Naomi Shihab Nye on Robert W. Bly

“People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems.”

“Robert Bly said writing a bad poem before breakfast/every day is a good habit./He did it in honor of his old friend Bill Stafford/(who also did it) after Bill died./The poems were never bad, by the way./They were great./There were a lot of them./You could work on them later, after you ate.”