The Drift of the World

1

Sometimes it seems there’s nothing left to read. Nothing new, I mean. In English, I mean, which is the only language I read well enough to read with my ear (that is to say, with my soul). Of course I come across striking individual poems here and there, and of course the old favorites remain mercurial and volatile and always have some new shadow to enlighten me. But I long for that bracing, immersive shock of style, the infiltration of an entire consciousness that both unsettles and restores my own, rather than the detached admiration of some singular aspect. I am fifty-three years old and have somehow never before read—or, more accurately, never properly heard—William Bronk.

A green world, a scene of green, deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window maybe) far behind the serene
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.

                                             And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. We are here. We are here.
Set this down, too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.
—Midsummer

It’s not as if this comes out of nowhere. Wallace Stevens is the obvious antecedent, as many people have pointed out. But Stevens is garish and flickering and rampant. Bronk is muted, focused, subdued. Stevens is the consummate fox, inspiration blazing in a million different directions. Bronk is all hedgehog. He knows one thing, which is that he does not truly know one thing. He sometimes seems determined not to be inspired.

But one almost gives up on this poem before that memorable end. The repetition and imprecision, the numb adjectives (“sweet,” “warm”) that actually haze the scene they supposedly refine—it all seems almost complacently vague. Then the poem stabs your soul. It’s an odd effect: the physical description in this poem feels abstract, whereas the abstraction feels concrete. This is not, in fact, an effect but a vision of reality, which for Bronk is, no matter how immediately acute, ultimately untouchable. (“‘Well, of course,’” he said, “‘we take a different approach/to reality.’ As though it were something that lay/like a lump in the yard, that anyone could kick.”) The last lines of “Midsummer” don’t memorialize—and may not even refer to—some actual event in the poet’s life but instead resonate into life itself. One sees the sound, as it were.

2

“Ideas are always wrong,” Bronk says in a poem that is an idea, in a book that is itself so abstract it’s like some Platonic library, a library in which there is one book, one person (you; Bronk is not there), one tone that has no more range than the hum of the fluorescent lighting.

Of lovers, one senses how, coupled, their joy is to think
their singleness, together, to find themselves;
how, holding each other, they think to hold
as well as themselves, the truth, reality.

We honor their wanting; what better could we want than that?
Or, more than honor, we feel what they feel.
If not for another sense, then this were all:
we sense that what they hold is not the truth.
—From The Holding

Truth. It’s a word that haunts even the poems in which it doesn’t appear. Like a lot of modern poets, Bronk’s intuition clashes with his intellect. He is driven toward a unity and finality of perception that his poems—and presumably his life—keep telling him does not exist. He feels what he cannot believe in. He will not resolve this clash with a reverberating image or epiphany, a celebration of the everlasting everyday. The “everyday,” in fact, is scoured out of Bronk. There is something ruthless, swoonless, comfortless, something just plain less, about this voice. I am put in mind of an advertisement that ran many years ago in which we see a seared and desiccated man crawling out of a desert into a town. When the townspeople gather above him, the only words the man can manage to whisper are, “Give me some potato chips.”

3

They come home. They come back. They find their way to us.
Sniffing. Nudging our legs with their noses. They are ours.
Whose should they otherwise be? They curl content.
Discarded animals we thought we could lose
by losing them. Damn them! Here they are.
—From Euclidean Spaces: Linear Time

Let me not have a life to look at, the way we look
at a life we build to look at, in the world belief
gives us to understand, a snowman life.
—From On Credo Ut Intelligam

She wants me to say something pretty to her because
we both know the unabettable
bleak of the world. Make believe, she says,
what harm? It may be so. I can’t. I don’t.
—From The Inability

4

We become more susceptible to, more partial to, the abstract as we get older. This is not because of increased understanding or any onset of wisdom, nor is it the result of diminished intensity. It’s often just the opposite. The particular is too much for us, because it is leaving us.

Is that right? Or is it that the particular is too much for us, because there is too much of it? Who could guess that all the fires and despairs of youth, all those almost intolerable nows, would eventually pile up in a mass of time too obdurate and undifferentiated to be called memory? Or, worse, that some present-day gale of pain or need might cause that mass of losses—for that’s what, at this point, they are—to disperse and go swirling around you with a force that no form, much less a mind, could contain. It can be a relief to release one’s hold on singularity for the sake of a binding truth, even if the truth is only that there can be no such thing. If we can’t salvage the bits of memory and matter that have made us what we are, let us at least acknowledge the whirlwind.

So many things happen; many smaller than a sparrow’s fall.
It is a long rain in rain country where the flow
falls steadily all day and all night long
and the next day keeps on falling in an air
half air, half water, and a world half gone
to dissolution, fluid and almost formless
in the rain of small occurrences. So many things happen
at a single time, it seems an idleness
to note them all, or try to note them all,
for who could note them, smaller than a sparrow’s fall.
—From The Rain of Small Occurrences

For Bronk it’s impossible that the whirlwind could ever cohere, much less speak back. Impossible, but not inconceivable, and therein lies the anguish. We are forever driven to become conscious of a wholeness from which consciousness exiles us. It is an iron ring. Strange, then, how almost porous this passage is, how lightly wry, how it seems to float over—or maybe through— the oblivion and fatedness it conjures. You can almost feel, through these lines in which all life is lost, life streaming. I wish Bronk could have allowed this opening stanza to stand on its own (the poem as a whole, which tries to work through the argument, is turgid). I wish he’d allowed this elusive, allusive sparrow (Matthew 10:29) to ramify into the silence its existence has conjured, freed not only from meaning, which of course Bronk never claims for it, but from the need to mean.

5

Silence is not only the source of sound but its subject, and since the speaker’s acquaintance with it is through himself, it is the speaker also.
—From Silence and Henry Thoreau

Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.
—From Silence and Henry Thoreau

We live in reality without possession or occupation and the love of reality unpossessed transfigures us.
—From Desire and Denial

6

If there is a metaphor in Bronk—and they are rare—it is totalizing. That is, it’s used to illustrate “the world” rather than any particular world you might experience with your senses.

We cling like animal young to the flanks of the world
to show our belonging; but to be at ease here
in mastery, were to make too light of the world
as if it were less than it is: the unmasterable.
—From In Contempt of Worldliness

This may be a clue to what is unique in Bronk. The philosopher Richard Kearney writes that “the transformative and synthetic power of metaphor ... turns contingency to essence.” Kearney is arguing that certain artists not only manage to create such metaphors, but also that their art, for the reader, brings essence (back) into contingency—the word becomes flesh. This assumes some original connection between word and world, which Bronk is quick to repudiate. “We know nothing of the world and will never know,” he writes in an essay called “Costume as Metaphor.” “All we say is metaphor which asserts at once our unknowing and our need to state in some language what we don’t know.” But I’m not sure this is quite as conflicting as it seems. Kearney is talking about individual metaphors. Bronk is referring to “all we say”; that is, the totality of language is a single metaphor for what we can’t express. He sought a poetry true to this vision of language and reality. The particular itself is not important to him, but particularity is. Oskar Fischinger once said to John Cage that “everything in the world has a spirit which is released by its sound.” For Bronk, thinghood has such a spirit. This is why all of his poems have, in effect, one sound. It’s like the frequency of Being.

7

It is no small thing to chisel an idiolect out of (or is it into?) the solid rock of one language. We think of language as being protean, plasmic, ever shifting and extending to accommodate a collective consciousness. And this is true. But for some poets a mother tongue is, besides this living instrument, a lumpen collectivity within which, it seems, they are trapped. One must somehow both inhabit that protean flow and break it open. This is a muddled image, I realize, so just imagine what it’s like to live it.

A comparison might help. Whitman, so purposefully “democratic,” so at ease with the demotic, invented a form, not an idiolect. (“An unrealized potentiality of form,” Bronk complained in a letter, but never mind.) In his work one feels great tectonic shifts far below the surface of literature, not some violent crack in the magma. Dickinson—do I even need to finish this sentence?

“My poems come to me in their own language,” Bronk said in an interview, “and if they were not in that language, they would not have any force.” This is the dilemma of every poet (and it’s a tiny minority) who is both forced into and freed by an idiolect. Basil Bunting and David Jones are such poets. Robert Frost and W.H. Auden are not. Gwendolyn Brooks, yes. Elizabeth Bishop, no. Bronk’s place in this schema is obvious. His poems are quirks, freaks, almost belligerently unbeautiful, though that suggests a stance and not a nature. He’s the armadillo of poetry: armored, elusive, prehistoric, a survivor.

8

I deal with despair because I feel despair. Most people feel despair but they are not prepared to deal with it except pretend that it’s not there. I think it’s there metaphysically, that it is not a matter of an individual predicament. It’s in the nature of reality and not to be denied.
—From “A Conversation with William Bronk,” Credences

Reality is brought to mind by the inadequacy of any statement of it, the tension of that inadequacy, the direction and force of the statement.
—From Preface to Vectors and Smoothable Curves

But the effort I want to make is not to become more lucid and straightforward but to become forceful and vivid enough that the discomfiting ambiguities of the poems will have to be swallowed and even a little digested.
—From A Partial Glossary

9

I’ve spent a month of mornings with the gray, flimsy Talisman edition of Life Supports: New and Collected Poems. Somehow even the plainness of the book—it looks almost self-published—is heartening. And the way the poems are crammed together one after another as jagged and implacable as a pile of scrap metal. Nothing to see here, the book almost shouts. Or mumbles, rather, as even his rare exclamation points can’t lift Bronk’s lines to a shout. Everything is bent, balked, Bronked. Many of the poems literally stutter. Lines repeat, break apart mid-sentence, backtrack—not as if stuttering were a deficiency to be overcome but almost as if stuttering were an aesthetic, as if anything said too plainly were a lie.

Common sense is talking; it tells us what
we have to believe is true, the obvious:
we are born, we die, we perceive the shapes of things,
and these are the shapes that anybody can see,
granted good will, granted a will to be sane.
Listen to it, oh listen to it. Yes!
Hold hard to clarity. Stay here.
But, Jesus, God, this is a world where we
are under compulsion not to stay with the sane
—where besides the shape of things, is shapelessness,
randomed with atoms whose dance we please to be,
all private, nothing and all in a world
where the sense we commune together to make is wrong.
—From The Duplicities of Sense

All private. This is another essential ingredient of Bronk, a privacy so absolute that there can be no such thing as shared speech, or feeling, or “sense,” or whatever. And yet this assertion is qualified as being both “nothing and all.” And then there is that strange interjection, “But, Jesus, God.” If he’d only said Jesus or God, it would sound like an ordinary secular curse, but the repetition makes it more intense and specific, as if it were an appeal, even a prayer. And it is a repetition: there is a theology implicit within it (and in the poem as a whole). Christ sacralizes matter and awakens (restores) a kinship with every human life therein. (Gerard Manley Hopkins: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”) God is the comprehensive and comprehending “reality” before which every human understanding falls short. (St. Augustine: If you think you have understood God, it is not God.) The sense we commune (another word with Christian echoes) to make together is “wrong,” but the act of communing to make such sense has to mean something, right?

Wrong:

That we believe in nothing is a hard requirement because we want to believe in something: some political theorem, say, or religious creed or, sparing these, some unevaluated strength of our own as though in our person we might prevail and that prevalence had the salience of some proof. For what? For our dying? Because we do. Unable to think of ourselves this way, think instead of someone ten thousand years from us one way or another will have or had a name, a place and costume no more and as much as we have. And who is he? Even so far as we know, it is a pretense of knowing. Abandon that.
—From Costume as Metaphor

But to believe in nothing is a belief. It is a consolation to declare that you will never be consoled. Again and again Bronk finds (and suffers) the limit of what the human mind can know. This is a feat. But unlike some poets with whom he shares certain formal and philosophical orientations—Dickinson and Stevens, for instance—Bronk never discovers a way to release himself into unknowingness. This can be frustrating. One sometimes has the sense of a man lashed to a mast in his own living room.

And yet: Randomed with atoms whose dance we please to be. This is the kind of shining, autonomous line, and the kind of seducing music, Bronk usually avoids, and which therefore merits close attention. I’d read this poem several times before I realized I was unconsciously inserting an “ourselves” after “please,” which is definitely one possible reading. But the grammar demands another one, which seems to me truer to the poem. Instead of ourselves, it’s the purely material world that’s pleased (which must not be purely material if we can “please” it?) by the fact of our being—provided, that is, that our being partakes of whatever kind of sense lies beyond that which is “common.” What is common sense? “We are born, we die, we perceive the shapes of things.” This different, saving kind of sense, then, must call into question each of these assertions. Perhaps we are not only born but created. Perhaps there is a kind of life that is not nullified by death. And perhaps we do not in fact rightly perceive reality until we perceive the excess existence brimming within it. I’m not saying Bronk is saying all this. I’m saying he’s not-saying it. Not-saying, in fact, is Bronk’s ultimate ambition, here and elsewhere. Not this, not this, not this, he says over and over, until, in the interstitial silences, some volatile possibility of this-ness begins to glow. “Apophasis” is the theological term for this. “Agnosticism” is what Bronk himself settles on late in his life. Both terms are a bit anodyne for the exhilaration and anguish any whole-souled effort at inhabiting this ontological space demands. Here are two poems placed right on top of each other in the collected poems, from a book called (remember that whirlwind?) Finding Losses:

Once, I thought I might once know
some minor thing of the world but a start though.
That was a long time. There isn’t an I
or a world to know. There is something not known.
—The Late Agnostic

If we are asked how we shall live in the world
it doesn’t ask us. It lives us if it will
or else, no matter, leaves us alone. Have
thine own way, Lord. Have thine own way.
—Old Him

10

For a long time I thought the loneliness of poetry was terrible, in both senses of that word. It was a grief that every poet suffered in order to be the voice that Being needed to acquire, and it was also a source of spiritual power. Now I see that loneliness is general. Poetry merely gives form to this fact and makes it available—and therefore bearable.

11

Bearable?

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
—The World

This may be the saddest poem I know. As with other Bronk poems it sends me reeling through my own life grasping after my own anchors: my wife and my work, my God. Oh no.

And yet this minor poem brings me major peace. Why? Because it is beautiful, and beauty triggers an instinct for an order beyond the one it enacts. And because usually we suffer the drift of the world but do not really feel it. It happens to us but not in us. One of the functions of art, says Kearney, is to make us active rather than passive with regard to our memories and therefore our futures, to help us move “from melancholy to mourning.” True enough, both in general and with regard to this one poem. And yet every time I read this cosmically-compressed elegy my chief feeling is not grief or mourning, but elation.

How does this little poem accomplish all of this? Sound, form, the frequency of Being. Much of Bronk’s technical genius involves repetition, careful substitution, deletion. The way this poem stutters and repeats makes readers unconsciously anticipate, after the opening phrase of the final line (“I thought you were”), that they are going to hear the entire first line again. Which is what happens, in a way. The fragment (which can also be read, hauntingly, as a complete sentence) disrupts the expectation, but in the space occupied by the “oh no” the mind, consciously or not, “hears” what is missing: the anchor. Leaving it out, paradoxically, puts it back in. Not-saying. In the middle of this ghostly poem there floats, unaccountably, an iron anchor. Something of our deepest sadness, which is our deepest loneliness, has been faced and, precisely because it has been faced, lifted up. It is not in any way lightened. It is, literally, dead weight. Which makes the way it’s been raised all the more miraculous.

12

Nothing left to read? “It is better to say ‘I am suffering,’” writes Simone Weil, “than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’”

13

It is late morning and I have been sitting despairing over what a life in poetry amounts to and little three-year-old Greta has just come from next door bearing a book about the necessity for a second conversion that her father thought I’d want to read. She is curly-haired, her whole being golden, alert as a bird. We talk for a bit about the redemptive qualities of “asahgo” bagels, and then she skips back across the yard to her house. We are here, we are here. Set this down, too, as much as if an atrocity had happened and been seen. The earth is beautiful beyond all change.