CALLING

“Well, you know, as men we’re taught not to not to feel pain and grief, as children. I remember seeing one of my boys, he was maybe about nine. He was hit in a basketball [game], maybe hit by the ball, and I saw him turn around and bend down and get control of his pain and his grief before he stood up again. 

That same boy would be so wonderful in being open to wounds and crying and so on when he was very small. But, you know, the culture had said to him, “You cannot give way to that, you must turn around and when you must turn around; you must have a face without pain or grief in it,” right?

So therefore, as a son of an alcoholic, I received that. I mean, when you’re in an alcoholic family, you’re hired to be cheerful. 

That’s one of your jobs. 

You’re appointed that way. 

One is hired to be a trickster, another I was hired to be cheerful, so that when anyone asked me about the family. 

I’d have to lie in a cheerful way and say, “Oh, it’s wonderful, yes, indeed, we have sheep, you know, and we have chickens, and everything’s wonderful.”

Well, then if you can deny something so fundamental as the deep grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. 

So then how can you write poetry, then, if you’re involved in that much denial? 

So the word denial was very helpful to me.

MOYERS: 

Did you resent your father? Did you feel -

BLY: 

No, I think that what happened was that as far as the grief goes, being appointed to be the cheerful one in the family, I would tend to follow a movement upward like this, hmm? 

More and more achievement, more and more and so on, hmm? 

That’s what you’d do. And finally you’d redeem the family’s name by doing this.