My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems – Intimate Ghazals of Startling Beauty, Wildness, and Astounding Energy

by Robert Bly

Readers have found Robert Bly’s ghazals startling and new; they merge wildness with a beautiful formality. The ghazal form is well-known in Islamic culture, but only now finding its way into the literary culture of the West. Each stanza of three lines amounts to a finished poem. “God crouches at night over a single pistachio. / The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming / Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.” The ghazal’s compacted energy is astounding. In a period when much American poetry is retreating into prosaic recordings of daily events, these poems do the opposite. My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is Robert Bly’s second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars , and the leaps even more bold. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War, “Call and Answer”: “Tell me why it is we don¹t lift our voices these days / And cry over what is happening.” The poems are intimate and yet reach out toward the world: the paintings of Robert Motherwell, the intensity of Flamenco singers, the sadness of the gnostics, the delight of high spirits and wit. This book reestablishes Bly's position as one of the greatest poets of our era. After many years of free verse in American poetry, years which have been very fertile, the inventive ghazal helps the imagination to luxuriate in a form once more. We are seeing a poetry emerge that is recovering many of the great intensities that modern art and poetry has aimed at and achieved in earlier generations.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Robert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

If we can’t get
To port, perhaps it’s best to head for the bottom.
[...]
All those who have ruined their lives for love
Are calling to us from a hundred sunken ships.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing Wings

It's all right if Cezanne goes on painting the same picture.
It's all right if juice tastes bitter in our mouths.
It's all right if the old man drags one useless foot.

The apple on the Tree of Paradise hangs there for months.
We wait for years and years on the lip of the falls;
The blue-gray mountain keeps rising behind the black trees.

It's all right if I feel this same pain until I die.
A pain that we have earned gives more nourishment
Than the joy we won at the lottery last night.

It's all right if the partridge's nest fills with snow.
Why should the hunter complain if his bag is empty
At dusk? It only means the bird will live another night.

It's all right if we turn in all our keys tonight.
It's all right if we give up our longing for the spiral.
It's all right if the boat I love never reaches shore.

If we're already so close to death, why should we complain?
Robert, you've climbed so many trees to reach the nests.
It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

- Robert Bly

[David Drum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Bly’s My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, published in 2006, is his second book of poetry utilizing the ancient Arabic ghazal form, and many of the works are lovely and thought-provoking in part or on the whole. A few of the works seemed unfocused on first reading, but I liked them much more the second time.

Bly’s gazhals are 18 lines, with three-line stanzas, a bit longer than English sonnets. The traditional ghazal often contains five couplets and a refrain, but many of these poems are closer to American free verse although a few do contain a refrain in the third line of each stanza and a few have some rhymes.

The poem “Call and Answer,” written in opposition to the Iraq War, is the best-known poem here. Like the others it is filled with the spirit of the ghazal, in which the poet is an unrequited lover, addressing an illicit or unattainable love. In “Call and Answer,” Bly addresses the citizens of the United States who are “silent as sparrows in the little bushes” as the nation marches off to war. One of my personal favorites is “Hiding in a Drop of Water,” like many a poem of mystical longing and an acknowledgement of approaching death.

The tradition of occasionally using the poet’s own name in the last verse is a bit unsettling in an English poem, since it appears the poet is talking to himself in the third person, as Robert. Here it mostly works to deepen the sense of loneliness and alienation from the distant love object which in these poems is never a beautiful, enchanting woman.

Bly’s strength as a poet, as in other collections such as the magnificent Light Around the Body, which won the National Book Award years ago, is not strictly musical but more in crafting startling images that resonate in the mind. He’s a Midwestern guy, and we some of that in the flat, direct speech and images of wren’s nests, water holes and runaway horses although we also get Samson, Plato, Cezanne, Brahms and Bach. At more than 80 years of age Bly is quite aware of approaching death. This is evident in the last two stanzas of the book, in a poem, “Stealing Sugar from the Castle.”

I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

The ghazal originated in sixth century Arabia and the mystical Islamic form has enjoyed periods of popularity in the West, most notably championed by Goethe. The form is enjoying a moment of popularity here with poets such as W.S. Merwin writing ghazals which are also sung in several cultures.

[Suhaib · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Bly aligns his words in such a way that my senses secretly met under every line. There's a unison—a coming together—a merging that entices you to grab the one person you feel closest to and whisper in his/her ear, We are in this together, the you and the me of the world.

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even better than his previous book. On each reading I gain new insights. Poems bring in threads that, at first, seem unrelated. Then by the end, and after a few rereads, there is that AHA! moment.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s good if you become a soul and then disappear.”

What a great book of poems, it teaches the mind to leap!

[Bennett Slibeck · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m branching out 👣 walking into new territory 👽 learning from the poets 😓 the nature of grief

Of these 47 poems I found 8-10 deeply affecting

Funny how often he mentions himself by name

This guy really likes the sitar

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the elder statesmen of American poetry explores old age, spirituality, nature, literature and music in this book of ghazals. Bly is too honest to try to reconcile light and dark, but alert to possibilities for redemption. My copy is thick with marked passages:

“Our oak will break and fall. Even after their tree/Has splintered and fallen in the night, once/Dawn has come, the birds can do nothing but sing.” Bach’s B Minor Mass

“Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days/And cry over what is happening.” Call and Answer, August 2002

“Please don’t expect that the next President/Will be better than this one. Four o’clock/in the morning is the time to read Basilides.” Advice from the Geese

“We know it’s good not to have sharp opinions;/But would you still think so much of Noah/If he had thrown away his bag of nails?/Four times this month I have dreamt I am/A murderer; and I am. These lines are paper boats/Set out to float on the sea of repentance”. The Pelicans at White Horse Key

“Each of us is a Jacob weeping for Joseph./We are the sparrow that flies through the warrior’s/Hall and back out into the falling snow./I don’t know why these images should please me/So much; an angel said: “In the last moment before night/Brahms will show you how loyal the notes are.” Brahms

[Jose Araguz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently on my blog, while discussing Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions, I found myself saying that part of a poet's job is to see how much he can get away with. In "Thousand Years", Robert Bly fulfills this side of his job as a poet. There are lines in here that could be poems on their own - the same of which can be said of some of Neruda's questions. A strong collection of poems experimenting and owning the ghazal form. I believe that a poet's relationship with a form changes over time, becomes more intimate and real. What you read here are not traditional ghazals, nor are they intended to be. What is here are Bly's ghazals, and, ultimately, Bly himself. Bravo!

[Dan Gobble · Rating 5 out of 5]

The further I got into the book, the more I grew to enjoy what felt to me as clunky, roughly cobbled together lines at first, but after growing accustomed to the ghazal's form I began to see them more as shards of colored glass forming beautiful mosaics. Think stained glass windows catching the fire of an evening sun. Think of a flotilla of a sort of haiku-like group of boats, loosely tied together, winding down a river. Each stanza heading in a generally agreed upon bearing, but offering its own drift and heading with its own particular thrust and push of the paddle in its stretch of the river, all the while being tugged here and there by unseen, deep and swirling currents. Straight line, linear, western, overly rationalistic thinking will get frustrated when the math of these lines doesn't yield to its formulas and reason. But the cracks in the logic allow the light to shine in and the heart to sing.

[Michael Patton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A day after I finished this book, I heard about Bly's death. So, after reading poetry about grief, loss, and joy, I began to grieve a loss. But at the same time, felt joy at what this human being had given me, given us.

[Milt · Rating 3 out of 5]

poetry, of the month. booked frags, some

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed by this book. The cover and title are beautiful, and so is the language of the poems within, but as I went on I couldn't find anywhere close to enough differentiation between the poems to give the experience of reading any kind of real structure.

See, the thing is that Robert Bly claims these compact flavor bombs of language are not merely poems but, specifically, ghazals, a Middle Eastern form hundreds of years old, despite fulfilling few or none of the formal requirements of ghazals. ... Why do the formal requirements matter, though, especially as Bly impressively captures the ghazal style in other respects? Well, because the stanzas of an individual ghazal are meant to be tied together not particularly by subject matter, but instead by mood and, less discreetly, by ending every stanza the same way: a rhyme-word (one rhyme for the entire poem) followed by the poem's refrain. Bly nails the tenuousness of the thematic connection between stanzas of an individual poem here, and mostly completely punts on the rhyme and refrain that link them together. Add that to the fact that every poem in this collection is exactly the same length -- eighteen lines, divided into six stanzas of three lines each -- and the result is forty-eight poems with very little to distinguish one from another.

There's no topography to this book. Many individual lines are stunning -- “It was still dark when the fingers began to play. / Now we who have listened so hard have nothing to say” or “Our task is to become a moist tongue / By which subtle ideas slip into the world”, to take a couple of early examples, and lines like that are why this book gets three stars -- but they get lost in the wash. To get a better feeling for what a book of ghazals can do, I recommend Agha Shahid Ali's Call Me Ishmael Tonight!

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book of poems all written in a modified version of the Middle Eastern form ghazal, in which each stanza has to address a different subject, and the final stanza must somehow evoke the author's identity. The modifications Bly made were in the line and meter counts, which he posits had to be shifted to fit English. It's an intriguing form, which stays fresh because it doesn't get formulaic with its shifts in subject. Fittingly, Bly uses a lot of Biblical references in these poems, but not in a devout way, more as an exploration of faith in these war torn times. Some of the more obscure references are difficult to parse through, but all are worth the work, as there is much wisdom to be read and re-read in these pages, as the poet ages and shares the humility and reverence for life that comes with it. Also, it is timely, to explore a form that is part of the cultural heritage of a place we are at war with, as a way of understanding our differences and searching for a common humanity. This is where the final stanzas are so powerful, evoking the identity of the writer, pulling the political into the personal, and applying it to our own feelings and actions. Bly is a wonderful poet, and this collection shows why he continues to be read.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bly's second volume of ghazals, a form derived from Persian poetry, doesn't come closer to his best work: The Light Around the Body and Sleepers Joining Hands, one of the essential books of the 1960s. The ghazal is a form designed to break down rational processes and encourage the exploration of psychic states that might otherwise be beyond reach. The best English-language ghazals are the ones Adrienne Rich included in Leaflets and The Will to Change, which push the connections between political and personal experience in ways which recall Whitman at his very best or Godard's films. The problem with Bly is that I feel like I'm being preached to, a problem that's been present in his work since he emerged as the guru of the men's movement with Iron John (which I do recommend). There are some good lines here-
Bly certainly understands the relationship between rhythm and image--but I came away without any feeling of real discovery.

[Dan Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Call and Answer is a great poem! Try these lines ,
"Robert, those high spirits don't prove you are
A close friend of truth: but you have learned to drive
Your buggy over the prairies of human sorrow."
I won't tell where they are - find them yourself - we all have our own journey.

[Snickerdoodle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't pick the book as much as I did the poet. I've enjoyed his work in the past. The title suggests joy but I didn't find much of that in this book. All the poetry is in a form called 'ghazal' and maybe that's what didn't register with me.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this a couple years ago, thought: meh.

Now it's picked up again and I think I'll be currently reading it for a long time--one of those books you reread as you go. Bad. Ass.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a signed copy and met the man, so how could I not give it a good review?

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good. Most not.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 B661my 2005