changing hands
by Douglas Messerli
David Bromige Threads (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971)
David Bromige My Poetry (Berkeley: The Figures, 1980)
David Bromige Desire: Selected Poems 1963-1987 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow
Press, 1988)
David Bromige The Harbormaster of Hong Kong (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1993)
On June 3 of this year (2009), poet David
Bromige died at his home in Sebastopol, California, of complications from
diabetes, a stroke and heart attack. During his last years, according to
friends such as D. A. Powell, Bromige suffered from "dementia."
How different the David Bromige I knew in the 1990s, the time when I
first met him—if I remember correctly, at a reading of his in New York
City—publishing his book, The
Harbormaster of Hong Kong (the title poem is still one of my favorites of
his works) in 1993. The following year, David appeared at a literary salon in
the Sun & Moon offices on September 22, and read, I believe, that same
weekend at Beyond Baroque in Venice. In those days he was the very image of a
clever, stunningly quick-witted punster, creating his famed maxims and dicta,
many of which dotted his poems, seemingly out of clear air: "There is no
revision in the grave," "Lambs live a long time in our recipes,"
"Every endless summer hurries in a fall." Many of these were presented
in the form of "pairings" of lines which in their oppositional syntax
nonetheless paralleled and defined the other:
infatuation
___________
break break break
on thy cold gray stones o shore
kiss me quick
____________
too late
Bromige was what at one time would be described as a wit, and his poetry
literally shimmered with his quick connections, or, at the other extreme (as in
"You") revealing a slow, "deliberate" process, where the
reader, working with the author, moved through the matter of the poem,
"changing hands," so to speak, with the author as together they made
their way through the work. But these are only two aspects of a body of writing
that was constantly in shift, moving between narrative and lyricism, rhyme and
radical disassociation at the drop of a hat, sometimes, as in "In an
Orchard, in America, In August," focusing on the lush surfaces of things
in order to reveal their inner core:
Let this be
the story of the core.
The part that's thrown away,
that can't be used.
That can't speak for itself,
Bromige's quick shifts in syntax and genre clearly irritated some,
particularly poets and readers who demanded a signature style from a writer. I
remember attending Bromige's reading at Beyond Baroque where I sat next the
usually fair-minded poet-editor Lee Hickman, with Hickman hissing into my ear,
"I just can't stand this kind of writing." Hickman was an often obstinate
critic, but here I suspect it was just Bromige's wide poetic range and
abilities that irritated him—and so delighted me.
Born in London in
1933, Bromige grew up with signs of becoming tubercular, and was sent to an
isolation hospital for four months as a child. His second childhood
"trauma" was his existence in London during the Blitz, during which,
on one particular night, a series of neighborhood bombs seemed likely to
destroy their family home. After the war Bromige won a scholarship to
Haberdashers' Aske's Hamp-stead School, but after completing his certificate he
took a job on a dairy farm in southern Sweden. Soon after, he emigrated to
Canada, living for a while in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Alberta, before moving
to Vancouver to be near to his sister, and where he attended the University of
British Columbia, meeting poets such as George Bowering, Frank Davey, Robert
Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan, who might be
described as Bromige's mentor.
In 1962 Bromige won a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship, which required he do
his graduate work in a different university. Accordingly, Bromige chose the
University of California at Berkeley, moving to the Bay area. From 1970 on he
became a Professor of Literature at Sonoma State University. His poetry
collection of 1988, Desire: Selected
Poems, 1963-1987, won the Western States Book Award.
Many of his students have described David as a caring and giving
teacher. As D. A. Powell wrote soon after his death:
Our classroom was
in the theatre department, and it was
furnished with
ungodly dilapidated sofas.... So each week
we'd sprawl on the
sagging couches, reading poems reproduced
in purple ink on a
ditto machine, and David would sit cross-
legged in the
center of the room, sigh deeply, smile, and
praise even the
most sickly poems, though he often seemed
to pass first
through a period of deep physical pain before
he'd bless us with
that smile and praise.
I did not know David Bromige well; apart from working with him on the
one book we published, attending three readings, and working with him on his
selection of poems from From the Other
Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 we seldom communicated
over the years. Yet I sensed in David a similar openness and a complete
commitment to living.
As we left my offices to take him to the airport, David called out to my
companion Howard, "Please, you have to get a photograph of the two of us
in front of Sun & Moon. Here, Douglas, let us hold hands." We did, the
camera catching us in the act of "changing hands."
Los Angeles, November 20, 2009
Reprinted from PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) (November 2009) and Shearsman [England], No. 83/84 (April
2010).
