Thursday, November 12, 2015

'A Thousand Years of Joy' Documentary




Below is the trailer for the documentary Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy (Zinc Films, 2014) from director and producer Haydn Reiss. The film, which took four years to make and involved visits to five states and two countries, shows us Robert Bly's life journey — from son of a farmer, to radical anti-war protester, to "wild man" of a men's movement.

The well-known and celebrated translator of poets Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Rumi and Kabir, among others, Bly also is an editor, the author of numerous collections of poetry as well as prose, and himself the subject of more than a half-dozen books and another film, A Man Writes to a Part of Himself: Robert Bly, by Mike Hazard and Greg Pratt.

The documentary A Thousand Years of Joy includes interviews with poets including Donald Hall, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, the late Philip Levine (1928-2015), Gary Snyder, and Tracy K. Smith and the writer and poet Louise Erdrich, among other literary and cultural figures. 

The film recently was screened at this year's Mill Valley Film Festival, in California, and is scheduled to be shown in April 2016 at Monmouth University in New Jersey. 

The DVD is available to purchase at the film's Website.




Read my profile of Robert Bly from 2011.

Among Reiss's many other films are Every War Has Two Losers (2009; see the trailer), about the late poet William Stafford, and Rumi: Poet of the Heart (1998).

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