`I'd like To Go Unnoticed'

Reading and rereading Kay Ryan’s poems this week led me to a brief essay she wrote last year for Poetry about the poet William Bronk. Here’s a sample:

“However little you thought you’d been trafficking in surfaces and ornament, after a Bronk poem you realize it was much too much; however cleansed of illusions you believed yourself to be, it looks like they built up anyhow. Bronk takes them off like paint stripper. You’re shriven, your head is shaved. The experience is religious in its ferocity and disdain for cheap solace.”

Ryan expresses kinship with a poet who did more with less, and she rekindled my old fondness for Bronk and his work. I pulled Life Supports off the shelf, his volume of new and collected poems that won the American Book Award for Poetry in 1982, and that announced his gift (at the age of 64) to the world beyond small presses and fellow poets. Tucked inside was a letter from Bronk that I had forgotten, dated Aug. 12, 1993. I was working then as a writer for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., and had written him asking for an interview. Bronk had lived for most of his life in Hudson Falls, N.Y., a town along the Hudson River about 50 miles north of Albany. I remember reading a review published in New York Newsday around that time in which the novelist Thomas McGonigle had referred to Bronk as the greatest living American poet, and I was living less than an hour away from him. Here’s the text of Bronk’s letter:

“Dear Mr. Kurp,

“Sure, come talk if you like most anytime; I like hearing people and their reactions to the work and I like talking myself.

“I think I am to understand that the further intention of your letter is to say that with my cooperation the talk will lead to a promotional human interest piece in your newspaper. This is a perfectly proper offer and I thank you for the courtesy but I don’t want that. I like having my work noticed and reviewed even if the reviewer’s reaction to the work is less than warm. If you want to write about the work and your responses to it that’s fine with me and you don’t need my help or my permission. I don’t mean to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. I want only to say what I am willing to be part of. I’m willing that the work be noticed; I’d like to go unnoticed.

“Good wishes,

“Wm. Bronk”

What an admirably forthright letter, courteous yet candid and unyielding, especially the final sentence, though it disappointed me at the time. Bronk wrote on a sheet of white, unlined note paper with a fine-point pen. The letter is concise and free of verbal fat, like his poetry. For the return address he used only his zip code.

Bronk (the Bronx was named for one of his ancestors) was born in Fort Edward, N.Y., a town on the Hudson River rich in colonial and revolutionary history. I had covered the excavation of a camp used by Rogers' Rangers during the French and Indian War on Rogers Island, adjacent to Fort Edward. An archeologist with the Melvillean name David Starbuck unearthed a hospital, blockhouse, barracks and huts -- an appropriate setting for Bronk, a quintessentially American writer.

Bronk and his family moved to Hudson Falls when he was still a toddler. In 1947, after Army service and a brief job as a college instructor, Bronk took over management of the Bronk Coal and Lumber Co. in Hudson Falls, which he had inherited from his father. That’s what he did for most of the rest of his life, living in the same sprawling Victorian house in which he had grown up. There are parallels here with Wallace Stevens (one of his models), who worked as an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams, a physician. None of these poets, all businessmen, was self-consciously bohemian. Poetry was their calling, not a pose or “lifestyle.”

Bronk (1918-1999) needs rescue from academics and partisans of postmodernism. His poetry is too good to be squandered on readers unable or unwilling to do the hard work of loving it. Here’s one of the new poems (as of 1981) in Life Supports, “Flowers, the World and My Friend, Thoreau”:

“It no longer matters what the names of flowers are.
Some I remember; others forget: ones
I never thought I should. Yes, tell me one.
I like to hear that. I may have forgotten again
next week. There’s that yellow one whose name
I used to know. It’s blossoming, secure
as ever as I walk by looking at it,
not saying its name or needing to.

“Henry, it’s true as you said it was, that this
is a world where there are flowers. Though it isn’t our truth,
it’s a truth we embrace with gratitude:
how should we endure our dourness otherwise?
And we feel an eager desire to make it ours,
making the flowers ours by naming them.

“But they stay their own and it doesn’t become our truth.

“We live with it; live with othernesses
as strangers live together in crowds. Truths
of strangeness jostle me; I jostle them
walking past them as I do past clumps of flowers.
Flowers, I know you, not knowing your name.”

To use Melville’s term, Bronk numbered among the “isolatoes.” He was, like Thoreau, a solitary by nature, and I find it touching that he addresses Thoreau as a friend. He was clearly an enduring companion and influence. The best piece in Bronk’s collected essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves, is “Silence and Henry Thoreau,” in which which he writes:

“Silence is the world of potentialities and meaning beyond the actual and expressed, which the meanness of our actions and the interpretations put upon them threatens to conceal. Yet all actuality is to be referred to it and valued accordingly as it includes or suggests it. Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.”

A guy who ran a lumber yard in upstate New York wrote those sentences and conjured those thoughts, and we react with the same sense of delight remembering the sentences of a shiftless surveyor in Concord, Mass.