Guest blogger Girard Tournesol

It was 1990 and I was cramming for my graduate thesis when I first heard about a new book that sought to reconnect men to their archetypal, mythical heritage. 

Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly opened my eyes to the hidden generational wisdom imbedded in fairy tales and legends; the divine masculine and by proxy, the divine feminine. 

I had never read Bly before Iron John, and then I couldn’t get enough.  I threw myself into his poetry and as a poet, writer myself I was mesmerized.  He became a core inspirational voice for me and I can only hope there is a nugget of him in everything I write. 

Iron John, a book using a Grimm brothers fairy tale for its core premise that the meaning of manhood had been lost in modern times, spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times best seller list. The internet was stupid in 1990. I bought my copy at a book store.  If you’re in the vicinity of a quaint community book store/hip coffee shop stop in and browse, they just might have a copy.  

Robert is still with us at age 96 and published a book in 2015, an inspiration to us all. In addition to Iron John he is the author and primary translator of countless works of poetry. 

With a body of work spanning some eighty years, it was difficult to find just one to share with you.  But I am indeed drawn to Robert’s work in the style of  “Poem 040: Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.”

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.
 ~Robert Bly

Be still, my heart. 

What I love about Poem 040 is something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to capture in my own practice.  Here is plain language that reaches the heavens. 

Notice the conversational, almost folksy tone. The poem has three ingredients that to me at least, make it a masterpiece.  It joins “the common” with “the ethereal” for “the profound.” 

The poem is bursting with meaning. 

As an aside, here is the test of meaning: ask yourself, would I have these words as my epitaph?  If you read a poem that seems like nonsense, perhaps even containing items from the poet’s grocery list, the answer is clearly, humanly—no.  

Give me meaning, or give me death. 

But perchance I’m wandering around a cemetery as I’ve been known to do and find Line 4: Driving around, I will waste more time, carved in granite.  Here, at this random tombstone I shall pause for the profound.  And so it is with Robert’s Poem 040, as is the case with most of his poems. These works will be around edifying people for a long time. That poet’s last grocery-list poem, sigh, will not.  

Cold. Night. Deserted. That first line so simple, common, like a warbler’s song. Glorious. Rather than think about the “reality” of the scene Robert is painting so vividly, I want you to try and interpret that line, this poem, with your feelings. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I just didn’t get it,” try feeling it.  In my opinion, and I’m a just another poetry reader/lover like you, starting straight out the shoot with this line one; I feel alone, vulnerable with a hint of death looming in that cold night. You know, like everyday life during a global pandemic?  There is a quality of expansiveness. Timelessness. 

Line two: only “swirls of snow” are moving. “Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world.” Bly shows you the very definition of ethereal.  

Line three is immediately at the mailbox.  An “antagonist” that only takes, eats something we have that is precious.  Our writing. Our intimacy. Our stamps! 

Our heart and soul are in that letter. You’ve got to feel that. Even back in the day, when we actually wrote letters because letters meant something. Something of ourselves is inserted in a letter, sealed, kept private, then gone, “out of our hands,” forever.  Will it get there? What will the reader think? That letter, the hard iron of “the eternal cold unforgiving taker, never giver,” is nothing less than the uncertain reality of life and death. 

Thinking of our own mortality, alone, at night, in winter (during a global pandemic when countless of us have died), can only be done in those precious private moments he describes. You know what he means—empathy—beyond words. He wants there to be so many, they seem wasted. 

You love these moments with him.  We all do. It is transcendent, human to do so. It means something. Everything. 

Girard Tournesol is a resident of The Pennsylvania Wilds region of Northern Appalachia. A regular contributor to The Watershed Journal, he’s been published regionally and online at Dark Horse Appalachia.  Find him at GirardTournesol.com