Sad this evening to post this death notice about Robert Bly.
I met him during his anti-Vietnam War heyday, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University. As the obit in the NYT says, he traveled the USA visiting campuses to stir protest against the war. His main contribution for us at IU was to give us the language to speak against the war, words more robust and meaningful than our heretofore sloganeering and shouts of BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! whenever someone in authority tried telling us how things were, especially with regard to that war.
I remember him wearing masks and reading to us of the Teeth Mother, which, afterward, some people branded as anti-feminist. But some of us didn't hear it that way. Maybe we weren't listening correctly, or with ears we were yet to develop. This was when the American War (as the Vietnamese call it still today) was the first and last thing on many of our minds, even though by the time I met Bly, the whole thing had wound down to just getting people out of the country.
Later, I attended a small gathering for him at the home of Ruth Stone (1915-2011). Bly had helped her secure a year of poet in residency at IU. She worked to get him on campus and threw the party for him in thanks. I had been an MFA in Poetry during Stone's year on campus. I remember people sitting in a circle with Bly and listening to him tell stories from myth and folklore . . . all of which had some bearing on our lives and our aspirations as poets.
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