Issa's Untidy Hut: Writing Again (poem)

Friday, August 30, 2013

Robert Bly: Writing Again

Photo by ecstaticist

A couple of weeks ago I did a post with a poem from This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years (revised edition) by Robert Bly and mentioned I would be getting back to it.

Back we are - here's another poem from that collection which I like very much.

Writing Again

   Oval
   Faces crowding at the window!
   I turn away,
   Disturbed—

   When I write of moral things,
   The clouds boil
   Blackly!
   By day's end
   A room of restless people,
   Lifting and putting down small things.

   Well that is how I've spent this day.
   And what good will it do me in the grave?

        ~ Robert Bly

Not unlike the part of the poem, "Women We Love Whom We Never See Again," I quoted previously, the opening here feels like we are in the other place, the land of dream, of archetype, of the subconscious.

And what of the title?

I suppose there are a lot of ways to read that last line, that question, and I would suggest that some of them are positive. But I'll leave that to you, the reader - is it something that feels negative, positive, indifferent? Just a conjurer's trick, or something more?

For me, the answer is in the first stanza.