with Moyers - the conscience of Public Television - guiding him, Bly was propelled into the national spotlight. Talking about the pain of men, and explaining that pain in terms of mythology, Bly became the spokesperson for American men tired of living their lives as usual.

A year later, “Iron John,” his book on male mythology, was published and began its rise to best-seller status. For more than a decade now, Bly has been looking at the emotional turmoil that drives men to commit all the misdeeds that are laid at their feet - fear of intimacy, flight from commitment, macho posturing, sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, war, etc.

And he has been rewarded for that exploration, which involves seeing the modern male dilemma in mythological terms, speaking of the “wild man” within us, etc. He has earned the gratitude of thousands of men who have attended his workshops and passed among themselves audiotapes of his readings and lectures.

But, then, he has been castigated as well. In “Backlash,” her look at the current state of feminism, author Susan Faludi devoted a chapter to criticizing the whole of the men’s movement and Bly in particular.

Author Michael True spoke for Bly’s male critics by weighing in with an essay titled “Celebrating Robert Bly, But Taking Him to Task As Well.” “With characteristic insight,” True wrote, “Robert Bly recognized a serious dilemma among middle-aged men, our inability to age as gracefully as women or to grow into wisdom. In addressing ‘the problem,’ however, Bly talks nonsense much of the time.”

Millions of other men are equally as unwilling to admit - as Bly has - that only in facing, not ignoring, the pain of childhood can we achieve peace as adults. They, like True, continue to lampoon both Bly and the mytho-poetic movement he represents.

Drum-beaters, Wild Men, New-Age warriors, they say.

Meanwhile, the world goes to hell all around us. Drive-by shootings move to the suburbs, young men caught up in the cycle of violence play it out, giving little or no thought to the consequences.

Caught up in emotions they can’t even understand, much less control, these young men do what they’ve been conditioned to do: express what Bly calls “the rage of the unparented.”

“Most of these are fatherless boys,” he says, “and if there is no father, there’s usually no older-men mentors either. So these are fatherless and mentorless young men, and their rage is terrific.”

Speaking by phone from his Minneapolis office, Bly, in a 45-minute interview, covers a variety of topics. He responds to his critics, analyzes the evolution of the men’s movement and comments on where he sees the movement headed. But his underlying message remains with these boys and, by extension, the men whom they may someday become. He speaks of the work being done for them by such men as Bob Roberts, whose mentoring project with released Louisiana prisoners has cut the rate of recidivism to a fraction of standard government-sponsored programs.

“What we’re saying is that there are certain young men who cannot be saved without older men as substitute fathers or mentors,” Bly says. “When a program can put them in touch with these older men, the changes are astounding.”

But what about the average man? What about, say, the standard guy working a 40-hour week who comes home tired and, before he even knows it, is ignoring his kids, blowing up at his wife and retreating to the TV room with a couple of cold ones? What does the men’s movement have to offer him?

Bly doesn’t hesitate: the chance to go down into the darkness, he says. The chance to see, in terms of “Iron John,” “the ashes as well as the ascension.”

If he doesn’t go, Bly says, “Well, a lot of men have a choice of that or life-long depression. They have a choice of doing the work in the ashes or suicide. They have choices of doing the work in the ashes or finding their wife is going to leave them because she can’t stand to live any longer with a man who is that distant from himself.”

This is where meditation and men’s groups come in. Quoting Baker Roshi, the one-time head of the San Francisco Zen Center, Bly says, “‘You know, we have two ways with anger: You either express it, or you suppress it.’

“What spiritual work offers is a third way,” he says. And that way involves allowing “the anger to come in and fill your whole body, so that you’re practically burning with it.” At the end of two hours or so, he says, “then you have of choice of what to say or what to do.”

Reflecting the teaching of conference co-leader John Lee, Bly says that the key is in learning to express anger, especially in a way that is non-threatening to those around you. The other key is learning to expel that anger. The expulsion, he stresses, is best handled around other men in the safety of a group.

“That’s one of the greatest way in which small men’s groups work to prevent domestic violence,” Bly says, “by having anger expressed in the presence of men who can handle it.”

It’s in the area of anger that Bly finds fault with the Christian-based Promise Keepers movement, which has been known to fill 65,000-seat stadiums. While respecting the Promise Keepers’ “connection with religion,” Bly is bothered by its unwillingness to concentrate on “the shadow of men.”

“This whole problem of being a good Christian means that you pay no attention to your shadow,” says Bly, a life-long Lutheran. “Jimmy Swaggart paid no attention to his shadow, and it came out and whopped him. What if there are 65,000 men who pay no attention to their shadow? What’s going to happen then?”

He also has problems with the hierarchical way that Promise Keepers tend to view the family unit, with men at the top. “It’s an attempt to ignore everything that women have tried to do in the last 30 years,” he says.

But while a conversation with Bly, who typically won’t suffer fools in silence, isn’t likely to avoid criticism of some aspect of contemporary life, this interview takes him back to the positive side. And that is how he views the future of the men’s movement.

“This movement is very young,” he says. “I think the best effect we’ve had is on young fathers, by urging them to be really strong fathers from the time the baby is born.”

Which leads to a lesson that Bly believes we can learn from primitive cultures. In many tribes, Bly says, “the baby doesn’t even touch the ground in the first three years because everybody carries the baby around. Well, we can’t do that because we don’t live in a village. But, still, we can say that the father should try to not let the baby’s feet touch the ground. And when the mother’s tired, the father carries the baby.” At risk is the very future of a generation of men.

“There is still a long road to go,” says Bly, recalling the words of a colleague about the gang members he works with. “The young men who had been violent had in them tremendous ability at loving, and the intensity of love often matched what we think of as the intensity of hatred or anger that they had. He wants to emphasize that these boys are not ruined by their experience, and that their souls are very much alive.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 photos (2 color)