WILLIAM BRONK'S PARADOXICAL ACCOMPLISHMENT

Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems. William Bronk. Jersey City: Talisman House Publishers, 1999.

Henry Weinfield

William Bronk died in February, 1999, shortly after his eighty-first birthday. He had been suffering from emphysema for many years, and for several had been attached to an oxygen line, but his poetic production had not flagged. Indeed, he often told friends in these last years that it was poetry that was keeping him alive. His most recent volume of poems, All of What We Loved, had appeared in 1998, and at his death, not only had he completed a new collection, Metaphor of Trees, but a number of poems in addition. This final, posthumous volume includes a poem that Bronk may have composed the day of his death and that was found beside his body. Like most of the poems he wrote during the last ten years, these are short (some only two or three lines long), aphoristic, declarative (sometimes to the point of being didactic), occasionally gnomic, and in the plain style that he had long cultivated. Bronk's muse spoke to him usually at night while he was asleep, and when he rose in the morning he would write that day's poem down. He revised more than he liked to admit, but very often the final version of a poem is exactly what he initially heard.
I rank Bronk as one of the two or three most important American poets of the post-war period. His roots are in Frost and Stevens (among earlier twentieth-century poets), and it was largely through Stevens that he developed the stylistic mastery that is already in evidence in The World, The Worldless, the great collection he published with New Directions in 1964. From Stevens, Bronk derived the loose iambic pentameter line that allowed him the spontaneity and flexibility to craft an original and philosophically radical vision into poems of great power. What Bronk took from Stevens was not the gaudiness of "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," say, but the plainness of "The Snow Man," but in Bronk's voice that plainness took on a prophetic cast that is not present in Stevens, and a grandeur that is perhaps more somber than what is heard in the earlier poet.
Bronk's greatest work, by and large, is to be found in Life Supports: New and Collected Poems, the volume he published in 1981 with North Point Press (now sadly defunct), which won the American Book Award for 1982. (This volume has now been reissued by Talisman House, the publisher of Bronk's later years.) Bronk published ten subsequent collections including this one (not including the edition of Selected Poems that I edited for New Directions in 1995), and these contain many marvelous poems-poems of far greater value than what the inflated reputations of our time have produced-but on the whole, I think that there was a falling off. In the poetry of Bronk's greatest period, there is a balance (so rare in American poetry) between the prophetic visionary and the meticulous craftsman. The "redundancy quotient" was always rather high in Bronk's work because of the persistence with which he articulated an essentially unwavering vision, but the language was so vibrant in the poetry of the period of the sixties to the early eighties that somehow this didn't matter. In the later work it does matter because craft has been so thoroughly subsumed by vision that the boundaries between one poem and the next tend to disappear. And as Blake said, the greatness of any art depends on the clarity of the bounding line.
In the best of these late poems, there is a starkness and simplicity that reminds me as much of the pre-Socratic philosophers as of anything in the poetic tradition-but we forget that the pre-Socratics were, in fact, poets. Except for its ironic title, "Goes Way Back," for example, is pure Parmenides-if Parmenides had written in a twentieth-century American idiom:

Whatever is is in the present tense.
When it no longer is we see it was
a misperception they had, not a thing
that really is. Is always was. (17)

"It must be abstract," said Stevens, but a poem like this one cultivates a kind of abstraction-joined to a simplicity of phrasing-which is not exactly in fashion in contemporary American poetry. It is a lovely poem, if not quite a great one. What disturbs me (slightly) is not its slightness, but the way in which the poem wavers between free verse and metricality. The first two lines (with the delicate enjambment to the third) are iambic pentameter; the third seems to go fuzzy in the middle of the line, and the fourth is iambic tetrameter. One could easily "fix" the third and fourth lines to make them pentameter ("a misperception that they had and not / a thing that really is. Is always was"), but Bronk would undoubtedly have said that this isn't what he heard, and in any event he seems to follow Stevens in wavering between the freedom of Whitman and Williams and a more formal pentameter line, between the immediacy of voice and the impersonality of meter.
At their best, the very slightness of these poems gives them point and accentuates what one might call their play of grammar, the way in which the resources of language are played off against the conception. A three-line poem entitled "Eternity" (and how many poets today have the nerve to entitle poems "Eternity"?) can illustrate the point:

Always isn't at any particular time
so everness is also a neverness.
At times, we are more comfortable with that.

This is the real "language poetry," it seems to me, because it assumes what poetry had always assumed in the past, but what it seems no longer to assume (and I include the so-called "Language Poets" in this): that the language of a poem can internally reflect the external conception, and that poetic tension inheres in this process of reflexivity. But the third line, which I think is only apparently flat, has something of a Robert-Frost-cracker-barrel-American-sage-aw-shucks quality; though certainly at a tonal remove from the tensile feeling of the first two lines, I think it somehow works.
The increasing abstractness of Bronk's style, it is now clear (he has a poem in Life Supports entitled "The Increasing Abstractness of Language" [179]), is the analogue for an Old Testament-cum-Calvinist vision in which all graven images are not only false but beside the point:

The real name, should there be one,
couldn't be spoken. The image given to man
was unimagined, the image not to be graved.
From the beginning, both god and man
were set apart from everything spoken and seen
and were only uncertainly sensed some by some. ("Storied," 23)

The irony here is that it is not only God that can't be imaged (or imagined) but man as well. ("Some by some" is a risk, but I think it pans out in the end.)
In their slightness, also, these poems accentuate the pathos of our relationship to the infinite:

The marks we make to give us whens and wheres
are inside other marks and they extend
to even larger ones until we find
the marks are marks but not on anything. ("Demarcation," 41)

This sort of pathos, which has always been the hallmark of Bronk's work-and which connects him to a writer like Pascal-can extend from the abstractness of cosmic space to the immediacy of human intimacy and love:

The loved is not that person the lover loves
but what that person holds in the lover's sight
and holds sometimes not knowing what it holds
and could be anyone no matter who
because it's not that person that the lover loves.
("Du Côté de Chez Marcel," 48)

Always in Bronk there is a strange dialectic between the aesthetic formality of the poems and the sense of formlessness they describe, between the epigrammatic concision and ironic wit of their style and the manner in which their thought is aimed at totality or at the absolute:

In order for order we think invariant time,
invariant space and of all in earthly terms
as walls, say, ceilings and level floors,
as beginning somewhere, ending somewhere else.
But, even to say no walls, no floors, no ends,
even as negatives, these aren't the words
for an all that resists whatever order we make. ("Resistance," 100)

What do we make of a poetry which, while putting its faith in clarity and simplicity, as far as its presentation is concerned, is so remorselessly transcendental in its vision as to countenance no human (merely human) touchstones or accomplishments? A three-line poem entitled "Fides et Ratio," coming at the end of a volume which comes at the end of a long life in poetry, raises this question:

The final accomplishment would be to know
the emptiness of any accomplishment
-to have that pleasure at the end of it.

Bronk's accomplishment (with its manifold pleasures) is now complete, and while his place in twentieth-century poetry is, I think, assured, we shall be interrogating the nature of that paradoxical accomplishment for many years to come.