This discussion between best-selling authors Deborah Tannen (You Just Don't Understand) and Robert Bly (Iron John) is presented as a sort of continuing education program. It is utterly delightful. The authors are both funny and serious. They care a great deal about the topic of women and men's conversational styles. The production is so well done that even questions from the audience are picked up by the microphones. This would be excellent for both bookstores and public libraries in which these books are great favorites and academic libraries with strong communications programs.
Through poetry, music and storytelling, Robert Bly takes us on a thought provoking and entertaining journey captured by this extraordinary live audio program recorded at the Open Center in New York City. Bly says parents make it clear there are certain parts of us they don't like, 'you're too noisy' ... One image is to say we take that part and put it into a bag. Our independence and feeling goes into the bag, the bag is getting heavy and two miles long...You could say we spend our life until we're 20 deciding what to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our life trying to get it out again."
These broadcast quality archival recordings have been edited down into an amazing journey led by one of the great and entertaining American thinkers in recent history. Robert explores the poetry of Yeats and goes deep into his biography to help bring to light the inspirations of his great works. Part english/history lesson, part poetry reading and a deep exploration into the personality of men, this never before released program will be a treasure for long-time fans of Robert, fans of W.B. Yeats and folks new to Robert and his timeless performances.
Robert Bly looks beyond the individual psyche to the problems of our public life, explaining why we as a culture are so adrift. What he finds is an infantilized society in which the battle between youth and age has been won by youth. Bly argues that in the collapse of the old patriarchal world-view, we are becoming a world of "siblings" who do not look up to heroes, leaders, or God, but only sideways at an army of siblings like ourselves. Through the psychological lessons embedded in ancient folk tales, Bly challenges us to move beyond our own adolescent envy and fantasy.
Robert Bly is in beautiful form, reading seven of his own poems from Stealing Sugar from the Castle and Coleman Barks reads some segments from the Shams Tabriz Sayings, as well as Rumi poems.
Robert Bly poet, storyteller and mythologist takes us on an imaginative and disturbing journey in this live recording. Disturbing both personally and historically, the commentary reminds us that the mythology we have inherited is often defective. One story reports that the very moment we are born a snake appears with us which the doctor throws out the window and, unknown to us, has been growing large in the forest. Just as the church refused to accept the reality Galileo saw in his telescope, literalists have removed from mythology, by refusing to include them, the dark soul images that nourished our ancestors.
During this talk, Iron John author Robert Bly gives a delicate and lively view of the fantastic flowering of feeling in 12th Century Provence. The feeling thought, developed from Arabic, Gnostic, and Albigensian sources, blossoms as love poetry famous at that time. In this recording, Bly distinguishes between the literal mode, the psychological mode, and the mythological mode, and locates the "Amor" or ecstatic love in the latter, which led to Sufism among the Arabs. Bly's recitation of Provencal poetry brings to awareness the terrible loss we suffered when these traditions were uprooted and destroyed.
In this deeply learned book, poet and translator Robert Bly offers nothing less than a new vision of what it is to be a man. Bly's vision is based on his ongoing work with men and reflections on his own life. He addresses the devastating effects of remote fathers and mourns the disappearance of male initiation rites in our culture. Finding rich meaning in ancient stories and legends, Bly uses the Grimm fairy tale "Iron John," in which the narrator, or "Wild Man," guides a young man through eight stages of male growth, to remind us of archetypes long forgotten-images of vigorous masculinity, both protective and emotionally centered. Simultaneously poetic and down-to-earth, combining the grandeur of myth with the practical and often painful lessons of our own histories, Iron John is a rare work that will continue to guide and inspire men-and women-for years to come.
We take our title from an Eskimo poem recited by Bly during this extraordinary dialogue with one of America's greatest contemporary poets. Bly brings us in touch with the deeper chords of consciousness residing in us all.
