Bronk Post

Bronk mentioned in The Dodge Blog.

KINGSBURY — The town will kick off nine days of celebration surrounding its 250th anniversary with help from one of its favorite sons — an award-winning poet who died in 1999.

At a concert Friday at Hudson Falls High School, a string quartet will accompany recordings of William Bronk reading his poetry. Bronk lived most of his life in Hudson Falls.

The concert is the first in a series of events surrounding the town’s 250th anniversary, which is May 11.

Jonathan Newell, who is organizing the concert, said he recently had Bronk’s recordings remastered. He said Bronk, whose consciousness-questioning writings won him the National Book Award for Poetry in 1982, is considered a pre-eminent poet of his generation. Brock rarely made public appearances.

“He’ll be reading his own poetry,” said Newell, executive director of the Hudson River Music Hall. “You can tell he’s drawing from his surroundings.”  More…

Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems of William Bronk

Edited by David Clippinger

William Bronk

- the conclusion from a talk given at the William Bronk Symposium, April 13, 2012, New York University

William Bronk is some kind of vast, reflective prism, who now feels to me more like a “principle” or “law” of some kind, than simply my mentor, friend, and spiritual father. Lyman Gilmore’s speculations at the end of The Force of Desire  in Appendix I about Bronk’s various dislocations during his life are viable fodder for further inquiry.  It may be very well that these dislocations - which were both terrifying and exhilarating to Bronk - provided the psychic energy which formed his unique stance to what I’ll call the “world dilemma.”  He didn’t arrive there via the formal study of Greek or Buddhist thought, or Christian Mystics, though he absorbed many of their tenants.  William Bronk’s work remains fertile ground for speculation.

[Binghamton] [Final Letter]

Dear Mark

I enjoyed Henny & Harry [full-length play].  I wish it was more Marked and less Becketted and it does get near that. Anyway, it is both perceptive and funny.

Learning to Read

It’s the reader each time that makes the poem
and has to make it in the poems words
that say what other saying doesn’t say.
He learns the language while he reads.

Affectionately

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

- from a talk given at the William Bronk Symposium, April 13, 2012, New York University

A letter from Bill in August expressed his feeling that there may not be more time for us to talk again. A letter in  mid-September expressed his grief at the passing away of my mother, and includes the poem, “Estimation”, where he speaks of “the world under the shape of the world.” 

The last letters were a jolt.  I called him and said that I wanted to visit.  This visit would be the first of three in close succession to Hudson Falls in the Fall of 1997, where I recorded our conversations, and would be the basis for the Artzar.com interview.

The interview’s range, depth, and openness are, I believe, a testament to the bond Bill and I forged over seventeen years.  He spoke in plain language about many of the themes that run throughout his work.

William Bronk in 1997 had greatly aged.  He used an oxygen machine for life support, and it was clear that his health was failing. Soon after I arrived on the first visit he said to me, “So you’re a big interviewer now,” which got us both laughing.  In a way I guess I was, having published quite a few of them in glossies with some rock stars and well-known digirati.  It seemed to be my cue.  I pulled out my micro-cassette recorder, with extra-long tapes filling my pockets.  “I’d like to record us talking,” I said.  Bill took a long breath or two from the machine, and said, “Is it out of love?”  And I said, “Yes.  You know it is.”  There was a silence as we looked at each other.  “Alright,” he said.  “Let’s see what happens.”

Three things stood out.  Intimacy, thoughtfulness, and patience.  We had to be very physically near each other for me to capture his weakened voice on tape.  Plus there was the sound of the oxygen machine, and the frequent breaks he needed to gather strength for speaking.  And I needed to slow down, attune to Bill’s condition, and settle in to the slowness of his speaking, and be thoughtful of the questions I was asking.  Intimacy, thoughtfulness, and patience had shown throughout our correspondence, as well, though in different ways.  He always took time to respond thoughtfully, both to life problems as well as my work, and when he was in worsening physical shape he would apologize for gaps in writing.

Regardless of his physical condition, there is no doubt that he was in full command of his senses, as the interview attests.  Our seventeen-year relationship came to fruition in these talks and each time I left I prayed their wasn’t a technical foul-up and the machine had captured his words.

After the third visit, I knew in my heart it was the last one, and the last time that I would see him.  It would be our final, embodied, goodbye.  Standing at the threshold of his kitchen, after a long hug, full of emotion, was heartbreaking.  He stood in the doorway waving.  I was shaking as I waved to him from my car.  I drove up the street to the near empty lot of a grocery store, parked, and wept for a long time.

[Binghamton]

I know your Mother’s condition has been a heavy concern to you and the final loss may be tempered with the loss of the pain you both have experienced. I am so sorry for your grief.

A job at Harper College would, of course, have been better than the one at Cornell but I’m glad you have that at least and the commuting may not be too bad.  Ithaca is south of the heavy snow area just below Lake Ontario.

Estimation

The self to esteem is not any self we are
nor the world as well. the world of the wordly world.
Only the world under the shape of the world
and the self there under the self to be seen.

Warmly,

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

[Kansas City]

Dear Mark

You are, of course, welcome to try a book about me and have my “blessing” to talk to other friends. However Farleigh Dickinson Press is doing Kimmelman’s book about me now which would reduce the possibilities of another Bronk book now and I’m not at all confident how many chances you and I will have to talk. I don’t want your work to be wasted. Some days the breathing is discouragingly difficult. Other times, today for one, it’s not so bad.

Affectionately,

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

[Kansas City]

Dear Mark

Good to see you in print though the magazine is so hip with colored paper, colored inks and changing type size that it’s very difficult to read. [Zavtone, Japan, 1995)

Good also what you are finding in your marriage. I’m very pleased with that.

Here, things aren’t going that well. I’ve had angioplasty with halfway results and my breathing gets worse and worse so I’m pretty much housebound or even chairbound. I may not be able to see you from Binghamton but give me a call from there to see.

Warmly,

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

[Kansas City]

Dear Mark

I am pleased to hear about your upcoming marriage. Here is a new book to celebrate [The Cage of Age]. My heath gets worse but beyond the poems in this book more good poems keep coming.

Hugs,

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

[Kansas City]

Dear Mark

No apology was necessary. I was glad for your ebullience. It’s good to have and whether we have reason for it or not it needs no excuse.

There isn’t much that anybody can do but if we love someone we you say you love me that’s a boon in itself and something to go on. Back in the sixties we used to say love is all you need. It isn’t all but your love and the love of others - from them and for them is something I think I couldn’t have done without.

I have been breathing well enough to handle the yard work on my own a little at a time even if the result is sloppy. No matter. And I have been writing and it has been like the yard work for my own pleasure most of all.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Go all the way ignorant of whom
you wanted to know and could only speculate
inaccurately. And never know yourself
either or be able to say what it is you are.

Dictum

Say to the painter and to the physicist
things do have forms which we depict for them
but the forms we depict for them are not what they are.
- The lover too should he not already know.

I enclose a small check to ease the holidays if only a little.

Hugs

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

[Kansas City]

Dear Mark

Thanks for sending the start of M7. It held my interest and when it broke off I wanted it to go on. That was in spite of my feeling that our day to day experience is, just as it is, bizarre enough that to make it mythical is to soften, rather than harden it.

I have been a long time responding but, with little to do, I seem always occupied with my own writing which even at this age still continues when it might decently have stopped, with things to read and people turning up.

Well, not to complain. New Directions is doing a SELECTED in October and Talisman is reprinting VECTORS this year. But it is only the work itself that wholly absorbs me and I think that’s the way it is with you too.

Hugs

B

courtesy Butler Library, Columbia University

 Beckett: Storming for Beauty: John Banvile in the NY Times Review of Books on The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941-1956.