Steve Fredman, in Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge University Press, 1983), writes that this book is about ‘the humorous and sometimes terrifying recognition of oneself as a group of pronouns trapped in the realm of language.’ The actual ‘tight corners’ consist of short declarative sentences, usually three to a corner, separated from one another by the sign for a 45 degree angle, and apparently the summary each time of some pronomical incident. But in among the three sections devoted to the ‘corners’, one finds lineated poems of a more conventional poetic cast, as well as an hilariously sardonic story of young love, and other short prose pieces filled with inventions from their own language. There is also a serial poem in which the author through a number of upsets counters his own ‘paranoia of clarity.’ ‘The “corners” were an invention with Tom Sharp. I composed them on 3x5 file cards, to ensure brevity. At readings, I used to hand these out to the audience and let them do the reading. It was intriguing to note the range of appropriateness, of ‘corner’ to reader, each time. I wanted John Martin to publish them as 200 file cards in a plastic case, but it was not a Sparrow format. Later, Whale Cloth Press did Grenier’s Sentences in much this way, although I had wanted something not at all that sumptuous. The “corners” presented a problem when done as a book; turning pages suggests that things lead and follow, which was the opposite of my intention. Also, 200 corners in book form would be inescapably monotonous. In the end, I edited them down to 100, divided them into three sections, and surrounded them with other kinds of writing, which commented on the corners even as these commented on them.’
Out of My Hands. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. 12 pp.
‘Martin wanted to do another Sparrow of my work; I found my ligne donne in Polanyi’s essay, “Tacit Knowing”: “But in the language of Azande it is self-contradictory to doubt the efficacy of oracles, and this only proves that Zande language cannot be trusted in respect of oracles.” (This was the time of Watergate.) I recalled three incidents which thoroughly demonstrated Polanyi’s insight, and the booklet was written in a week. There was then some delay, so I tinkered a little with it later in the year.’
Spells and Blessings. Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 1975. 30 pp.
A small collection of poetry, all but three having ‘eluded inclusion’ in collections made during the years of their composition: 1968–1973. A common thread is the attraction of the unknown, embodied here in myth, the Tarot, sexual desire, and (as Bromige notes in his Foreword) ‘the face of a question that writing... raises: I trust this is so for others.’ Again, attention lights on language as the mediating agency, itself the primordial mystery: ‘Your nipples dark , behind your shirt.’ ‘ ‘A Spell* is a fascinating work — owing something to T. Manley Hall’s account of a Saxon legend; there’s an entire poetics embedded in this poem.’
Credences of Winter. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. 13 pp.
Eight poems; each not only ‘an enviable example of a poem’, but also ‘a definition of what a poem can be, a test of poetry, an exploration of a poetic’ (Tom Sharp, ‘Poem as Poetic’). ‘Somewhat loosely, these match up with stanzas of the Stevens’ poem, but respond also to other instigations — notably by Oppen, Spicer, Duncan.’ The third Bromige issue Sparrow, and the last book of his to be published by that press, until the Selected Poems appears next year.
Living in Advance (with Gifford, DeBarros et al). Cotati, California: Open Reading Books, 1976. 70 pp.
Songs with music, and a foreword by Bromige. ‘Since 1966, when I met Paul DeBarros, I’d been interested in writing rock songs, and for a while worked with a group calling themselves “Circus Maximus”... I introduced Paul to Barry Gifford, and they did some gigs together. Barry had a hideaway in the mountains in Mendocino County where people expanded their consciousness and grooved on the trees and the stars. If that’s heard as irony, it’s simply a function of the passage of time. There were some eight or ten of “us” who hung out together in varying permutations, there, and in San Francisco and Berkeley and Sebastopol, and I learned (somewhat) to play piano since there was one in the house I’d moved into. It’s more fun if there’s a group purpose, so we used to write songs together. Time and “personality conflicts” dispersed the gang, but we managed to get this songbook done before that happened. You know that Band song, that appears to refer to T.S. Eliot? Well, I think the quickest notion I can give of the three personal tones is by telling you that “Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Vivien”, had we written that opening verse, would have been written by Gifford; “give them all my salary” by me, and “On the waters of oblivion”, by Paul.’
Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other. Mansfield, Pennsylvania: Mansfield State College Press, 1976. The first, 28-page section of issue number 13 of The Falcon.
Poems with prose commentary. The poems are taken from several earlier books; the prose pieces deconstruct various critical approaches — biographical, psychological, mythopoeic, sociological, anecdotal, philosophical, and even deconstructionist; each piece is hilarious, coruscating with wit and word-play, yet indicating obliquely those readings the author thinks viable. ‘Bill Blais of The Falcon asked me to do a “retrospective” — instead, I came up with these: perhaps, after all, it wasn’t a case of “instead”. I wrote them all in January 1976; we’d had a house-party that lasted from Christmas beyond New Years’, and it had been highly anecdotal; as soon as the last guest left, I put this work together. I had intended to go on with it, but early in February, my father died. That stopped me writing for nearly a year. When I tried to pick up where I’d left off, it was academic — like the bumpkin on his first train ride who whips out his knife and makes a notch in the window-sill when his hat blows out the window so that he’ll know where to look for it when he comes back.’
My Poetry. Berkeley: The Figures Press, 1980. 100 pp., 650 copies.
Bromige’s first major collection since Tight Corners (1974). Poetry and prose, including a slightly revised version of ‘Six of One’, and a play that is actually a cut-up of several poems from Credences of Winter. Ron Silliman, reviewing this book in the magazine Soup, finds it ‘essential reading for anyone who wishes to be in touch with contemporary poetry.’ A long prose poem, made of sentences from a small-town newspaper, ‘One Spring’ won a Pushcart Prize upon its initial publication in the magazine This. Coincident with the publication of My Poetry, Bromige won an NEA Writer’s Fellowship. ‘As to the story of its publication: I had sent a TS to Black Sparrow, and John had written back that he loved the Bromige poems in it, but not the prose “cutups”, and would I omit these? Since these were what I found of chief interest, I wouldn’t; so I took the book to Geoff (Young, of The Figures), and he wanted to do it but thought that a lot of the “Bromige poems” could go. He got me to think of it from the book’s point-of-view, and not as a “collected works 74–79”. Actually, most of it was composed in 1977 and ’78, before I left Sherril and went to live in San Francisco with Cecelia (who took the photo of the author squatting with hand out in front of the Bank of Babylon, in her hometown of West Babylon, that appears at the back of the book). “One Spring” came from material I had gathered at the public library to be background material for a novel I then began to write: Bob Perelman read it and said, “Trash the plot and you’ve got a piece” — he was right. “My Poetry” is composed from interesting sentences taken from all my previous reviews. “Hieratics” was written after the move to S.F., using mainly Jansen’s History of Art to evoke three intense passages from a period that now felt like archeological remains.’
P-E-A-C-E. Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1981. 18 pp., 450 copies.
Peace in pieces. Framed as a history (primarily literary) of the 1990s, told in the year 2020. The clarity of the narrator’s vision struggles with the deteriorated language of a collapsed culture. ‘Bromige’s playful yet very serious chapbook combines poetry and prose as many of his other works have done.... The combination.... is very effective, one commenting upon the other. The prose is the voice of the present thinking about the past, and the poetry is the voice of the past being heard in the present.... there is no promise of a way out or of something yet to be. There is only this: birth, life, death — itself.’ (Dennis Barone, in ABR.) Art-Dave Brimbody (whose adventures are akin to Rimbaud’s during the Siege of Paris) writes the title poem, a deliberate, even lugubrious, indictment of closure and its required hypocrisies. The craftily disordered syntax and vocabulary (Bromige worked from a Swedish text which he ‘translated’ according to its aural cues) make one continually stop and question what is being said. ‘Lyn asked me for a book and I wrote one. It didn’t quite fit her format, so I omitted passages; the work is global, not “rarity-value”. Ted Greenwald’s Smile had recently come out in the Tuumba series; I’d been struck by that (it’s, also a prose narrative of poetic resonance), and that was the germ, as they say, of the idea. For me, ‘Smile’ recalled flower-children on Telegraph Avenue, and so does ‘Peace’. The Reagan landslide had swept away some final vestiges, I felt, of a great, if impractically ingenuous, hope.’ ‘It’s like there are two people, one of whom is very angry and other watching finds that person’s anger comic.... The problem was how to write the piece that expressed the anger and at the same time contained it, framed it. A fake translation was one way to do it. You appoint a text to be master over you; a lot like The Inferno, where Dante’s imagination of Virgil prevents him from stopping to gloat or to relish his anger.... It was some Swedish memoir of lonely childhood and how certain poems found at that time were consolation.... (the poems embedded) are previous fake translations, from the Spanish and the Portugese. ‘ (Bromige, interviewed by Weber, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K #6).
In the Uneven Steps of Hung-Chow. Berkeley: Little Dinosaur Press, 1982. 34 pp., 250 copies.
Three stories, about a Chinese sage, as told by his humorless and gullible disciple. Each tale deals with an aspect of representation. The narrator’s lack of humor makes the telling that much funnier. This is one of a series of three chapbooks by this press, companion to works by Michael Davidson and Michael Palmer. ‘I found the cover in a drawer. We were house-sitting for Bob Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin, and I opened a drawer looking for scotch-tape, and found I was looking at Hung-Chow! It was a pen-and-ink drawing Kathleen had done when she was fourteen. It was H-C alright — his asymmetrical beard, expression a compound of enlightened bliss and smug self-satisfaction.’ Bromige goes on to say that there are further stories written concerning this figure, but lack of time has so far prevented his assembling a second volume. ‘Though also, the initiating impulse has somewhat dissipated — I had roomed for a while with a friend who at that time was subject to a rather strict Buddhist discipline, which at once intrigued and repelled me. But my work as a teacher continues, and that can provide sufficient material and motivation.’
It’s the Same Only Different / The Melancholy Owed Categories. Weymouth, England: Last Straw Press, 1984. 4 pp., 200 copies.
Three — or perhaps four — poems in one: Bromige wrote two poems using the rhyme scheme from Keats’ ‘Ode on Melancholy’, and then intercalated these to make a third poem; readers who recognize the rhyme words from Keats will also hear his poem behind the scenes. There is also an extract from a letter written by Bromige to his publisher, Bernard Hemmensley, which appropriates a letter Keats wrote to his brother. ‘Bernard as early as 1981 was in touch with me requesting a small book. I felt this work appropriate for my first publication in the country of my birth, so I sent it to him. A severe flu early in ’84 had got me reading Keats, feverishly, and I’d made a number of rime-identity poems from his work. Rime is always a question of identity and non-identity, either of a like and an unlike sound combined, or of two or more (to move a step away) concepts of alleged universal currency, such as “justice”, and speaks to us of how we learn — and raise the question of how we must apply these to a range of experience. These considerations embodied in the formal aspects of this work thus supply its content as well.’
You See (with Opal Nations). San Francisco: Exempli Gratia Press, 1986. 16 pp., open-ended run.
Bromige’s first collaboration with Opal Nations, the ’pataphysical poet and story-writer, artist, and musician, well-known in the Bay Area for his PBS weekly radio show, ‘Doo-Wop Delights’. This chap-book presents Parts One and Two; a third (and final) section was published in the journal Paper Air. Part One consists of 15-line sentences in 14-line stanzas, ending when the final line of a sentence coincides for the first time with the final line of a stanza. Part Two alternates 5- with 10-line sentences in 14-line stanzas, ending, as before, with the first coincidence of final lines. (The initial phrases of each sentence are also a further sentence when combined: ‘Blue you forget this fate: the undressed let what somewhat dots these: godlike, remember well; let yourself or else.’) ‘Opal, whom I met through Allan Fisher during the latter’s residency in S.F., had asked if I had anything lying around unfinished: he was at loose ends, and would finish it for me. I didn’t, but I did have some thirty fake translations from the Spanish that never cohered as poems, but with some striking lines in them: at Cecelia’s suggestion, I cut these out and mailed them to Opal. A month later, he sent me a 15-page prose narrative, fantastic with surreal landscapes and childlike acuities concerning these. The weight fell rather heavily, to my thinking, on the subjective side, so my task as I saw it was to locate some theme — but at the same time I did not want any single overriding topic. I hit upon the relation between the chemistry and dynamics of actual seeing, and the metaphorical language of “coming to see”; the formal devices (see above) say something about collaboration, how two fields of vision or “vision” overlap but never quite coincide — even though that is the end toward which we strive. Not only the immediate collaboration between Opal and I is meant, but also the collaboration between subject/ object and object/ subject that constitutes our apprehension of and by the world... Opal used as many of my original lines as he could, and I preserved as many as I could, and as much of his narrative as possible, in this final version.’
Red Hats. Atwater, Ohio: Tonsure Press, 1986. 54 pp., 500 copies.
Prose, with some line poems. A work in seven sections, each one prefaced by a letter of the title; an index assembles certain key words per section that begin with the instigating letter: (e.g., ‘R, rooted, reality, rules, responsiveness, reckoning, register,’ etc., etc.) A post-script reveals the genesis of the title to be an anagram of Threads. According to the author, ‘having turned fifty, I felt it time to give a thorough re-reading to my early work; the prose of this book was at first generated as a kind of commentary on and response to the poems in Threads, but after some accumulation of such, the work begat itself out of its initial sentences, in tandem with contemporary concerns. As to these, anyone alive today and given to reflection upon our present can know as much and more about these contents than I; although it is the case that certain sections make a sort of one-man collaboration with their dedicatees — specifically Grenier, Silliman, and Bernstein.’
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