William Bronk – Oh What a Relief He Is
The Poet’s Life Work Goes Against the Grain of Much Recent Poetry
Oct 7, 2009
A large chunk of recent work by young American poets seems to seek out a new kind of sense, reveling in disjunction and language-games, and not in clearly organized thematic argument or presentation. This kind of poetry has often, over the last 40 years, been labeled “language poetry,” whose practitioners range from the ultra-famous John Ashbery to the somewhat well-known Leslie Scalapino and Susan Howe. But the movement is so mainstream now that labels don’t really fit—for many young poets, it’s simply what poetry is supposed to be.
A cause for celebration? In some ways, yes. Poetry has always been the guardian of intellectual experimentation and the enemy of shallow thinking. These young poets are as far from reality-TV show contestants as it’s possible to be. Here’s the catch, however. While disjunction highlights the lightning speed of a fine mind bypassing hopelessly simple connections, and while language-games tell us much, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, about how language functions within a general human context (a highly original sense of language is perhaps more universal than private), for many readers, shallow thinking is what this kind of poetry embodies, rather than fights against.
The Best Kind of Difficulty
It’s a relief these days to turn back to the work of William Bronk, who died in 1999 at the age of 81. His poems are carefully considered, rich philosophical musings in which language is a tool for chipping away at any meaningful thoughts about life and living that our minds can construct.
“Language poems,” or whatever they should be called now, seem to relinquish such an effort and surrender to the free play of words, creating an enigmatic, opaque difficulty. Bronk’s poems, on the other hand, are difficult in the best sense of the word: because attempting through language to precisely locate depth of meaning in our lives is difficult. To turn back to Bronk is not to retreat into an outdated, simpler theory of poetry, but to question the value of certain flights of 21st century poetic experimentation.
Bronk lived most of his life in Hudson Falls, New York. In 1946, he left a teaching job at Union College to take over the management of the business his father started, Bronk Coal and Lumber Company, and retired 30 years later. His first book of poetry was published in 1956, and received little recognition. It was not until the publication by North Point Press of his Collected Poems, Life Supports, which won the American Book Award in 1982, that he became a significant presence on the American poetry scene, a worthy heir, for instance, to the deeply beautiful philosophical musings of Wallace Stevens’s later poems.
Having The Right Stuff
Several poems in Life Supports show how aware Bronk was of the kind of poetry he was writing, and read like rallying cries against “language poetry.” Here’s some lines from a poem called “Rational Expression”:
“There is a whole world
of inner knowledge which, guardedly,
becomes experience but yet remains
beyond expression as if it were unknown;
but we know, we are at home there
and go as often as we can, open the door,
walk around the rooms, sit down and look,
wish we could tell, could take our friends there.”
And from “On Credo Ut Intelligam”:
“I disclaim the invented world
of which we say there might be ultimate things
unknown about it, not wholly understood,
but we have the fundamentals anyway,
and the stuff before us, and someone knows,
or someone will shortly know. That world, which asks
our belief, and offers us understanding back,
has cost too much in what it shuts away
of all our awareness, the reaches of ignorance.”
The plain-spoken yet intricate developed thinking in these lines (just a taste of what Life Supports has to offer), in addition to making Bronk more than a Wallace Stevens clone, is a quality absent from a lot of 21st century American poetry. Let’s hope poetry readers keep Bronk and others like him in their own thinking in times to come.
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