Lexington Community Education

Lexington Community Education Celebrates National Poetry Month

An Evening with Robert Bly

Thursday, April 9, 2009 • 7:00 - 9:00 pm
Cary Hall • 1605 Massachusetts Avenue • Lexington MA

Robert Bly has changed the American literary landscape in numerous ways. He has published over a dozen highly-regarded volumes of poetry, including My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy; The Night Abraham Called to the Stars; Morning Poems; Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems; and The Light Around the Body, for which he won the National Book Award in 1968. His poems in My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, are written in his own adaptation of the Mideastern ghazal form in three-line stanzas. Bly has also established himself as one of the great translators of international poetry into English, with pioneering translations of Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomas Tranströmer, and Hafez, among many others. The best work of his long and varied translation career appeared recently in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations. In 2008 his translations of Hafez were published in a volume Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door.

Bly’s bestselling book-length essay, Iron John: A Book About Men, sparked the men’s movement of the early 1990s and defined a whole generation’s view of masculinity. His other influential books of social and psychological commentary include The Sibling Society and The Maiden King, the latter co-authored with Marion Woodman, with whom Bly co-leads workshops for women and men in the US and Canada.

Robert Bly Website

Robert Bly is featured on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, August 31, 2007. "The poetry of Robert Bly has touched on spiritual insights and deep truths about American culture." The full video is available online: www.pbs.org/moyers. To learn more about Robert Bly's Annual Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, click here: http://www.greatmotherconference.com/