[Robert Bly is a] poet I don't believe and never have. He explains in the preface to his new book, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, that he is aware of two consciousnesses, his own and those of the "inanimate" things around him: pebbles, moons, dry grass. For my part, this is Swedenborgian nonsense, very dangerous. It saps our minds as it saps the beauty of the natural world. Distance and difference are what make us conscious, not fuzzy homologies. But let it go; Bly writes against my grain, yet in some poems he catches me, and I am not off my guard. "Sometimes when you put your hand into a hollow tree/you touch the dark places between the stars." Not many of Bly's readers have done that, I imagine, but I am a country poet, like him, and I have done it. I'm...