Books in Brief: What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? by Robert Bly (HarperCollins, 90 pp., $16)

THE PEDAGOGUES of the Men’s Movement promise to make poets out of their disciples. “When a man begins to develop the receptive side of himself and gets over his initial skittishness, . . . he gets to write poetry,” writes Robert Bly in Iron John, one of the Movement’s Great Books. In his new collection of “object” poems, Bly engages all our senses in his fluid prose rhythms as he describes a potato, a grain of rice, looking at a dead wren, a godwit. Surprisingly, for a man who has inspired more than his share of foolishness, he manages to capture well many little things often left unnoticed-until he abandons the disciplined focus required of object poetry. Introducing the book, Bly writes: “I hoped that a writer could describe an object . . . without immersing it like a negative in his developing tank of disappointment and desire. I no longer think that is possible.” And so Bly passes the objects of his poetry through the filter of his Men’s Movement philosophy, in such a way that twigs, for example, become a “part of the wild things of the world, noticed only for a moment by a heavy, nervous man who sits near them.” Because the Movement demands self-centeredness of men, Bly’s object too frequently becomes himself, causing his poems to disintegrate into diary entries.

DA

About the Author

Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant university professor at Harvard University, and a former candidate for governor of Massachusetts.

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What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? by Robert Bly (HarperCollins, 90 pp., $16)

THE PEDAGOGUES of the Men’s Movement promise to make poets out of their disciples. “When a man begins to develop the receptive side of himself and gets over his initial skittishness, . . . he gets to write poetry,” writes Robert Bly in Iron John, one of the Movement’s Great Books. In his new collection of “object” poems, Bly engages all our senses in his fluid prose rhythms as he describes a potato, a grain of rice, looking at a dead wren, a godwit. Surprisingly, for a man who has inspired more than his share of foolishness, he manages to capture well many little things often left unnoticed-until he abandons the disciplined focus required of object poetry. Introducing the book, Bly writes: “I hoped that a writer could describe an object . . . without immersing it like a negative in his developing tank of disappointment and desire. I no longer think that is possible.” And so Bly passes the objects of his poetry through the filter of his Men’s Movement philosophy, in such a way that twigs, for example, become a “part of the wild things of the world, noticed only for a moment by a heavy, nervous man who sits near them.” Because the Movement demands self-centeredness of men, Bly’s object too frequently becomes himself, causing his poems to disintegrate into diary entries.