{"id":82808,"date":"2015-02-17T19:33:19","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T00:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82808"},"modified":"2015-02-17T19:33:19","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T00:33:19","slug":"a-green-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/17\/a-green-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A Green World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bronk001\"<\/a>

William Bronk<\/p><\/div>\n

Whenever anyone mentions William Bronk, they usually preface the word poet <\/em>with obscure<\/em>, or little known<\/em>, or forgotten<\/em>. Bronk\u2014born February 17, 1918; he died in 1999\u2014is apparently read so rarely that Daniel Wolff\u2019s piece on him in last spring\u2019s Literary Review <\/em>was called \u201cWhy Nobody Reads William Bronk<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst, it\u2019s hard,\u201d Wolff writes. \u201cThe second reason is: it\u2019s hard.\u201d He outlines Bronk\u2019s ars poetica: <\/p>\n

\n

Everyday things\u2014which includes people\u2014are indeed real, but they\u2019re not what you think they are. They don\u2019t correspond to their names. And they never will. Whatever you call them, it\u2019s a \u201cmiscalling.\u201d It would seem to follow that the act of writing, of trying to put things into words, is impossible. Because anything any poem tries to describe is, by this definition, unknowable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not the sort of ethos that sends readers running out to bookstores. I remember reading printouts of Bronk\u2019s poems in college alongside work by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. I ended up with books by Creeley and Olson on my shelf (not, to be clear, that I reach for either of them on a regular basis) but no Bronk. If you\u2019d asked me why, at the time, I didn\u2019t cotton to him, I would\u2019ve probably said something glib about not needing any more Wittgenstein-type headaches in my life and then gone off to smoke a bowl.<\/p>\n

I gave Bronk a second look, as I\u2019m sure a number of other readers did, when he figured in Ben Lerner\u2019s novel 10:04 <\/em><\/a>last year. Lerner\u2019s narrator is searching for a gift for an old mentor, Bernard, and he decides on a collection by Bronk:<\/p>\n

\n

Wallace Stevens, I remember Bernard telling me on another occasion, had heavily influenced two poets Bernard particularly loved: Ashbery, whom everyone rightly celebrated, and Bronk, who was largely unknown. Ashbery wrote in color, Bernard said, whereas Bronk wrote in black and white; Ashbery embraces Steven\u2019s lushness, whereas Bronk stripped it down, as if Stevens were being translated into a limited vocabulary. As a result, Bronk\u2019s poetry as suspended between philosophical heft and an almost autistic linguistic simplicity, a combination that, I must say, had never really worked for me: I\u2019d read all his books out of a sense of duty, but I was usually bored or unconvinced by the affect of profundity. But now, when I found Bronk\u2019s selected poems on one of the shelves and opened the book at random, the power of it was all finally there, finally real for me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As proof, Lerner\u2019s narrator cites Bronk\u2019s \u201cMidsummer,\u201d which begins:<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can read the whole poem here<\/a>. It sits in that sweet spot between the lapidary and the plain, and it makes a great case for Bronk\u2019s necessity; \u201cto Bronk,\u201d Wolff writes, \u201cpoetry is about what exists independent of writing. It\u2019s about that something, that force, which sweeps poetry (and just about everything else) away \u2026 Behind Bronk\u2019s deadpan voice, there\u2019s often humor, warmth, even compassion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later in 10:04<\/em>, the narrator attempts to forge an email from Bronk. \u201cDid Bronk even have e-mail?\u201d he wonders in an aside. \u201cProbably not.\u201d A safe assumption, to go by this interview conducted toward the end of his life<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Are you familiar with the Internet, the World Wide Web?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know there are such things. My archives at Columbia and the University of New Hampshire are indexed on the Internet. From time to time somebody will say to me, \u201cOh, I saw one of your poems on the Internet the other day.\u201d I don\u2019t know who put it there or why.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know, either. But I\u2019m glad it\u2019s here.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever anyone mentions William Bronk, they usually preface the word poet with obscure, or little known, or forgotten. Bronk\u2014born February 17, 1918; he died in 1999\u2014is apparently read so rarely that Daniel Wolff\u2019s piece on him in last spring\u2019s Literary Review was called \u201cWhy Nobody Reads William Bronk.\u201d \u201cFirst, it\u2019s hard,\u201d Wolff writes. \u201cThe second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[15283,3263,14640,17076,7221,165,17075],"class_list":["post-82808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-15283","tag-ben-lerner","tag-hudson-valley","tag-midsummer","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-william-bronk"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Is William Bronk Perennially Under-read?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A brief look at the poetry of William Bronk, who died in 1999.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/17\/a-green-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Green World by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 17, 2015 \u2013 Whenever anyone mentions William Bronk, they usually preface the word poet with obscure, or little known, or forgotten. 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