Below I offered a link where you can hear Robert Bly at a poetry reading. I have listened to over half the poems so far. My favorites at this point are by Antonio Machado, and can be heard
here.
Bly has elsewhere said that deciding to become a poet was an unusual thing for a Lutheran to decide to do. Having grown up evangelical, I at first thought this was a bit of a slap at Protestant culture which ignored some of its high points. Having been around the Germans a bit, though, I think I know what he means. (I know. Bly is not German. But I have to wonder if German readings of Luther don't influence other people.) It is not so easy to argue how poetry helps the neighbor. (It can be done. It is just not so easy.) Women and men who try to follow churchly admonitions tend to end up in the helping professions. I have often felt like a fish out of water when I've been around such people. I'm glad they're there. I'm just not one of them.
In one poem, Machado asks himself "What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?" This is a little like the Parable of the Talents, only in a different vein. It offers an internal development as the standard. It may pose the question of whether or not in our own day we take the Parable of the Talents a bit too literally. What is it that has been entrusted to us? The Parable asks us to consider what the world would look like if we decided that what was entrusted to us was to be managed with the same attention, the same expectancy, the same sense of stewardship as money lent by a venture capitalist. Our application is to throw ourselves more aggressively into just that kind of world. Perhaps something has gone awry? Our reading is similar to one where we hear the Parable of the Prodigal Son and rush out and put ID bracelets on children, or hear the Parable of the Good Samaritan and warn people about travelling in the Middle East. It isn't that the applications don't have some merit. But our readings are a bit narrow and far too literal. Making them too literal, ironically, does not lead to better conditions in the real world.
One of Bly's contributions is to suggest that a male garden doesn't look like a female garden. You cannot find out what it's supposed to look like from a woman, even if a good one can offer great support in the venture. A rose garden is not a jungle. A medicinal herb garden is not a primeval forest is not an arboretum. (I offer three terms so nobody can get too insistent on which is male or which female. I don't want to put on women what their own garden should be, whether very cultivated or wild. I don't think that's always the key difference between male and female, even if we have to stake out a lot of room for wildness in our time.) Bly's colleague James Hillman has done some work on our poverty of imagination in these areas.
