One by one, 24 poets read their favorite Bly poems before Bly himself stood and read Moon Behind a Cottonwood Tree, Arriving in the North Woods and the poem that had become his late-in-life anthem, Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat, about survival, grace, and death.
Olaf College for a year before transferring to Harvard, where he studied under Archibald MacLeish and was part of a group of feisty young writers — John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton and Adrienne Rich.
The trouble was that no one in my family talked,” he told the Paris Review, and so his efforts at writing dialogue fell flat.
Bly attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, married Duluth short-story writer Carol McLean, and then received a Fulbright and went to Norway to study and translate Norwegian poetry.
Back in Minnesota, the Blys moved to a rustic farmhouse outside of Madison, a half-mile from where he grew up.
The farm became a gathering place for writers, including James Wright, Bill Holm, Donald Hall, Lewis Hyde, Tomas Transtromer, Frederick Manfred and many others.
“I spent whole days sitting out in the fields,” he told the Paris Review.
In 1968, he won the National Book Award for his second collection, The Light Around the Body, which included poems harshly critical of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.
Bly continued to write, translate, edit and publish for the next 40 years; in the 1970s, he published 11 books of poetry, essays, and translations.
His 1990 book, Iron John, catapulted him to mainstream fame.
In a 1990 documentary, A Gathering of Men, Bill Moyers and Bly explored the changing role of men in modern America.