“…my Chicago had its moments: the Surrealist attack on Robert Bly that ended in a fistfight and the arrival of police.” ~ Paul Hoover
One four-below-zero winter’s night, I took the “el” train from my studio apartment in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood to the Body Politic in Lincoln Park. It was the mid-1970s. On that bone-chilling night, a high-impact though little known incident in Chicago poetry history took place.
An older poet from Minnesota, Robert Bly, was making a special appearance at the Yellow Press Readings at the Body Politic Theater. I had never heard of him before. In years hence, he became well known as the spearhead of the American men’s movement, and author of Iron John: A Book About Men, a national bestseller.
The room’s floodlights and brightly painted wall behind a small dais stage radiated welcome warmth against the bitterly cold night. But still shivering from my trip down there on the “el,” I kept my coat and cap on the rest of the evening. Before long, Robert Bly moved to the center of the dais. The lighting above Bly’s head appeared as bands of yellow, light orange and salmon enveloping the man in a fiery glow. He wore a loose-fitting white shirt and faded blue jeans. His white hair was mid-length and flowing, his face clean-shaven. A quiet comfort spread through the room as the frozen streets outside enclosed us in their silence.
Bly began. I found his poetry accessible, nature-driven, and dealing quite a bit with his home state, Minnesota. Unlike other readers, and in the fashion of a teacher, he repeated each brief poem twice so we could more fully absorb it. Soon, he donned an elaborate animal mask.
Then, according to poet Al Simmons, “Five of them…four men and a women… approached him from each flank, and the woman came down the center aisle.”
“We thought it was part of the show,” said poet Terry Jacobus. “Then the group knocked host Richard Friedman out of the way.”
Simmons continued, “Bly sat perfectly still as two of them each poured a five-pound bag of white flour over his head, then stood back while the other three began shooting Bly with water pistols.”
I had remembered it as bags of powdered Sakrete. Jacobus mentioned something about “confetti.” In addition, Bly received one or more pies-in-the-face. It looked like pie plates filled with shaving cream to me (Three Stooges-style?), while others recall it as custard.
Poet Michael Anania, by circumstance, was busy giving a more polite poetry reading that same night on the other end of town at the South Shore Cultural Center with poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, and Leon Forrest. “I was the token white guy,” he said. Although he missed the Bly reading because of this previous engagement, he had quickly got wind of the concurrent event and heard that Bly’s “tar and feathering” ingredients comprised flour, eggs and milk.
Getting back to the Bly reading crashers, just who these culprits? None other than a group who called themselves the Chicago Surrealists, more of a political than artistic enclave, who published a magazine at the time called “Arsenal.” Among them were poets Penny Rosemont and her now-late husband Franklin Rosemont.
It was of the latter that the late poet Paul Carroll wrote, “One hulking surrealist, dressed in Army-Navy store black, gargled at the audience that theirs was retribution for some recent review Robert had written in the New York Times, daring to criticize their hero, Octavio Paz.”
I later learned that Bly was one of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s translators. Neruda, it turns out, who was politically a communist, and had been sympathetic to the Soviet leader Stalin. It was Stalin who had persecuted the Surrealists during his regime. For this and the crime in the paragraph above, Bly was doubly guilty in the eyes of the surrealists. Their goal that night? To “tar and feather” Bly in a shake-and-bake call-out for his transgressions.
Bly stood without a word against his attackers. Then, according to Paul Carroll, “Several leapt from the audience, led by poet and bookseller Douglas MacDonald, who gave the bums the rush out.” Also, the Stone Wind poets, Simmons, Jacobus and Henry Kanabus charged the stage. Simmons said, “There was a skirmish and we pushed them out of the theater…into a vestibule that became pitch black when the lobby doors shut behind us.”
According to Jacobus, “We wrestled, punched and landed out on Lincoln Avenue. The cops were called.” In the dark, someone (not Jacobus) inadvertently had clocked Penny. Another Surrealist ended up in the gutter, and at least two had bloody noses. “We almost got arrested for poetry,” said Jacobus.
The defenders “…ducked back into the theater, to cheers and a standing ovation,” according to Simmons.
Meanwhile, the evening’s hosts had come to the aid of Bly to guide him out of the spotlight into the nearest bathroom. Once quickly cleaned up, Bly returned to the dais and finished his reading. Carroll said, “Robert Bly’s performance was a tribute to the spirit of poetry itself. It was not fanciful to say that we heard one of the voices of Orpheus speaking, at times, through him. The show went on for hours and hours. It should have gone on all night.” Afterward, it was drinks all around at the Oxford Pub next door.
All I really knew was that both Neruda and Bly were poets I admired. As well, I later came to personally meet and appreciate surrealists Penny and Franklin Rosemont, as honorable people, poets and publishers of the great Wobblie poet and friend Carlos Cortez. I always liked the Stone Wind guys, too, and had visited the Evanston home of Douglas MacDonald more than once with friend Effie Mihopoulos. Among such poets, who can choose sides? I was never quite sure if the small Surrealist group’s “statement” was as keenly directed as they had calculated, but I’ll never forget that night. ##
~ excerpted from the nonfiction/memoir/creativity guide Frugal Poets' Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren't a Poet