Robert Bly

My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is Robert Bly's second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, and the leaps even bolder. The poems are intimate and yet reach out toward the world: the paintings of Robert Motherwell, the intensity of flamenco singers, the sadness of the gnostics, the delight of high spirits and wit.

Selected from throughout Bly's monumental body of work from 1950 through the present, we see how he has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation. In poetry spiritual yet worldly, celebrating the uncanny beauty of the everyday, Bly is a poet moved by the mysteries of the world around him, speaking the language of images in a voice brilliant and bold.

An American poet, essayist, activist, and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. Men and the Wound: In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

Through poetry, music and storytelling, Robert Bly takes us on a thought provoking and entertaining journey captured by this extraordinary live audio program recorded at the Open Center in New York City. Bly says parents make it clear there are certain parts of us they don't like, 'you're too noisy' … One image is to say we take that part and put it into a bag. Our independence and feeling goes into the bag, the bag is getting heavy and two miles...

When a woman or a father attacks a naive male, he immediately opens himself up and takes the attack right into himself. “Oh, yes, that is true. I am really bad!” It does not occur to him that the attack may be something quite different. Maybe the woman or father is angry at something else and is displacing or projecting the anger onto the man. The naive male takes in the attack, feels the wound, and then bends over, psychologically. When the bull...

Robert Bly poet, storyteller and mythologist takes us on an imaginative and disturbing journey in this live recording. Disturbing both personally and historically, the commentary reminds us that the mythology we have inherited is often defective. One story reports that the very moment we are born a snake appears with us which the doctor throws out the window and, unknown to us, has been growing large in the forest. Just as the church refused to accept...

In his numerous roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called "the expressive men's movement," Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half century. In this new collection of poems, the National Book Award-winning poet explores the meaning of mature love in a sustained meditation on faithfulness, on the sustenance of intimacy, and on grief as the door to deep emotion....

Robert Bly is in beautiful form, reading seven of his own poems from Stealing Sugar from the Castle and Coleman Barks reads some segments from the Shams Tabriz Sayings, as well as Rumi poems.