News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness

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University of California Press, 1995 - 305 páginas
Publisher's description: Acclaimed poet and translator Robert Bly, known most recently for gatherings in which he guides men to greater self-knowledge, has created a unique multicultural collection of 150 poems that demonstrate the union of spirit between the poet and the natural world. Their "twofold" nature celebrates inner and outer consciousness, the participation of the object in the poetic vision. In this splendid anthology, Bly introduces the poems with extensive commentary to show society's changing attitudes toward nature - a movement away from anthropocentric assumptions fostered by Descartes, the church, imperial ambitions, and the rise of technology. Those beliefs held that human thought was the only sentient force in the universe and resulted in the subjugation of the natural world to the designs of the human intellect. Starting with the works of Pope, Swift, Milton, and others representing the "old position," the volume proceeds to the poetry of Blake, Hl̲derlin, Rilke, Goethe, Keats, and on to the enlightened sensibilities of Rexroth, Levertov, Berry, and, among many others, Bly himself. Bly's translations of Goethe, Rilke, Neruda, Lorca, Jimňez, Nerval, and others provide cross-cultural examples. The news this poetry brings is good news - of consciousness operating outside our own, all around us, and universally available to receptive spirits.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE
3
THE THREE KINGDOMS OF NATURE Gotthold Lessing
18
GOLDEN LINES Gérard de Nerval translated by Robert Bly
38
WHEN GEOMETRIC DIAGRAMS Novalis
42
APHORISMS from Pollen and Fragments Novalis
48
FROM LINES COMPOSED A Few miles above
62
THE HOLY LONGING Goethe translated by Robert Bly
70
THE MOST OF IT Robert Frost
85
MILKWEED James Wright
163
THE NIGHTBLOOMING CEREUS Robert Hayden
169
MIDDLE OF THE WAY Galway Kinnell
176
THE OYSTER Francis Ponge translated by Robert Bly
216
H Lawrence
223
RIGORISTS Marianne Moore
229
BATS Randall Jarrell
237
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO Rainer Maria Rilke
245

WHALES WEEP NOT D H Lawrence
98
THE LAMB WAS BLEATING SOFTLY Juan Ramón
106
ENIGMAS Pablo Neruda translated by Robert Bly
114
MOVING AHEAD Rainer Maria Rilke
120
THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS Kenneth Rexroth
133
WAXWINGS Robert Francis
139
JOURNEYS Gary Snyder
144
viii
147
COME INTO ANIMAL PRESENCE Denise Levertov
150
IF THE OWL CALLS AGAIN John Haines
156
THE GREAT SEA Eskimo woman shaman
257
OFFERING Zuni adapted by Robert Bly from
261
THE FALCON Anonymous England perhaps
267
FISH Shinkichi Takahashi translated by Lucien Stryk
273
A MEDITATION ON A POEM BY GOETHE
280
A MEDITATION ON A POEM BY YEATS
286
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
295
INDEX
301
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Acerca del autor (1995)

Robert Bly lives on a farm in his native state of Minnesota. He edited The Seventies magazine, which he founded as The Fifties and in the next decade called The Sixties. In 1966, with David Ray, he organized American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The Light Around the Body, which won the National Book Award in 1968, was strongly critical of the war in Vietnam and of American foreign policy. Since publication of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a response to the women's movement, Bly has been immensely popular, appearing on talk shows and advising men to retrieve their primitive masculinity through wildness. Bly is also a translator of Scandinavian literature, such as Twenty Poems of Tomas Transtromer. Through the Sixties Press and the Seventies Press, he introduced little-known European and South American poets to American readers. His magazines have been the center of a poetic movement involving the poets Donald Hall, Louis Simpson, and James Wright.

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