Robert Bly

I am amazed, there is nothing you can do for me, I am content.
I see my mother and father, the night pervades them and enfolds them.  
Everything I've said about them, I take back, and yet I still maintain what I have said.

For as long as I can remember I've been hearing the story: that James Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, had nearly given up writing early in his career. What saved him? An unexpected copy of a new magazine called The Fifties and the ensuing correspondence with its young poet-editor Robert Bly. The correspondence bloomed into a friendship, and Wright's best and most famous poems were written at Bly's farm in Madison, Minnesota. As I say, I've been hearing this for as long as I can remember. But without a biography or a volume of Wright's letters to confirm the story, it always remained in the realm of rumor. 

Being born at all amounts to peering out from a cliff
Over the sea. The great jellyfish who spread their arms
Out on the sea tell us how deep our ignorance is.

Have you noticed the horses galloping past us?
Perhaps they are horses with no riders at all.
Perhaps they are riders who have turned into horses.

On a clear day, the jealous
Are jealous of ash leaves,
Flies, all jewelry of air.

The hawk sweeps down from his aerie,
dives among swallows,
turns over twice in the air,