Advice From Robert Bly It was over thirty years ago.

Robert Bly had come from the dark earth of his farm in Minnesota to read his poetry in East Orange, New Jersey. I was chosen to guide him to the reading from Manhattan. I found Bly at an apartment on Riverside Drive, with his dulcimer and masks, like some messenger from Odin, prepared to speak directly to the unconscious of the nation. We drove through the New Jersey meadowlands, past garbage dumps and junk yards, past the red lights of radio towers reflected in the blue/green surface of the pools of trapped chemicals, as the stations pulsed their advertising across the a.m. band. Bly judged my poetry too academic, and urged me to take a job where I would work with my hands. It upset him that I had never shown any of my poetry to my father. You must not allow this separation to continue. You are condemned, he warned harshly, to marry that which you will not confront. As we were having this conversation, my father pulled his car onto the highway just two lanes away. Bly commanded me to pull alongside, as if all of the barriers that had evolved between fathers and sons since the invention of the steam engine could be overcome at sixty miles per hour.

I crossed the lanes, and honked the horn. Bly waved with all the didactic fervor he could muster. My father looked over, recognized nothing, and took the next exit. This Bly announced is what is wrong with America. Although I agreed that night, I did not go to work with my hands. I went to law school. Many years passed before I showed any poems to my father. When I did, we were not in some primordial wood, beating drums among the graves of Chippewas. Instead, there was fish on the grill, as we sat alone together in the fading August light sharing language and loss in the narrow kitchen of the small house built for one. Gene Curry 2011 Eugene R. Curry