Homage to William Bronk

RICHARD ELMAN
 

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'hen William Bronk's book of poems The World, The
Worldless, published by June Oppen for New
Directions in 1963, was sent to me by Wilfred Sheed,
then literary editor of Commonweal, for an omnibus review of the
fall books of poetry, I'd never heard of Bronk, but I was taken
with the originality of tone and lack of artifice in his work, and I
convinced Sheed to allow me to review the poems in a thousand-
word essay.

In discovering Bronk's poems more or less on my own, I found
much to praise. I called his writing "the ornament to its own hon¬
esty." I pointed out that one of his themes was how "naming
things" gives them "shapes which tyrannize and imprison our per¬
ceiving of them," and repeated the lines in "Ignorant Silence in
the Center of Things": "If we could talk, could hear each other
speak. . . ."

My piece was among the first serious considerations his poems
had received; Bronk was so far removed from the literary world of
reputations coined and slandered that he confessed to me he was
surprised to have gotten any notice at all, and very grateful, as I
later learned, when he wrote a handwritten note from Hudson
Falls, New York, forwarded by Commonweal: he would be in New
York in a couple of weeks, before setting out on a winter holiday
to Egypt, and could I meet him in the Algonquin Hotel bar for a
drink?

The figure who greeted me that day in the bar was certainly
different from the independent-minded countrj' man of homely
diction I had imagined Bronk would be—the man who wrote of
living "in a hogan under a hovering sky," or, with a characteristi¬
cally thoughtful and laconic mood, of painting an old house yel¬
low. This tall, somewhat somber but well-turned-out fellow, in his
late forties, in a teal blue double-breasted business suit with a

Opposite: William Bronk, circa 1976