This site is part of North Harris Montgomery Community College's "Great Writers on the Internet" homepage. The page contains links to poetry and quotes by the author as well as interviews and critical essays.

Poetry Breaks, Robert Bly Video Clip
http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ES/Video/poetry83.html

Contains a brief video of Robert Bly discussing poetry and reciting one of his own poems.

Poetry Daily interview with Robert Bly
http://www.poems.com/blyinter.htm

A 1997 interview with Peter Johnson, in which Bly discusses his own work and the nature of poetry in general.

BIOGRAPHY
Robert Bly (b. 1926) was born in Madison, Minnesota. After serving in the Navy, Bly attended St. Olaf College before transferring to Harvard. At Harvard Bly joined a famous group of poets who were undergraduates at the time, including Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and John Hawkes. In 1956 he received a Fullbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry. Bly discovered many excellent poets whose work had not been translated into English, and decided to start a literary magazine for poetry translations named The Fifties,, which later became The Sixties, and then The Seventies. Through this publication American audiences were exposed to relatively unknown poetic geniuses such as Pablo Neruda and Georg Trakl. In 1962 he published his first book of poetry Silence in the Snowy Fields. His next collection, The Light Around the Body published in 1967, won the National Book Award. Bly has published over 40 books of poetry and translated some of the world's most respected poets including Rainer Maria Rilke, Tomas Transtromer, and Pablo Neruda.