The Iron John Podcast
The Iron John Podcast is a production of the Minnesota Men’s Conference (MMC).
The Minnesota Men's Conference was founded by poet, author, and storyteller, Robert Bly in 1984. In the past decades, the conference as reached out to men of all ethnicities, orientations, nationalities, backgrounds, life experiences, and ages. Any person who identifies as a man is welcome to participate. We welcome men from all over the country, from large cities to rural communities, and from all over the world. In general, the men who attend our conferences are interested in living the question of what it means to live a mythically-informed life of depth and purpose, a life of soul.
The Iron John Podcast
The Iron John Podcast: Poetry, Our Companionable Animal
In preparation of the 2025 Minnesota Men's Conference, October 7-12, 2025, Timothy Young spoke with poets, Jonathan Stensland and Jesse Dermody, about the importance and value of poetry at the conferences and how poetry is our "companionable animal", personally and communally at the conference and in our daily lives. This conversation wanders through many landscapes of language and the sources of poetry.