Tag: essayists

William Bronk: “Several Possible Worlds”

Photographers Unknown, Several Possible Worlds

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
–which what?–something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

William Bronk, Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World, 1964, The World, the Worldless, New Directions

Born at Fort Edward, New York in February of 1918, William Bronk was an American poet and essayist. A poet of statement, he fashioned experimental and meditative works that used a language stripped of imagery, metaphor and ornamentation.

A descendant of settler Jonas Bronck for whom the Bronx River is named, William Bronk entered Dartmouth College in 1934, where he studied under poet and critic Sidney Cox. After graduation, he studied for a semester at Harvard and left college to write a paper on Herman Melville,  Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman entitled “The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States”.

During World War II, Bronk served in the U.S. Army, first as a draftee and, later after attending Officer Candidate School (OCS), as an officer. After his military discharge in October of 1945, he taught English for one year at Union College in Schenectady, New York before returning to Hudson Falls, the site of his family’s homestead. In the latter half of 1946, Bronk finished writing his “The Brother in Elysium”; this volume of essays would be published in 1980 by The Elizabeth Press in Virginia.

Upon the unexpected death of his father in 1941, William Bronk had  managed his father’s business in Hudson Falls, the Bronk Coal and Lumber Company, until he was called up for military service. In January of 1947, Bronk again took the responsibility of managing the family business; this position, at first temporary, lasted until his retirement in 1978.

Bronk’s work follows the New England poetic tradition, an evocation of nature and its seasons that delves into the essence of reality and truth. This core tenet is also examined in the  works of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. As a poet, Bronk was a spontaneous writer; poems would emerge in his mind as he went through his daily life. Known for his austerity, both in world-view and writing style, Bronk believed the world was only a semblance of the truth. While able to intuit its existence, he understood it was really beyond his grasp.

A prolific poet, William Bronk never used the typewriter, but wrote longhand. His manuscripts revealed that he seldom rewrote or modified a poem once it was written down on paper. Bronk’s poetry is clean and even in tone, free of unnecessary wording and filled with a subtle congruity of sound set to a basic iambic line.

In 1951, Bronk published his first major poetic works in the Journal “Origin”, an American poetry magazine founded in that year by poet Cid Corman. The response to his first two books, the 1956 “Light and Dark” and the 1964 “The World, The Worldless” did not garner him any reputation. Following those disappointments, many publishers proposed and later abandoned projects for Bronk’s poetry. Throughout the 1970s, the Elizabeth Press published his poetry volumes and established his place in the literary world.

William Bronk was the author of thirty-two published collections of poetry. His 1981 “Life Supports” won the National Book Award for Poetry. In addition to his 1980 essay collection “The Bother in Elysium”, Bronk wrote two other volumes of essays: the 1974 “The New World” and “Vectors and Smoothable Curves” published by North Point Press in 1983, Talisman House, Bronk’s publisher since 1993, published his final collection of poems, “Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems” in 1999.

William Bronk died of respiratory heart failure at the age of eighty-one, on the twenty-second of February in 1999 at his home in Hudson Falls, New York. He is interred in Union Cemetery in Hudson Falls, New York.

“To Bront, poetry is about what exists independent of writing. It’s about that something, that force, which sweeps poetry (and just about everything else) away. . . Behind Bronk’s deadpan voice, there’s often humor, warmth, even compassion.”—Daniel Wolff, “Why Nobody Reads William Bronk”, Literary Review, Spring 2014

Notes: Poet Burt Kimmelman, Professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology, wrote an extensive and interesting 2001 essay on William Bronk for the NJIT educational site: https://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma/poetessaylong.html

Two audio recordings with William Bronk can be found on the Poems to a Listener website: https://poemstoalistener.org/interview/william-bronk-1986-1994-series/

A biography and a taped 1978 poetry reading by William Bronk can be found on the PennysPoetry website: https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/William_Bronk

Harvard Library’s “Listening Booth” site has thirteen audio recordings of William Bronk reading his poems: https://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/poetry/listeningbooth/poets/bronk.html

Top Insert Image: Daniel Leary, “William Bronk”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Poems to the Listener

Second Insert Image: William Bronk, “Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems”, 1999, First Edition, Paperback, SOS Talisman House, Northfield, Massachusetts

Third Insert Image: William Bronk, “Manifest and Furthermore”, January 1987, First Edition, North Point Press, New York City

Bottom Insert Image: William Bronk, “Light and Dark”, 1956, First Edition, Origin Press, Ashland, Massachusetts

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981. 

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny. 

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism. 

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the  Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year. 

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.