1. After spending a couple or three hours completing a stickler of an acrostic puzzle, I retired to the Vizio room and watched the filmmaker Haydn Reiss's retrospective of the life and letters of Robert Bly. The movie's title is A Thousand Years of Joy.
The movie takes us back to Robert Bly's boyhood days on the family farm in Minnesota, how he was, from the beginning, an unusually intelligent and curious kid, drawn to poetry, as evidenced by how, as a teenager, he read and memorized quatrains from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam while plowing the family's field. One day, deeply absorbed, he drove the tractor into a ditch and turned it over. His brother and father rescued him.
I'd like to think Haydn Reiss included this story in A Thousand Years of Joy, in part, because it serves as a metaphor for Bly's adult life as a poet, prose writer, teacher, publisher, critic, lecturer, and political activist. He spent his life turning things upside down. He turned American poetry on its head by resisting the poetry of academia and exploring the power of deep images, drawing upon poetry from Norway, old Persia, China, Japan, and elsewhere to inspire him.
Later in his life, he turned many ideas of what it means to be male, to be a man, upside down by looking to the mythological patterns and symbols/images in fairy tales and other folk stories and songs from around the world as a means of urging men to discover and claim what is primal, what is original, in a man. He implored men to give up their childish and immature ways of being and did all he could to reacquaint men with initiation rituals and other lost elements of modern life with the hope that more men would simply grow up, become more whole, and experience the totality of being a man, of being a fully dimensional human being.
Twenty-five, thirty years ago, I was wary of Robert Bly. Some of my skepticism about his work, especially with the Men's Movement, wasn't especially generous. In fact, my favorite Bly to read wasn't Robert Bly. It was his former wife, Carol Bly. Today, in preparing to write this blog post, I went online and revisited the Table of Contents of Carol Bly's superb collection of essays, Letters from the Country, a book I gave away years ago and am now going to purchase again. I found a few of her passages online and I loved experiencing her intelligence, clarity, and insight again.
I began to soften toward Robert Bly nearly twenty years ago when I first saw the episode of Bill Moyer's series, The Language of Life, entitled "Love's Confusing Joy". It featured Coleman Barks discussing his devotion to translating the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi. Robert Bly had introduced Barks to Rumi back in 1976 and Robert Bly appeared in this episode, joining Coleman Barks in reading Rumi's poetry. Bly's love for Rumi and his affection for Coleman Barks both softened and moved me. I decided to see about revising some of my resistance to Robert Bly.
By the way, let me interrupt myself. Some time in 1977, '78, or '79, I went to a Robert Bly reading at Gonzaga University. Here's how I remember it: for a while, let's say forty-five minutes, he gave a standard poetry reading. Then he turned the reading upside down. He wanted to convey to us, I think, some of the learning he'd absorbed in his study of Carl Jung. In order to make visible what he understood as the dark and shadowy side of the American male, the darker elements of men hidden behind our masks of politeness and conformity, he put on a Richard M. Nixon mask and acted out the aggression and hunger for domination this mask represented.
I came into that room expecting a polite poetry reading and, instead, Robert Bly spent time scaring me (and other audience members, too), really making me feel rattled.
If I remember correctly, once my nerves settled down, I was elated by Bly's performance that evening. I'd studied Joseph Campbell in a Jan term class I took from Lew Archer (RIP) in 1975 and I'd done some reading of Carl Jung then. About fifteen years later, in my work team teaching philosophy and Freshman composition with Rita Hennessy, I got to dive back into Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung as a way of studying metaphysics. All through those years of following Rita's lead and teaching metaphysics, that night at Gonzaga and Robert Bly's performance played out repeatedly in the theater of my mind. Robert Bly had made an indelible mark on me.
So, today, as I watched A Thousand Years of Joy, my old feelings and suspicions of Robert Bly got turned upside down. Listening to Jane Hirshfield, Louise Erdrich, and others talk about Bly helped me see him in a more generous light, as did seeing the whole of his life of letters, his stout sense of independence, his generosity in working with other poets, his deep friendship with William Stafford, and his consistent love for the power of poetry to shape how we see things, educate our emotions, and bring countless dimensions of human experience vividly alive.
I'm grateful to Bill Davie and Diane Schulstad for giving me both this dvd and the dvd, Every War Has Two Losers that I watched earlier this week.
Both movies awakened old and hibernating feelings I've had about poetry and these poets. They also helped me plow new ground, helped me experience and contemplate these poets in fresh ways.
2. Christy, Debbie, and I yakked for about an hour on the back deck. Afterward, Debbie and Laura Kemp launched into a FaceTime session for a couple of hours.
I retired back to the Vizio room.
I rented a documentary I've had on my watch list for several weeks entitled, Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock 'N' Roll.
I am going to watch this movie again to get the social and political details straight, but, for now, suffice it to say that until rioting broke out in early July of 1970, rioting triggered by racial division in Asbury Park, the town had a vigorous music scene. Bruce Springsteen honed his talents at The Upstage in Asbury Park, an after hours no booze music club, as did Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. In this music scene, black and white musicians performed together, influenced each other, and these musicians blended together varying styles of music. You can hear this blending of soul, blues, rock 'n' roll, and other styles in the sound of both Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and in Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. In fact, a hybrid tradition that became known as the Jersey Shore Sound or the Asbury Sound emerged.
During the rioting, however, numerous music venues were destroyed. The Upstage was shuttered. Asbury Park fell into a long period of decline. This movie looks at the impact of the riot's destruction and also explores the long, slow renewal of Asbury Park. I was reminded of when I'd visit H St NE in D.C. This district has also experienced revival in the last 10-15 years after decades of ruin following the fires and other devastation in the rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr and decay brought on by the D. C. crack epidemic of the late 1980s and on into the 1990s.
I hadn't paid attention, living out west, to how long lasting the damage in D. C. was and now I know that the story was similar in Asbury Park.
Watching this documentary further deepened my understanding of history as predictive. I don't think the past merely repeats itself, but the past predicts for us what we can expect will happen. Another way of putting this, from my point of view, is that we live in an extended present. I don't see much of our experience divided into past and present, but tend to see that what happened, say, fifty years ago in Asbury Park, never, at a deep level, ended. I think this is true about the tensions and violence that erupted in Asbury Park as well as about the music. The tensions endure, locally and nationally. The music endures, too. The Asbury sound lives on in the artists who originated it and in musicians who, inspired by it, carry it forward.
3. It was getting to be about 10:00 and, normally, after being absorbed in two such riveting films as the one I watched on Robert Bly and the one on Asbury, NJ, I'd be done for the night.
But, I wasn't.
Over the last few days (or weeks), I've been playing a day from the summer of 1981 over and over in my mind. I was married for the first time. My wife was working as an intern at The Oregonian. She lived in Portland. I was going to summer school in Eugene. I was naive to the fact that our marriage would soon completely disintegrate; I was also naive to the state of disintegration our marriage was already in. If charged with the offense of willful obliviousness, I plead guilty.
One weekend I traveled to Portland to visit my wife. Many of the details about that weekend are fuzzy for me, but I do know that I had the whole day of Saturday to myself. I'm thinking my wife was working the copy desk at the paper that afternoon and evening.
I had one of the most glorious, uplifting, stimulating, and joyous days of my life in my oblivion that Saturday. A movie theater -- I think it was the 5th Street Cinema -- was running a film series called "The Overlooked Films Festival". I went to a double matinee featuring two movies directed by Carol Micklin Silver, Between the Lines and Head Over Heels (later retitled Chilly Scenes of Winter). Both movies featured John Heard. I'd seen him in one movie before. He played the role of Jack Kerouac in Heart Beat.
I loved these two movies and wanted more. I headed out to, I think, the Bagdad Theater in the Hawthorne District and saw an unusual double feature: Tell Me a Riddle and The Return of the Secaucus 7. I'd seen Secaucus 7 at least twice earlier in the year and Lee Grant's Tell Me a Riddle was a great, beautiful, and moving surprise. I saw it again later in the year back in Eugene.
So.
Tonight.
The music soundtrack of Between the Lines features Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes -- in fact, they perform live in the movie. The music comes from Southside Johnny's album Havin' a Party.
Having just watched a documentary on Asbury Park and having, just a couple of days ago, discovered that I could stream Between the Lines by subscribing to the Cohen Media Channel via Amazon Prime, I subscribed, and watched Between the Lines.
I hadn't watched this movie since about 1982 -- when I bought a BetaMax videorecording machine in 1982, Between the Lines was the first movie I rented.
I'll just say that I relished seeing it again. It reminded me how, in my late twenties, I loved movies like this one and Secaucus 7 that were about people around my age trying to make their way in the world without giving up their idealism -- Between the Lines is about an alternative weekly newspaper about to be bought out by a corporate media company. I also enjoyed, back in 1981-2, entering into the uncertainties, insecurities, and anxieties the characters in these movies experienced in their relationships and in their sexual encounters. I don't feel the same way about these things nearly forty years later, but tonight I enjoyed that I haven't totally lost touch with that oblivious young guy whose life was about to be turned upside down and who had such a passion for independent films and stories about his peers back in those days.
Earlier in the day, two dvds I ordered arrived in the mail -- two movies from early in John Heard's career: Cutter's Way and the aforementioned Chilly Scenes of Winter.
I have discovered access to streaming Tell Me a Riddle.
If I could only find a library copy or an affordable dvd copy to purchase of The Return of the Secaucus 7, or, if one of the movie streaming services decides to run it, I could relive that day of movies back in July, 1981.
I'm holding out hope.
Yes, my life, unbeknownst to me, was on the verge of radical heartbreak and disenchantment on that day in July of 1981, but I like the idea of reliving that day through watching these four movies in a single day.
I welcome getting familiar, at least temporarily, with that young version of myself who was so naively happy that day, untouched by his failures as a young husband and the dissolution and disillusion that was only a few months away.
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