small daughters, one Mary, about 2½ (there is a poem about her in Jim Wright’s book) and a new one, Bridget, about 1¼. Do tell me how it all turned out! I will definitely come to see you some time this year. We’ll be here another month, and then we go either to Paris for three months, or Oslo for three months (we’ll go both places, but the order isn’t decided yet). So I do want to know when you will be leaving for the United States. How long will you be in that strange Goldwater-ridden nation? Is your family going along?
There is not much to say about James Wright. As he said on the dust jacket of his Saint Judas, he has led a “bookish, uneventful” life. Of course that’s a lie, but anyway. He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a steel-plant area, not far from where W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Patchen, and Jonathan Winters (our best comic for thirty years) was born. He makes his living as an English teacher (particularly of Dickens) in the colleges and universities, and absolutely refuses to teach any “creative writing” or poetry writing courses. He has refused several offers of “poet in residence” positions, when it involved such teaching; always to the astonishment of the department heads. He is married, and now divorced, with two sons. He has a wild streak in him that makes him a very ambiguous, even frightening, figure in the eyes of the academics. The reason for that uneasiness in their eyes is this: he went to Kenyon College (where John Crowe Ransom was) on a scholarship, and thereby escaped from the steelmill town. Later he took a Ph.D. at the University of Washington where Theodore Roethke was. He began writing poems in the accepted, iambic, traditional manner, which was everywhere in the 1950’s, and by many such people was considered the very best in the country in this traditional sort of poetry. Suddenly he renounced the whole thing, and began to write an utterly different sort of poetry, made of mingled streams of savagery and tranquillity. This upset the academic poets considerably, and they still haven’t recovered.
[------]
I hope all is well with you! I have written to Bonniers for your books (the one I was reading belonged to the Univ. of Minn library, and I don’t have it here in Europe with me), and so I hope to send you a new translation of one of your poems soon.
with very best wishes,
Robert
3-9-64
Dear Robert Bly,
Thanks for your very welcome letter, and for the poems! I’d better reply right away before three months have suddenly gone by. Naturally I too have begun to write a poem about unanswered letters (with the title “Not to Worry, I’ll Write Soon”)—it’s the insidious old telepathy at work again. But the poem never did come out anywhere; the lines I want to keep were about something completely different, namely the snails that sail forth so majestically in the August night.
For the moment I find myself in a lovely and unaccustomed position. I started my vacation yesterday. I’ve dreamed about that vacation so much that I’d begun to believe it would never come. I’m the only one of the so-called higher officials who hasn’t been away from the INSTITUTION this summer, I’ve had to sit here “for the sake of continuity.” And this institution has resembled Cyprus. Accordingly I haven’t had the time or strength to write anything. And just when it looked as if I could, the editor of a collection of Auden’s poetry called and barked like a watchdog because I haven’t delivered any of the translations of Auden I promised. At night the baby cries. Yes! THE BABY CRIES. It went well, happily. Paula was born in the hospital at Linköping at the beginning of July and was entirely as she should be, despite all the damned uterine complications. It turned out to be a lightning-fast birth that had already started in the car. Twenty minutes after we got to the hospital the baby was born. So it was a happy summer in spite of everything.
I’ve taken my Saab out of
There is not much to say about James Wright. As he said on the dust jacket of his Saint Judas, he has led a “bookish, uneventful” life. Of course that’s a lie, but anyway. He was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a steel-plant area, not far from where W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Patchen, and Jonathan Winters (our best comic for thirty years) was born. He makes his living as an English teacher (particularly of Dickens) in the colleges and universities, and absolutely refuses to teach any “creative writing” or poetry writing courses. He has refused several offers of “poet in residence” positions, when it involved such teaching; always to the astonishment of the department heads. He is married, and now divorced, with two sons. He has a wild streak in him that makes him a very ambiguous, even frightening, figure in the eyes of the academics. The reason for that uneasiness in their eyes is this: he went to Kenyon College (where John Crowe Ransom was) on a scholarship, and thereby escaped from the steelmill town. Later he took a Ph.D. at the University of Washington where Theodore Roethke was. He began writing poems in the accepted, iambic, traditional manner, which was everywhere in the 1950’s, and by many such people was considered the very best in the country in this traditional sort of poetry. Suddenly he renounced the whole thing, and began to write an utterly different sort of poetry, made of mingled streams of savagery and tranquillity. This upset the academic poets considerably, and they still haven’t recovered.
[------]
I hope all is well with you! I have written to Bonniers for your books (the one I was reading belonged to the Univ. of Minn library, and I don’t have it here in Europe with me), and so I hope to send you a new translation of one of your poems soon.
with very best wishes,
Robert
3-9-64
Dear Robert Bly,
Thanks for your very welcome letter, and for the poems! I’d better reply right away before three months have suddenly gone by. Naturally I too have begun to write a poem about unanswered letters (with the title “Not to Worry, I’ll Write Soon”)—it’s the insidious old telepathy at work again. But the poem never did come out anywhere; the lines I want to keep were about something completely different, namely the snails that sail forth so majestically in the August night.
For the moment I find myself in a lovely and unaccustomed position. I started my vacation yesterday. I’ve dreamed about that vacation so much that I’d begun to believe it would never come. I’m the only one of the so-called higher officials who hasn’t been away from the INSTITUTION this summer, I’ve had to sit here “for the sake of continuity.” And this institution has resembled Cyprus. Accordingly I haven’t had the time or strength to write anything. And just when it looked as if I could, the editor of a collection of Auden’s poetry called and barked like a watchdog because I haven’t delivered any of the translations of Auden I promised. At night the baby cries. Yes! THE BABY CRIES. It went well, happily. Paula was born in the hospital at Linköping at the beginning of July and was entirely as she should be, despite all the damned uterine complications. It turned out to be a lightning-fast birth that had already started in the car. Twenty minutes after we got to the hospital the baby was born. So it was a happy summer in spite of everything.
I’ve taken my Saab out of
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