Archetypes and Metaphors

Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly and many others have talked about how myths can frame lessons or dramas. They need not be literally true in order to contain truths. The Hopi oral history contains a tale of a great flood, for instance, and Rapunzel should warn against pilfering greens from your neighbor's garden.

Finding excuses not to practice my Mozart concerto, which has its last rehearsal with the orchestra tonight, I was looking at the painting which hangs above my piano. The title is "L'Oiseau Chant Avec Ses Doigts" (The Bird Sings With His Fingers), and the picture is supposed to be a boy Orpheus--the Greek God of music--making a lyre in the tree branches. The title comes from an old Jean Cocteau movie.

Who knows if there was ever a real Orpheus? Plays, poems, musical works have been written about the god who charmed the beasts with his playing, who even cast a spell over the Underworld so that it would release his beloved Eurydice from the dead.  The film "Black Orpheus" sets the story in Rio and has Orpheus making the sun rise with his song.

All this is a long way from my present chore. All I really want to do is what Nicodemus advises: Try to make it nice for the people.

Robert Bly

Once when I was trying to get advice about publishing poems, I wrote to Robert Bly, whose poetry I admired. He wrote back, a long letter in his hieroglyphic hand, giving me specific suggestions with names and addresses. I may have tried a couple of the publishers he mentioned. I do hate rejection slips. My heart sinks when I see the envelope addressed in my own handwriting.

I found a printer with a Linotype near where I lived. His shop was named Mount Vernon Press. He even had a Benedictine font, though he ran out of "e"s before he typeset the last pages of my little chapbook, The Phoenician Sailor.

I sent a copy to Robert Bly. He was gracious and generous with his praise. He asked me to send three of the poems to a friend of his who was starting a magazine, and she did in fact publish them. So of course I would be a fan of Robert Bly even if he did not write such good poetry. When I saw one of his poems in a magazine last week, it was like a "Hello!" from a friend.

At a reading Bly once gave in San Francisco, he said good poetry should stir you up. His book, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (Doubleday, 1985) is some of the most stirring poetry you will ever read. Just the titles of some of his other poetry books bear out his intent: The Light Around the Body, Sleepers Joining Hands, The Fish in the Sea Is Not Thirsty, Old Man Rubbing His Eyes, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.

Ever since Iron John, Robert Bly has been better known for his men's books and lectures than for his large and comprehensive body of work, poems, essays and translations, but he is still out there, reading stirring poetry and beating a drum and probably strumming on his out-of-tune banjo.