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Photo © Christopher Bromige
David Bromige in 1986
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Back when everything was still everything, back in the 1960′s, I met David Bromige. Like me, he had by then become a fresh and floating fixture on the Northern California poetry scene. The air crackled with creativity. If you happened to be in the circle that had at its center El Corno Emplumado (a bilingual magazine from Mexico, edited by the expatriate American Margaret Randall and her Mexican husband Sergio Mondragón), then you were plugged into one of the cutting-edge literary scenes. I was publishing in those pages. And did it ever feel good to see my name alongside names like Carlos Fuentes and Denise Levertov. David Bromige’s poetry came to me by way of El Corno Emplumado, but in a funny way. When the journal ran a special section on Canadian poets gathered, as I recall, by the Calgary-based poet George Bowering, there was Bromige. We read together at Cody’s in Berkeley, and I remember the brooding energy that swirled around him when I paid visits to Sonoma State, where he taught. At this time his companion was the writer-illustrator Sherill Jaffe, who, he confided, “writes all my poems for me.” In my view, his poetry embodied the spirit of what Chile’s Nicanor Parra championed as “the anti-poem,” which was all in zeitgeist. Bromige’s prose-bent declaratory approach to poetry drew an enduring audience. Younger self-labeled “language poets” eventually adopted him as a kindred spirit. I always admired David Bromige for the brave anti-war positions he took. At a time when young Americans were embracing Canada to sidestep military service in Vietnam, Bromige had slipped into the U.S., where he remained for the rest of his life, making a name for himself in the perennially restive worlds of the avant garde. I miss his trickster smile and uncool laugh.
– Al Young
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© Richard Denner
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Jack Foley: Tribute to David Bromige
My friendship with David Bromige goes back over 20 years, but it was never a deep, personal friendship. He was a literary acquaintance I liked and whose work I followed with considerable interest. I was introduced to both him and his work by Ron Silliman, who brought me to a reading. I was surprised to see that Robert Duncan—whose work I knew—attended the reading. Duncan swooped into the room with his great cape, overwhelming everyone—a star’s entrance—but he listened attentively and obviously enjoyed David’s work. David was open and friendly, but I wasn’t certain enough of my own work to claim him as an acquaintance: we didn’t exchange addresses.
David became associated with language poetry, but he was older than the originators of language poetry. He became friends with many of them. They were definitely what was happening at that time. I think his relationship to language poetry was partly personal—he liked the people who were writing it—but also partly professional. Language poetry was getting a lot of attention. By associating with language poets, David could share in that attention. But the language poets who became best known were theorists as well as poets, and David was in no way a theorist. His impulse was satirical, parodic, even smart ass, but not theoretical. When David published “One Spring” in This magazine, I believe that the editors felt that they were printing something that was both liberating and beyond their own current capacities—which was true. In The New Sentence, Ron Silliman clearly asserts that “One Spring” exemplifies the kind of thing language poetry is all about. The new sentence, writes Silliman, is “a sentence with an interior poetic structure in addition to exterior ordinary grammatical structure. That is …why and how lines quoted from a Sonoma newspaper in David Bromige’s ‘One Spring’ can become new sentences.” But language poetry became a style, a kind of writing which doesn’t sound or read at all like the sophisticated, Joycean, highly literary medium of Bromige’s work. The young people who were and are turned on by language poetry were not turned on by what David was doing. David the man and teacher is sometimes sentimentalized by his friends and students. But the work is edgy, problematical, anything but sentimental. Poems like “One Spring” and “My Poetry,” which—like certain passages in James Joyce—are made up entirely of quotations, place in question the person who is writing the poem. The original version of “One Spring” was published in This magazine. When David published the poem in his book My Poetry, he changed some of the names. When I asked him about that, he said it was for fear of being sued! These were real people he was dealing with. Language poets were attacking and defining themselves against the poets published in Donald Allen’s 1960 volume, The New American Poetry. Many of the poets in that volume were attacking and defining themselves against “The New Criticism,” a body of writing from the 1940s which took irony and paradox as the center of the poetic work. Irony and paradox are at the center of David Bromige’s work. If he is a language poet, we might regard language poetry as the revenge of The New Criticism. Here is how “One Spring”—simultaneously naïve and knowing—begins:
One Spring
It hailed. 0.06 inches were precipitated where the instruments are kept. At least one driver found his windshield wipers clogging. High winds drove the hail into the orchards of apple, pear & prune. It hailed on the new Vacu-Dry plant, an independent, publicly-owned corporation, making instant apple-sauce for the government. During the following night, thieves walked off with the bus-bench.
Next day samples were brought to the inspector. The leaves were shattered & the fruit already indented. Though the sun shone bright, some wisps of high cirrus appeared shortly after midday.
Next day dawned clear & bright, & by the middle of the afternoon the thermometer registered 73 degrees Fahrenheit. That night the valley-bottoms were free from frost. Next day began well also, the sky a clear deepening blue, the light flickering off the eucalyptus leaves.
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