William Bronk Hears an Aria
The poems of William Bronk (1918–1999) are known for a chillingly dark metaphysical vision in which the speaker stands naked and alone before an empty cosmos. When Bronk gave readings, it could seem as if the universe itself were speaking to us, ominously articulating the dire nature of our existence. The directness and honesty of his poems, rendered in a stripped-down syntax formed out of common nouns, can be frightening.
In his darkest poems, negative assertions are stated in the most absolute, extreme terms. The effect can echo the universe before Genesis or the opening lines of the Rig Veda (“In the beginning there was nothing, and then not nothing”). But even those visions of an empty universe are more hopeful than some of Bronk’s poems, since they suggest that, dark as the cosmos may have been before Creation, there is a world to come. In stark contrast is a poem like Bronk’s “The World,” which made me shudder with a kind of terrified awe when I heard him read it, almost shouting the words, at a reading in a New York City bookshop in the 1970s:
The World
I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no; there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
Oh no! We are adrift in the world, with nary a spar, a mooring anywhere. It is a statement of our utter nakedness, a message we are horrified to learn, that has always been true.
Perhaps even bleaker—despite its black humor—is “Names Like Barney Cain”s,” a poem that Linda Stern and I had the honor of first publishing in Endymion, a poetry magazine we edited, in 1976:
Names Like Barney Cain’s
Two locks on the Feeder are named for him.
I have asked and nobody knows who he is.
Alexander, Alfred, Quetzalcoatl,
nobody, nowhere, never, nothing.
I remember Bronk reading that last word with a rasp, a loud outrush of air and then raising his gaze, almost defiantly, to the audience. It would have been hard to argue with that contention at that moment.
And yet, and yet. In rarer moods, the stance of honest, direct nakedness before an unanswering world could lend his verse a ravishing, almost celebratory, lyrical humanism: If all we have is ourselves, then let us sing in praise of what we have. On Twitter today, courtesy of Kamran Javadizadeh, I discovered “The Aria.” It is a remarkable statement of how, even though the content of our songs might be delusional, false, or misguided, we can sing, and even rejoice merely in our ability to sing: “With what sweet eloquence/these objects speak and ask no reply;/for listen, it is we, ourselves, who sing.”
The Aria
by William Bronk
He lets us into a room which must be any room in an ordinary
house on a street where buses, perhaps,
go past us, or once we arrived just
too late to watch a parade. This
is a city, anyway, where
we always seem to be at the wrong
season; the weather is bad, and our friends
are somewhere else. Here in the room
though, there is a fragrance we had all
but forgotten from somewhere, and all around
us, a great ingathering of lovely things
from such long distances of time
and space, we marvel to see again,
and for once together, what we have failed
before to connect. Or so it seems.
Does it matter than on a second look
the room is empty, or if not that,
that the things that are gathered here are things
we never saw before? No.
With what sweet eloquence
these objects speak and ask no reply;
for listen, it is we, ourselves, who sing.
From Life Supports, New and Selected Poems by William Bronk, 1982