Giving Mirth: A Caterpillar on the desk. Robert Bly

Giving Mirth: A Caterpillar on the desk. Robert Bly



There is a poem by Los Angeles poet, Bert Meyers, who died in 1979, in his small book, The Blue Café, that reads as follows, and, strangely enough, it is dedicated to Robert Bly:



ANOTHER CATERPILLAR POEM



     As I lift the coffee cup I see a caterpillar crawl over

the sheet of airmail stamps.

     It's head is a microphone dragging its cord. Used pipe

cleaner, so many little accordions open and close like a

mountain range of exhausted joy.

     I pick up the blood-colored sheet and the caterpillar

undulates like smoke at the edge of a field, then rises --

an electrician bewildered by wires, a man whose remote

feet are anxious staples gripping the gound.

     Should I speak now about wings and the flower's

sexual glare?

     I think it's November again. Leaves are the grand-

parents of spring. I don't mind that I've failed at times.

The desperate summer sleeps in the shade. The sweet legs

of the grass have gone away.

     I see the earth's plain face, it's wrinkled belly, the

family loaf that rises under the moon.

     The caterpillar dreams, dark lightning, on the desk.



Compare the poem above to Robert Bly's poem in his book of prose poems titled, The Morning Glory.



My name is Nicholas Campbell. I'm a poet who lives in Atascadero, California. I was a student and friend of Benjamin Saltman who was a personal friend of Bert Meyers. Ben introduced me to Meyers' book, The Dark Birds, published in 1968 by Doubleday. I was greatly influenced by it and the way Meyers, like Bly and James Wright, sometimes worked a poem.  Others, too, like my friend and correspondent, William Stafford, also presented a poem in the fashion of the poem above but set up more often in the traditional way of setting up a poem, with the title and stanzas that qualified a theme, as Meyers did in his poem above and Robert Bly did in his fashion.  The publisher of Café Solo, Glenna Luschei, called me in 1992 I think it was, to say that Bly had remarked to her that he liked two of my poems written in this fashion and that were published in the same issue of Café Solo as one of his poems. I think poets who write similarly are indeed attracted to the work of other poets who write in such a fashion. I suspect Bert Meyers may have read Bly's poem and wrote the poem above "after" Bly's, and was, perhaps, more successful at it than Bly, if one takes the time to compare the two poems for their effectiveness.



I once read Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields, and noticed a poem of his that strongly resembled one by his friend, James Wright, and that was published in Wright's iconic book of poems, The Branch Will Not Break, and both books were published by Wesleyan University Press.  Here first is the poem by James Wright:



Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's

     Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota



    Over my head, I se the bronze butterfly,

asleep on the black trunk,

blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

the cowbells follow one another

into the distance of the afternoon.

To my right,

in a field of sunlight between two pines,

the droppings of last year's horses

blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.



Here is Robert Bly's poem from Silence In The Snowy Fields:



Driving To Town Late To Mail A Letter



It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.

The only things moving are swirls of snow.

As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.

There is a privacy I love in the snowy night.

Driving around, I will waste more time.



Bly's book was published, it appears, in first edition, in 1962 and Wright's in 1963. Neither book notes when the two poems above were published individually so we have no idea what poet wrote what poem first.  That said, the resemblance cannot have been a coincidence, nor was Meyer's poem above and dedicated to Bly a coincidence; I do wonder which poem was published first in both cases.



It is my opinion that Bert Meyers and James Wright were more successful than was Robert Bly in both cases.  That said, it matters little.



Here are my two poems published in 1992 or 1993 in Café Solo and that Bly remarked after and that he told Glenna Luschei he admired:



Transient



It's my belief

and true of the plum

that bears no fruit,

it's still a plum by its leaf.



If some flowers are not flowers,

we need only a weed to show us

how to wrest honey from a weed.



Pigeons are those vagrants

in the park we love to feed.



Upward from birth,

these are men whose roots

grow above ground, whose brances

grow into the earth.



They've crossed the line

where we all pass from one

place to another, where

even the line must move on.



Horseshoes



You walk along a trail

and they appear

as if thrown from years.



Like so much of life: a game

in which our lives are pitched

at a stake in the ground.



They hang above doors

and we gallop under them

until our luck runs out.



Nicholas Campbell

Atascadero, California, 2015