Morning Poems

by Bly, Robert W.

• ISBN13: 9780060928735
• ISBN10: 0060928735
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-11
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Often personal and autobiographical, the poems in this collection include meditations on the art of poetry, on Robert Bly's boyhood on a Minnesota farm and on the myths and stories that shape our mutual world. It also includes a sequence of poems on Wallace Stevens and meditations on aging and facing death. Written with the discipline of a poem each day, the collection cements Bly's stature as an important modern poet.

Table of Contents

Early Morning in Your Room	p. 3
The Shocks We Put Our Pitchforks Into	p. 4
Why We Don't Die	p. 5
Hawthorne and the Elephant	p. 6
The Old Woman Frying Perch	p. 7
Conversation with the Soul	p. 8
He Wanted to Live His Life Over	p. 9
The Glimpse of Something in the Oven	p. 10
Bad People	p. 11
Things to Think	p. 12
Two Ways to Write Poems	p. 13
The Barn at Elabuga	p. 14
The Russian	p. 15
Some Men Find It Hard to Finish Sentences	p. 19
Visiting the Eighty-Five-Year-Old Poet	p. 20
All These Stories	p. 22
The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog	p. 23
Reading in a Boat	p. 24
Waking on the Farm	p. 25
When Threshing Time Ends	p. 26
A Family Photograph, Sunday Morning, 1940	p. 27
A Farm in Western Minnesota	p. 28
For a Childhood Friend, Marie	p. 29
What the Animals Paid	p. 30
The Bear and the Man	p. 31
When My Dead Father Called	p. 32
The Green Cookstove	p. 35
The Playful Deeds of the Wind	p. 36
It Is So Easy to Give In	p. 37
Wanting More Applause at a Conference	p. 38
Making Smoke	p. 39
Thinking About Old Jobs	p. 40
Conversation with a Monster	p. 41
The Black Figure Below the Boat	p. 42
The Man Who Didn't Know What Was His	p. 43
The Mouse	p. 44
The Storm	p. 45
The Yellow Dot	p. 46
It's As If Someone Else Is with Me	p. 49
A Week of Poems at Bennington	p. 57
The Dog's Ears	p. 59
When the Cat Stole the Milk	p. 60
Being Happy All Night	p. 61
The Widowed Friend	p. 62
We Only Say That	p. 63
Wounding Others	p. 64
What the Buttocks Think	p. 65
What Bill Stafford Was Like	p. 66
A Poem Is Some Remembering	p. 67
Wallace Stevens and Mozart	p. 68
Rethinking Wallace Stevens	p. 69
Tasting Heaven	p. 70
Wallace Stevens in the Fourth Grade	p. 71
The Waltz	p. 72
The Neurons Who Watch Birds	p. 75
A Question the Bundle Had	p. 76
Seeing the Eclipse in Maine	p. 77
Clothespins	p. 78
The Face in the Toyota	p. 79
The Scandal	p. 80
Looking at the Stars	p. 81
After a Friend's Death	p. 82
The Parcel	p. 83
My Doubts on Going to Visit a New Friend	p. 84
One Source of Bad Information	p. 85
Thoughts	p. 86
The Grandparent and the Granddaughter	p. 87
The Ocean Rising and Falling	p. 88
Ocean Rain and Music	p. 89
Looking at Aging Faces	p. 93
November	p. 95
Three-Day Fall Rain	p. 96
Winter Afternoon by the Lake	p. 97
Isaac Bashevis and Pasternak	p. 98
People Like Us	p. 99
A Christmas Poem	p. 100
Reading Silence in the Snowy Fields	p. 102
Words the Dreamer Spoke to My Father in Maine	p. 103
Visiting Sand Island	p. 104
A Poem for Giambattista Vico Written by the Pacific	p. 105
For Ruth	p. 108
A Conversation with a Mouse	p. 109
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Morning Poems

Early Morning in Your Room

It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasplike
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water--
It seems you've travelled years to get here.

Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least;
Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.

Now you have a room. Those light-hearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter
To His Father, are all here. You can dance
with only one leg, and see the snowflake falling

With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That's what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.

Morning Poems. Copyright © by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Morning Poems by Robert Bly
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.