William Bronk's poetry begins where philosophy leaves off: in the enactment of an idea, in the testing of a proposition. Each poem addresses itself to a central question of existence, not only why we are here but where we are. He merges dialectics and lyric: "And oh, it is always a world and not the world" ("At Tikal").

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This is where modern philosophy is weakest: in motivating force, in addressing itself to the central questions: "Has there ever been, will there ever be, / not now? No, always. Only now!" ("The Now Rejects Time and Eternity").

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The single great constant in the poetry of William Bronk is desire; specifically, desire for the world, which can never be known as a totality. Despite the self-limiting fact that consciousness is aware of its inability to experience this totality, it continually struggles for the achievement of its goal. Cut off from any ground of belief, secure only in its desire, consciousness therefore creates a world, which despite its insufficiency in metaphysical terms nevertheless allows for the rendering of form--the poem.

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.

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: . . .