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Poetry,Pottery and Grief

Father's Journal

Poetry, Pottery and Grief

The thing I like best about Robert Bly is that he is a little tricky to pin down, like some mythical changeling, a serious jester. He's a poet, a linguist and translator, and, as he joked recently, the "mother" of the modern men's movement. He was in the area, headlining a fund raiser for a regional writer's group, and though I missed his reading, I made sure to hear his radio call-in show interview, even though I had to tape it for later listening as it was broadcast at my daughter's bedtime.

A quick search at the Amazon book site (http://www.amazon.com) listed several pages of books Bly has written, edited, translated, or that others have written about him. I stopped counting at 50. (This task is complicated by the coincidence that another prolific writer shares the name: Robert W. Bly, a technical writer and teacher, has as many titles to his name as the other Bly, leading to the comic juxtaposition in my search results of one Bly's, "News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness," and the other's, "The Ultimate Star Trek Quiz Book." Perhaps these are two books in a series?)

Robert (no initial) Bly's most famous work, "Iron John," was published over 8 years ago (not to be confused with the very funny "Ironing John," published in 1996 by British author James Leith.) Bly's been the butt of many a men-drumming-in-the-woods joke since "Iron John" came out, something he sounds just a little bitter about. The book is a beautiful full-length prose-poem delving into the mysteries and metaphors of ancient stories and the history of men's development. On the radio, Bly seemed ready to move on a bit, he was, after all, on tour for his latest book of poetry, Morning Poems.

"Let's talk about the poetry now," he suggested to his interviewer after her persistent questions about the many caricatures of the men's movement.

But the callers too were mostly interested in his views on men, fathers and mentoring. I was struck as I listened, as I have been before, by how hungry people are for wisdom about men and boys and how they grow.

The poems Bly read from Morning Poems were short and warm. He claims to have written them all in bed, in part explaining the "Morning" in the title. But I assume too that he was playing on the word "mourning," as what he read held sadness and grief as well as peace in the words.

Bly's poetry and work with men meet most richly when he talks about men and grief. His contention is that men are not given time to grieve the natural losses of life, so they carry with them a fear of their own emotions. While this seems, like all generalizations, an oversimplification, it also captures an important truth. The example of the power of this grief which Bly supplied suggested that men who go to war are not given room to grieve this experience. He claimed that more veterans of the Viet Nam war have died by suicide in the years since than died during the war, a statistic that gave me pause.

A few days after first listening to Bly I was shopping with my friend Gary, a musician and sculptor and Viet Nam vet. As we toured the cavernous isles of a building supply store, searching for screws and vents and such like for a pottery studio we are setting up, I ventured to ask his opinion of Bly's statistic.

Gary chuckled in his quiet way. "Fifty thousand guys died in 'Nam," he said, examining a length of chain. "Some people say as many as 500,000 have died since then from suicide and other war related problems."

Five hundred thousand. Men also die at much higher rates than women from stress related illnesses, heart disease, high blood pressure, and so on. Men's life expectancy is always less than women. Is this, like the death rate of veterans, in part because of this unmet need to grieve?

Like everyone, my life's had its ups and downs. In the last decade, things are generally up. I'm building a rich life with my daughter and wife. My career is in motion. We have our health. And we are trying for a second kid. What could be more optimistic? Yet I am not without grief, old and new. The new grief I may be a bit more equipped to understand and give appropriate time to. It is the old grief that I now find coming back to haunt, in the form of email from a long-ago ex-wife.

Why go back? Why dig up all sorrows? She wants to talk now, fifteen years later. Why bother, I wonder to myself and out loud to whoever will listen.

And then I think of Gary, and the burdens of grief he and other vets have had to talk through. I think of those five hundred thousand. And I think of the possibility of having another child. Maybe it is a waste of my time to unearth grief long buried. Or maybe, on the other hand, it would help me learn to be an even better father, more present, more real, than I am now (though this does seem barely conceivable).

Stephen Bergman, a psychiatrist who works at Wellesley College's Stone Center, a program focused on building a model of women's mental health, has talked about men's "dread." He uses this term in several ways, but I think of it now in relation to grief. I think many men dread grief. It appears sometimes like a bottomless well into which we will inevitably fall should we drink even a drop of its poison. If we go there, one feels, we may never come back. (Bly, by the way, has a lot to say in "Iron John," about these earthy, subterranean metaphors.)

I try, with varying degrees of success, to not let these fears prevent me from seeking that adventure of self reflection. Sure, talk to that old ex. Unearth the old wounds. Enjoy the pain a while, then move on. Dealing with grief, new or old, takes time, and this can mean time away from the things we love, from people. How can I take on more, a new child, and still give way from time to time to the grief? I don't know.

Maybe it's a little like making those pots Gary and I hope to do in our nascent studio. You slam the clay in the center of the whirling wheel, and gently pull the lip up, it wavers, you straighten it. It waivers again, then spins from your hands to the floor, from which you pick up the pieces, squeeze them back into a single solid ball, and raise the form back again up to giddy heights on the wheel, a changeling, never quite exactly what you at first expected. I guess life's like that.

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