Confronting the conventional formal strategist (and concomitant aesthetic ideologies) of his time, Bronk chooses to situate his poems precisely in the space between abstract philosophical speculation and the immediacies of lived experience. Bronk's discourse largely consists of language variously challenging not only the assumed generic and epistemological limits of modern poetry, but the occasions of its utterances as well.

What Bronk is doing, in my view, is proceeding along a path that is parallel to the via negativa of the mystical tradition. To the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, for instance, the only true knowledge is of God; but since this knowledge is utterly beyond our reach, all that is possible for us is to cast aside our false knowledge of the world and, by admitting our ignorance and putting off our vanity, enter into that "cloud of unknowing" in which alone it is possible, not to "know" God but to intuit his presence.

Over the course of more than a half century, William Bronk has produced a body of work unparalleled in arts and letters. His is a poetry of sinuous statement yet one that is musical, refined and deeply ruminative. His essays are rigorously investigative but also deeply passionate. Through his poetry and prose, separately and together, he has propounded a uniquely skeptical account of the human condition.

Bronk's philosophic positions are the excuse, perhaps the origin, for his poetry, not the poetry itself. They serve the function of, for example, Dante's medieval theology and Yeats' occultism — as systematic constants, that is, against which and with which the poet can measure the complexities and ambiguities of human behavior. However, just as it is important to know something of Aquinas to read Dante, it is essential to have some understanding of Bronk's philosophic positions as a unit when reading his poetry.

WB: That’s where I’ve been lucky. I didn’t have to use the poems as a way of feeding myself. And it’s a tremendous conflict or problem for any young artist. I mean how do you feed yourself? How do you live? Maybe it’s somewhat less for poet because a poet doesn’t need space and doesn’t need materials. A painter, a sculptor, a musician. . . . Even a musician has to have a place with a piano or something of that sort—very difficult to work without some kind of living quarters where you have a piano.

A number of recognizable ideas—signatures of Bronk—are contained in this poem: the possibility of multiple worlds; the inadequacy of the senses, language, and knowledge; and the insufficiency of man-made forms—noted in the poem by the concepts of time, space, and world—to contain the "real." For Bronk, light, as the trace from the outside, confirms the existence of the "real" world and serves as a catalyst for his sustained quest for the unattainable real world.

IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC 

Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Bronk, William. Living Instead. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991.

I was in a large class at USC when he [Schoenberg] said quite bluntly to all of us, 'My purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,' and when he said that I revolted.-- John Cage

Of this poem Hortense Spillers, praising the "wealth of implication" in this "[l]ess than lean poem," says it is "no nonsense at all." Finding origi-nal artistry, in-crowd and in-race code, and a full range of traditional poetic techniques in Brooks's poem, Spillers say that Brooks's players "subvert the romance of sociological pathos" and, quite comfortably, she has them read Brooks's lines, thus:

Compare two presentations of "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks: first, the single most widely accessible edition of the poem, on a page of her 1963 Selected Poems published by Harper & Row, and second on the 1966 broadside published by Broadside Press.  The words, in a formal linguistic sense, remain the same, but the material presentation does not.  Those physical qualities, as a necessary condition for reading the poem, as an unavoidable part of the thing read, create a different set of meanings in each artifact.

"We Real Cool," illustrates the wealth of implication that the poet can achieve in a very spare poem: . . .