Robert Bly, the National Book Award-winning poet who started out writing bucolic poems about rural Minnesota and went on to shake up the complacent world of 1950s poetry, rail against war, bring international poets to Western readers, and become a best-selling author teaching men how to be in touch with their feelings, died Sunday, just a month before his 95th birthday.
He died at home, with most of his family in attendance. "He had no pain," said his daughter, Mary Bly. "We played Chopin all the day before, and literally all his children were around him. And when he took his final breath it was with a choral hallelujah."
In his heyday, Bly was known for making theater of poetry readings — reading poems twice, or three times, just because he loved their sound; reading other writers' work; wearing a rubber fright mask or an embroidered vest on stage; reading to the background music of drums and sitars.
But despite his theatrics, he was always intensely serious about poetry and its importance in the cultural and political landscape. He was besotted by words.
Bly lived most of his life in his native Minnesota, a familiar figure at local literary events until recent years, when his memory began to fade. His last public reading was April 13, 2015, at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis where he launched the collection, "Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life." One by one, 24 poets read their favorite Bly poems before Bly himself stood and read "Moon Behind a...
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