From Minnesota's prairie to the best-seller list, renowned poet Robert Bly challenged the status quo

Robert Bly started out writing bucolic poems about rural Minnesota. He went on to shake up the complacent world of 1950s poetry, rail against war, bring international poets to Western readers and become a best-selling author helping men get in touch with their feelings.

The National Book Award-winning poet died at his Minneapolis home Sunday, just a month before his 95th birthday, with most of his family in attendance.

"He had no pain," said his daughter, Mary Bly. "We played Chopin all the day before, and literally all his children were around him. And when he took his final breath it was with a choral hallelujah."

In his heyday, Bly was known for making theater of poetry readings — reading poems twice, or three times, just because he loved their sound; reading other writers' work; wearing a rubber fright mask or an embroidered vest on stage; reading to the background music of drums and sitars.

But despite his theatrics, he was always intensely serious about poetry and its importance in the cultural and political landscape. He was besotted by words, publishing more than 25 collections of his own poetry, and more than a dozen others he translated. His last book, "Robert Bly: Collected Poems," came out in December 2018.

Bly lived most of his life in his native Minnesota and was a familiar figure at local literary events until recent years, when his memory began to fade. His last public reading was April 13, 2015, at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, where he launched the collection "Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life."

One by one, 24 poets read their favorite Bly poems before he himself stood and read "Moon Behind a Cottonwood Tree," "Arriving in the North Woods," and the poem that had become his late-in-life anthem, "Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat," about survival, grace and death. He thumped his cane on the wooden floor of the church in time with the words.

In his essay "The Village Troublemaker," the late poet Tony Hoagland described Bly this way: "Well over six feet, bulky of girth, with an unkempt rooster comb of thick dark hair, he stood on stage at the front of the auditorium, in a Peruvian serape." Bly, Hoagland wrote, "has always been combative. … He has attacked whatever establishment has caught his attention," from the U.S. government, to war, to consumerism, to old-fashioned views of patriarchy.

Bly was born on the family farm in Madison, Minn., on Dec. 23, 1926, one of two sons of Jacob and Alice Bly. After high school, he spent two years in the U.S. Navy, working with radar and sonar. He attended St. Olaf College for a year before transferring to Harvard, where he studied under Archibald MacLeish and was part of a group of feisty young writers — John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Harold Brodkey, George Plimpton and Adrienne Rich.

They were all irascible, Bly said in a 2000 interview in the Paris Review — himself included: "I puffed up my throat like an iguana."

After college he spent four years writing in New York City with little success, even trying his hand at drama.

"I wanted to be a playwright, and wrote a play called 'Martin Luther.' The trouble was that no one in my family talked," he told the Paris Review, and so his efforts at writing dialogue fell flat. "That effort was hopeless from the start."

Bly attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, married Duluth short-story writer Carol McLean, received a Fulbright scholarship and went to Norway to study and translate Norwegian poetry. It was there that he became fascinated by the idea of publishing South American, Scandinavian and European poets, and he began working on translations of Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelöf and others.

Back in Minnesota, the Blys moved to a rustic farmhouse outside Madison, a half-mile from where he grew up. His father had sold the family farm and bought three smaller farms.

"One he kept for himself, one he gave to my brother, Jim, because he knew he was going to be a farmer, and one he gave to me because he knew I wasn't going to be," Bly told the Star Tribune in 2009.

The Blys lived simply — the house had no running water until 1962 — and their four children, Mary, Bridget, Noah and Micah, were born there. In her memoir, "Paris in Love," Mary Bly recalled one summer when her father was in charge of lunches.

"He specialized in big, boiled tongues," she wrote. "A hunk of tongue always seemed to be on the kitchen counter, labeled, 'lunch.' I would stare at it, repulsed, until I became so hungry that I would dowse a piece in salt and choke it down."

With schoolteacher William Duffy, Robert and Carol Bly founded a literary magazine called the Fifties, in which they published avant-garde poetry and poets in translation. The first issue, published in the summer of 1958, stated, "The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned."

People paid attention.

"When I read Robert Bly's magazine, I wrote him a letter," James Wright told the Paris Review in 1975. Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, was teaching at the University of Minnesota at the time. His letter to Bly "was 16 pages long and single-spaced, and all Bly said in reply was 'Come out to the farm,' " Wright said.

The farm became a gathering place for writers, including Wright, Bill Holm, Donald Hall, Lewis Hyde, Tomas Tranströmer, Frederick Manfred and many others. After Duffy left the magazine, Wright and others helped out with the editing.

Bly's first collection, "Silence in the Snowy Fields," was published in 1962.

"I spent whole days sitting out in the fields," he told the Paris Review. "But there was peace. I had still had a great love of silence. ... I never would have written a book that interesting if I had not moved back to the country where I was a child."

In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. Two years later, he won the National Book Award for his second collection, "The Light Around the Body," which included poems harshly critical of the war. He donated the prize money to the antiwar movement.

His poem "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last" is considered one of the most important to come out of the war. It begins: "Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck. / Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets … Helicopters flutter overhead. The death- / bee is coming."

Bly continued to write, translate, edit and publish for the next 40 years; in the 1970s, he published 11 books of poetry, essays and translations. In 1975 he founded the Great Mother and New Father Conference, a gathering of poets, storytellers and mythologists, which continues to meet annually.

He and Carol Bly divorced in 1979 (she died in 2007), and in 1980 he married Ruth Counsell, a psychologist and Jungian analyst. They moved to their house in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis in 1993.

His 1990 book "Iron John" catapulted him to mainstream fame. Prompted by Bly's intense grief over the death of his father, the book became an international bestseller, captivating thousands of men, drawing them to conferences to talk about their fathers and their emotions. He and Bill Moyers explored the changing role of men in modern America in a PBS documentary, "A Gathering of Men." He was named one of People Magazine's most intriguing people.

In 2009, the University of Minnesota's Andersen Library sponsored a four-day symposium on Bly that included readings, workshops and a bus trip back to Madison, where Bly reunited with old friends and toured his old writing studio, which had been moved off the farm to the Lac Qui Parle County Museum, furniture and books intact.

In a ceremony at the museum, Bly's niece, Julie Ludvigson, recalled seeing Bly on the farm back when he was young, steering the tractor with one hand, holding an open book in the other.

"And then when he'd get over the hill, sometimes it'd be a long time before he'd come back," she said.

In addition to the National Book Award, he has been honored with the 2013 Robert Frost Medal; the Tranströmer Poetry Prize in Sweden; and Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

He served as Minnesota's first poet laureate from 2008 to 2011, won the McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000 and had his translation of Henrik Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" staged by the Guthrie Theater in 2008, starring Oscar winner Mark Rylance.

In 2015, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs' annual conference held a celebration of his work that was topped off by a reading by Bly himself — even though the poet had been diagnosed with dementia nearly a decade before.

Mary Bly talked to Minnesota Public Radio about her father's fading memory in 2013: "My stepmother was talking about watching a video of him … and he said, 'I like that guy!' And then he said, 'I wish I knew him.' So it was very hard for my stepmother in that moment. But he's both recognizing what's happening — his sense of humor is not gone at all — and acknowledging that life has different phases."

His wife, Ruth, said Monday, "He always did everything well. He allowed us to give him all the love that we wanted to. And that was pretty rare. He gave us a chance to give him a good sendoff, and that helped a lot."

Funeral services will be private, she said, but there will be a public memorial at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to a favorite poetry association.