"Warning to the Reader": A Prose Poem and Commentary by Robert Bly,
With a Discussion About How Great Prose Poems Can Be Accessible to Anyone, Along With a Short Description of My Early Encounters with Robert Bly, and How We Became Unlikely Friends
Off and on for the next month I plan to publish a prose poem written by a master of the form, along with that poet’s commentary on the poem. All of these poems are accessible and show how good poetry can be for everyone. More important, it’s fascinating to learn the PROCESS writers go through when creating a work, especially since it seems that everyone is a writer nowadays.
These poems will be from an anthology I edited a few years ago, and I decided to privilege authors who have recently passed. The authors will all be males. Why? Because all of the women in the anthology are fortunately still alive. When I begin my normal posts in March, I plan to periodically, probably once a month, post poems and commentaries from living writers in the anthology, along with short video-interviews with them. The first four will be women. So take that!
Before I reprint today’s prose poem, allow me to say something about the anthology.
When I was a young poet, one of my favorite anthologies was Alberta T. Turner’s Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. In 1977 when it was published, people began speaking seriously about the writing process, even in freshmen composition courses. What made Turner’s anthology significant was that poets no longer feared that they might diminish their genius by describing how they wrote. Some of the poets in Turner’s anthology even reproduced various drafts of their poems with original cross-outs and annotations, so we could see how ideas and strategies for poems came about. Their commentaries affirmed my suspicion that there was no one way to write a poem.
Turner’s questionnaire was very specific, so much so that some poets refused to participate. They thought her questions were uninspiring or too rigid. One poet, whom she did not name, in a fit of hysteria, likened the questionnaire to something out of 1984, which suggested how distasteful it was for some poets to discuss process. After all, one way to crown yourself a genius is to suggest that your poems are tiny gifts delivered by the gods in the wee hours of the morning, bestowed upon only special people, of whom you are one.
I was thinking about Turner’s book when in the last two volumes of The Prose Poem: An International Journal (a journal I founded and edited for nine years) I asked a few selected poets to choose one of their prose poems and to write a commentary on it. Unlike Turner, I didn’t give much guidance. It would be nice, I said, to comment on it as a prose poem, but I didn’t want to restrict anyone. As it turned out, many of the poets chose to discuss the prose poem as a genre, anyway. But what was most interesting to me, and, hopefully will be to you, was how apparent it was that we all write very differently.
Many years later I decided to edit an entire anthology of these commentaries in a book called A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry, available here. A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly
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Certainly, Robert Bly does not need much of an introduction, since it has been, rightfully or wrongfully, argued that he was one the most influential American male poets since World War II. Even if you don’t know his poetry, you may know him through his 1990’s book Iron John, which single-handedly goosed the men’s movement into hyperdrive. Loved by men for this book, and often loathed by feminists, it’s still impossible to deny it’s influence.
In Iron John (and I admit this is a simplification of his thesis), he argued that too many boys, for a variety of reasons, are being raised by women, instead of being initiated into manhood by men, especially male elders. Bly relied a lot on myth to prove his point.
After this book came out, male mentoring programs, male retreats (with drumming), and many other male support groups sprung up, and Bly became a bit of a cult figure, with people often forgetting how significant his poetry and translations could be.
He was also a friend of the prose poem, and that’s how I met him, and how we became friendly—though we had a bit of a rocky start.
In 1991, when I founded The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Bly submitted his poem “Warning to the Reader.” I had already decided to keep the cover austere—a black and white cover featuring a prose poem. What better choice than a poem entitled “Warning to the Reader.”?
When the first issue came out, many poets asked me “How did you get Bly to submit to an unknown journal and to let you use his poem on the cover?” They mentioned this because they obviously were in awe and intimidated by well-known poets—something I never have experienced. To, me, they are just people who have a talent, and more than often many of the really big names I have met in the litertary world have turned out to be jerks.
But back to their questions. First, Bly submitted work simply because I asked him to; secondly, I didn’t bother to ask if I could use his prose poem for the cover. I mean, I’m the editor. I wasn’t trying to be arrogant. I was too overwhelmed with teaching, my kids, and my own work to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings, and, as I said, “Warning to the Reader” was a perfect title for the first reader, not to mention that it’s an incredible prose poem.
Six year later, I asked Bly to be on the first prose poem panel at the AWP’s annual conference in Washington in 1997 (which I was moderator of), and to participate with three other poets in the first prose poem retreat, organized by the poet Chard deNiord in 2000 in Putney, Vermont. It was at the AWP conference where I asked if Bly would agree to be interviewed by me about prose poetry—an interview that lasted six hours over two days. The first day he asked me, playfully, how I had the audacity to put his poem on the cover without asking him. I told him what I had told friends, and he seemed pleased that I wasn’t intimidated by him or looking for a father-figure to worship. I had already had a problematic relationship with one father. I didn’t need another one for a while.
At the end of the interview, he suggested we meet the next night to finish up, which was the last night of the AWP conference. I declined, explaining that my wife was flying in and that we were hoping for a very decadent romantic evening without, for once, obsessing about our children.
“You mean you’d rather do that, then finish this interview?” Bly asked.
I paused, and then thought, What the hell? I had already gotten three hours of good stuff.
“Well, let’s see, Robert,” I said, this being the first time I called him Robert. “I have two choices: I can spend three hours with you tomorrow night talking about the prose poem, or I can spend the night with my wife, drinking a couple bottles of wine, raiding all the goodies from the hotel fridge, and taking advantage of king-size bed.”
He laughed loudly, made time for me during the next morning, and we were friends from that point on.
Below is an excerpt from our interview where Robert talks about the composition of his prose poem, “Warning to the Reader.”
Robert Bly
A discussion of Robert Bly’s “Warning to the Reader” from an interview with Peter Johnson in The Prose Poem: An International Journal
Peter Johnson: Do you think that prose poetry more than verse poetry allows for the leaps we've been speaking about?
Robert Bly: I think a lot about the word "safety." One reason I couldn't write as well when I was twenty-five as I can now is that I didn't feel as safe then. At twenty-five you think you're going to do the wrong thing, and you probably are. You meet people who belong to the class system and are hierarchical, and this fear cuts down your ability to play. Instead of playing, you're looking for the right associations, the ones an educated person might have. I don't want to make a big thing about this, but for me one of the joys in the prose poem is that I don't feel as much fear there. I'm writing in a new form, so to speak; I'm not claiming that I'm keeping up to great standards. As I've said, the most wonderful thing about the prose poem is that no one has set up the standards yet the ability to make leaps has something to do with how safe you feel because if you can't feel safe, then you can't go back to your childhood . . . .
PJ: There are some wonderful sounds in your prose poem "Warning to the Reader." That poem seems to me to be your ars poetica. The poem is a warning to readers and to writers, and it works so well because of its shifts in thought, especially the huge transition signaled by "But" in the second paragraph. I also think it's one of your darker and more ironic poems. What do you have to say about this prose poem?
WARNING TO THE READER
Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats or wheat are gone, and the wind has swept the rough floor clean. Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks between shrunken wallboards, bands or strips of sunlight. So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.
But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries.
The bird, seeing the bands of light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again. The way out is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat's hole is low to the floor. Writers, be careful then that by showing the sunlight on the walls not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out.
I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched in the comer with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed. . . . They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor . . . .
RB: Well, the thought or drive of the poem is clear. I say I feel some responsibility through the years for urging readers to look upward, follow Kabir upward. I love ascents—who doesn't love ascents? But still, the old tradition was, no step upward without a step down. No food for the angel without some food for the rat. In “Snowy Fields” I say:
The leaves at the crown of the tree are asleep
Like the dark bits of earth at its root.
But the main feeling in Snowy Fields is "the joy of sailing and the open sea!" The great joy is to follow the route of Kabir upward to that warm union he so marvelously evokes. Freud is a rat person. Freud is not popular now. It's painful to know how imprisoned our parents and grandparents were—how they couldn't see either the cracks in the walls, nor the rats' holes. With "a mound of feathers" I'm thinking of many unlucky friends in the ashrams.
If we turn and look at the sound now, I can remember writing and rewriting this poem, and deciding very early on the n sounds. "Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats or wheat are gone . . . ." One can say "after the oats or wheat are gone," or "after the oats are hauled away." I had hundreds of possibilities, and settling on n helped narrow them down.
PJ: Don't you think those word choices are not really choices, that the right words often just arrive? Is it really such a conscious process?
RB: It wasn't so much a word, it was a sound. ". . . and the wind has swept the rough floor clean. Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks between shrunken wallboards, bands or strips of sunlight. So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light." I remember having eight or nine possibilities for the adjective for "wallboards." Wallboards are boards that have been in the sun too long, and they actually become warped and smaller. So we understand there are always dozens of possibilities; but because of the n's, I chose shrunken. The last sentence, "So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light" came in during about the fifteenth rewrite.
PJ: I think that sentence is the core of the poem.
RB: Yes. I'm declaring that this poem is not really about nature or farm granaries. ''How many birds have died trapped in granaries" that are workshops or meditation retreats that seem to offer life all the time, seem to offer constant glimpses of the spirit. “The bird, seeing the bands of light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again."
PJ: And then we encounter another big shift.
RB: Yes. As I've said, there's a problem in all this fluttering toward the light, because the "way out" is really where the "rats leave and enter." Baudelaire was a rat. Remember his Flowers of Evil. "But the rat's hole is low to the floor." We're citizens of such a great country, why should we bend and go through a rat's hole? "Writers be careful then by showing the sunlight on the walls not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out."
Then I decided to repeat the warning: "I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched," and I'm coming back to the n's, "in the comer with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed. . . . They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor . . . ." Some academic poets too "sit hunched in the corner with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed." I'm not mocking academic poets; I’m saying it is difficult to have to teach ascensionist literature day after day. Ministers and priests suffer from it. So do I. So I had to finish the theme as best I could, but I also had to finish the poem musically with the n's in the last sentence because that's where I began.
“Warning to the Reader” from The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Volume 1, 1991. You can find my entire interview at Bly Interview
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss+
When I read this line from Bly, why do I hear Frost’s “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”? The gaps in the wallboard, the gaps in the stone wall simultaneously promising both imprisonment and escape. Astonishing what brave writers can do unfettered, and how readers can learn to be brave.