Corsino Fortes | Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes

the poetics and politics of seduction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Corsino Fortes, Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and Sean O’Brien (Brooklyn, New York: Archipelago Books/Island Position, 2015)

The central objects and images of Cabo Verde poet Corsino Fortes are deceptively simple: sun, moon, sea, stone, bread, drums, guitars, blood, palm, fist, thumb, and mouth, along with the colors red, yellow, and green appear time and again throughout the book. At times this poetry collection even takes on the quality of a series of postcards, stanzas that lay out the details of daily life in the archipelago of the ten islands that lay off the West African coast, as if perhaps the poet were attempting to seduce us to his tourist-dependent land through a series of pleasant travelogues:

 

            The disturbance of the crows on the cliff

                                                   Announces us

            In the mouth of the village

            On the fat wind that smells of ham

                                                 of fresh bread

            At the seaside we stand our ribbed boats up

            Before the public promise of the sea

            And on the shore we navigate

            With fewer hands

                                With fewer feet

                                            And short of protein

 

            The people the sunset the bread in between

 

                            (“Barefoot on the Bread of Morning”)

 

     Yet even this seemingly picture post-card paradise, the author betrays some of the central problems with his homeland. The “fewer hands” and “feet” suggests the vast diaspora that has occurred to the islands over the last centuries. So many people have left the islands that today the country contains fewer citizens (about 525,000 individuals) than those who now live elsewhere: about 500,000 Cape Verdeans live in the United States alone, and large populations have moved to Portugal, Angola, Senegal, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, and even Argentina. Indeed one of the poet’s most touching poems, “Postcards from the High Seas,” discusses precisely this grand diaspora:

 

              I

 

              Crioula, you will tell the guitar

              Of the night, and the dawn’s small guitar

              That you are a dark-skinned bride

                                 With Lela in Rotterdam

 

              **********************

 

              II

 

              In the morning

              It snowed in the temples of Europe

              The lamp of my hand is a caravel

                                   Among the fjords of Norway

 

              *********************

 

              III

 

              I used to sell Karnoca

                        On the streets of New York

              I’ve played ourin among the girders

                         Of skyscrapers under construction

 

              In a building in Belfast

              Remain the skulls and bones

                                Of my contemporaries

              The blood remains

                                Alive in the telephone’s nostrils

 

 

     Although the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese explorers first discovered them in the 15^th century, the early Portuguese settlers quickly married and shared their blood with the numerous other immigrants who settled the islands from nearby West Africa—many of them brought there as part of the slave trade, which accounted for the early wealth of the archipelago—China, Italy, Lebanon and Morocco, along with more contemporary populations of Europeans and Latin Americans, accounting for the fact that today that the Cape Verdeans represent a mestiços (mulatto) culture whose people officially speak Portuguese but at home converse in a creole variant.

     It is a culture, accordingly, that is thoroughly genetically and linguistically mixed, the latter about which the poet seems particularly concerned in his first book, Bread and Phoneme, in which the act of eating (of survival) is equated with the act of speaking (a making of a reality that permits that survival). As Fortes writes in the poem “Emigrant”:

 

          Go and plant

                         In dead Amilcar’s mouth

          This fistful of watercress

          And spread from goal to goal [porta em porta, in the original, goal seems an odd choice]

                        A fresh phonetics

          And with the commas of the street

                and syllables from door to door       

          You will sweep away before the night

          The roads that go

                as far as the night-schools

          For all departure means a growing alphabet

                for all return in a nation’s language

 

     Food as survival is another important aspect of Cape Verdean life, moreover, as the poet hints in the first poem I quoted above (“Barefoot on the Bread of Morning”) in which he suggests the country is not only short of hands and feet, but also “short of protein.” Because of the volcanic creation of the islands, most of the land is able to support only the most basic of foodstuffs, and over 90% of food consumed in Cape Verde must be imported.

     In the early years of its existence the island populations were regularly sacked by pirates such as Sir Francis Drake; and during the long Portuguese rule of the islands, particularly during the Salazarist dictatorship, the Cape Verdeans severely suffered from hunger and, coincidentally in the early 1970s, endured a severe drought. Along with other Portuguese-ruled African countries, particularly Guinea-Bissau, rebels from Cape Verde, led by the Amilcar (Cabral) mentioned by Fortes above, fought against Portuguese garrisons. In 1975, the publication year of Fortes’ Bread and Phoneme, the islands gained independence from their former colonial rulers. Fortes, formerly the ambassador to Portugal, published this early work in Angola, where he was serving as a judge.

      The conjoining of food and language, accordingly, is perhaps an inevitable phenomenon for a poet in Fortes’ position. Both things, dependent on the mouth, make existence possible and give rise to the survival of a victimized population, many of whom had been forced to leave their homes simply to find enough to eat. Today the island country, despite its dependence upon imports, has one of the highest standards of living and the most democratic of governments in Africa.

      It has been precisely their abilities to connect one thing and another, to bring food and people into their somewhat isolated world that has resulted in the contemporary citizens’ continued existence. And Fortes stresses this interrelationship of things in his other books as well, originally published with titles like Tree & Drum and Stones of Sun & Substance. In fact, one might describe the poetics of this writer as representing a kind of engagement with conjunctions.

      Time and again in Fortes’poems, instead of proclaiming and separating opposing arguments, he conjoins its elements, as in the beautifully balanced, yet distinctively disjunctive work, “The Pestle and the Grindstone”:

 

                  The man And his female

                  That table and its tabernacle

                  The sun in the pregnant mouth

                  The bread of blood on the table

 

                  The man And his female

                  The source and its phoneme

                  The alarm in the revolted mouth

                  The cry of the artery over the map

 

                  And bread stone

                              Palm of the earth’s being

 

                  May it be

                           time & tamara

                  Over

                           Time and temples

                                         And gallops

                  The dialogue the dialect

                                            Which

                                                    Gallop

 

                     Over the palate

                              Bringing

                                         a

                                         e

                                         i

                                         o

                                         u

                                         in its feijãos verdes

 

 

     In a selection from “The Fisherman the Fish and the Peninsula,” Fortes employs the conjunction “E” (“AND”) as a major structural device:

 

                                    AND

 

                 In the calm of the prow

                 On the warlike waves

                 The boats carry in their souls

                                 The final morna of the island

 

                                   AND

 

                 From the volcano to the sunset candle in the west

                 The thunderclap bursts into flower

                 On the tree of smoke

                              The living root of the harmattan

 

                                   AND

 

                 The oar is a lightning flash across the face of night

                 It burns

                          in the mirror of the waves

                 Ripples of blazing coal

 

                                   AND

 

                                                          [etc.]

 

   This poet’s world is one of accommodation, a society in which things must be joined together in inclusionary embracement, like that of food and language, or with regard to seeming oppositions which were originally of the same origin, “Tree and drum.” His countrymen represent a culture of combining things, having a long history of bringing people and provisions to their shores not only for their subsistence but for their very identity. Cape Verde is a not a world that can afford to stand aloof from any “other.” It might even possibly be perceived as representing a kind exemplary American-like acceptance of other cultures without all of our following racial and cultural oppressions, even though Cabo Verde history, like ours, is inextricably intertwined with slavery, and—unlike the U.S—has had to suffer centuries of colonial repression.

    Perhaps nowhere in his work is this philosophy better summarized than in the short poem, “Art of Culture,” a work which through its title suggests that “culture” itself is a kind of cultivated act (“Acto de cultura,” as the original poem is titled):

 

                How the sound swells in the fruit: the drum

                                                                  Is on the tree

                And opposed to erosion: the politics of seduction

 

                                     And

     

               “If the destiny of man is ceaseless labour”

 

                                     And

 

              The word love has no mouth to its river

 

              Culture! Is entirely

              Old chaos given dynamic expression

 

And it is the seductiveness of that “dynamism of expression” through which the reader will best remember this significant translation.

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2015

Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend (May 2, 2015).

 

 

 

Janet Malcolm | Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice / 2007

thirteen ways of look at a stone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Janet Malcolm Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)

 

In the Fall of 2007 I taught a course in the MFA Program at Otis College of Art + Design on Gertrude Stein. Despite the difficulties I had had in teaching Stein to undergraduates some 21 years earlier, my writing students took to the work quite readily, and we not only devoured many of the commonly-taught writings—Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, etc.—but read large portions of The Making of Americans, spent one evening listening to Stein’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, and read a wide range of her shorter plays and performative works, the students themselves staging a number of them at the end of the semester. It clearly was not just the differences of undergraduate and graduate viewpoints or the geographical differences between Philadelphia and Los Angeles that accounted for the more ready acceptance of Stein’s work, but the changes in the way people read literature itself. Stein had gradually become more readable, and more importantly, was now a figure whose work was easier to enjoy.

     Given that fact, it puzzled me that several of the better students in the class had been reading Janet Malcolm’s biographical study of Stein and Toklas, Two Lives, each of them highly recommending it. In late December of that year, lunching with my former typesetter, Kim Silva—who had studied Stein with Lyn Hejinian at the University of California-Berkeley and who had become a Stein aficionado—I was also recommended to read this book! The New York Times Book Review had written of the book: “a journalist of the highest order, Malcolm approaches her subjects with a rare combination of qualities—a respect for the unknowable, the mysterious, at the center of lives, combined with a serious effort to get closer to the truth. …If Two Lives has a weakness, it is that one wishes, at the end, for more.”

    My puzzlement stemmed from the fact that when I had read the work, previously published in The New Yorker, I had been appalled at the lack of Malcolm’s critical thinking, and had even wondered why a woman who was clearly so antithetical to Stein’s writing techniques would even want to write about Stein and her companion. Of course, one could wonder why Malcolm had necessarily chosen to write about an author’s sexual relationship; as Marjorie Perloff asked in her review of the book, “…And why include Alice in the first place, such equal time rarely being given to the wives or husbands of Stein’s heterosexual fellow Modernists?” One recognizes that in Malcolm’s choice there is clearly an element of titillation, an interest that comes less out of a concern for the literary aspects of Stein’s career than out of what many still see—and what Malcolm dredges up again for her audience—the so-called “unsavory” aspects of such a relationship. If I have to hear one more time about Ernest Hemingway’s prurient comments from A Moveable Feast about his visit to Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus, where he overhead a supposed sexual conversation between Toklas and Stein—Stein’s pleading voice crying out “Don’t pussy. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy”—I will simply throw away the book (and shame on me for even repeating this here!). Most critics have long been skeptical of this event. I have always imagined the two of them, after being told of Hemingway’s arrival, giggling together as they joyfully performed their little play before the puritanical “Pappa.” No matter what anyone might imagine about their relationship, however, it is of a very private realm that has no consequence on Stein’s writing. And frankly, it is none of our business. Imagine if one were to overhear any of our private homebound conversations what others might think!

     The fact is that Malcolm does not only truck in these kinds of sexual innuendos—I presume we are to gather by her observations that their relationship involved sadomasochism, with Toklas playing the role of the sadist—but questions the women’s relationship to Judaism, and even, by again trotting out their friendship with Nazi sympathizer, Bernard Faÿ, hints that they were able to remain in France during the war because of Nazi connections. The fact is that these two older woman had little choice in the matter of staying in France or returning to America—if they had returned one can only imagine the hostility they both might have faced in the good old USA—and besides they had lived most of their lives in France. The fact that Faÿ, as Perloff observes had “genuinely admired Stein and recognized her genius,” allowed them an ally in an increasingly hostile world, seems to have no role in Malcolm’s muckraking observations. Stein, moreover, does very clearly detest the war, Hitler, and Stalin, the latter two portrayed in Mrs. Reynolds as Angel Harper and Joseph Lane, men who had transformed a more isolate United States from “being a part of a big flat land illimitably flat, the land against which Christopher Columbus bumped himself in 1492,” into being “part of the round world that goes around and around.”

     That book (published in its first single-volume edition by my Sun & Moon Press), which is dismissed by Malcolm as being written in “Stein’s most cruelly boring experimental style,” quite clearly reveals Mrs. Reynolds’s fears and judgments about Hitler:

 

Angel Harper forty-nine, might almost come to be a crime,

not a crime in a crime story but a crime like crime, a crime that

does not rhyme….

It does not seem so it is true. Angel Harper was forty-nine, five

days, not five days at a time, but for that time he was forty-nine.

It is easy to be nervous and it is easy to be happy and it is easy

to be late and it is easy not to begin and it is easy to have nothing

happen. But when it does. Dear me when it does.

 

     Later in the fiction, Stein writes about the moving masses of war:

 

It is very easy to watch other people moving about, when Angel

Harper was forty-nine they all began to have to move about, some

even came past the house of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, and when

Mrs. Reynolds saw them she said she was sorry for them and she was.

 

     Mrs. Reynolds, who did not previously dream, begins to have nightmares:

 

A man shooting or threatening to shoot with a gun, a man carrying a

lamb, a dog looking at a major, the dog black and large and major

small, a guinea-hen looking at the dog and a woman very cautious,

Mrs. Reynolds did not only dream of all these but when she did dream

of them it did not make her nervous but she knew what it meant. …

Naturally when they went to bed she did dream again but this time

she dreamed that she saw a half of a beef pass by and after that there

were soldiers and after that they went away.

 

     As if almost predicting observations such as Malcolm’s and others—Laura Riding Jackson once wrote me that she could not participate in a press such as Sun & Moon which had published a Nazi sympathizer such as Gertrude Stein—Stein writes near the end of her fiction:

 

It is not confusing to be mistaken said Mrs. Reynolds, it is not

difficult to find it difficult said Mrs. Reynolds and here we all are

and every day we find it difficult and every day we are mistaken and

we all sit down.

 

       Mrs. Reynolds is filled with a sense of horror and foreboding, and the heroine has continual dreams that reveal the terrors of World War II, all expressed in a language that my students, at least, easily comprehended.

      What most puzzles me about those Stein admirers who professed an appreciation of Malcolm’s book, however, was how they could possibly endure reading a work that in dozens and dozens of its pages dismisses Stein as a writer. As early in the book as page 10, Malcolm suggests that Stein “uses English words but in no other way resembles English as it is known.” Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (another Sun & Moon Press publication) is “austerely impenetrable.” Soon after, Malcolm describes Stein’s texts as “unintelligible”; at times when Stein “finally finds her true voice…the book (Wars I Have Seen) retreats into silliness.” As Malcolm summarizes, Stein’s “real” writing (as opposed to what critics have described as “audience” writing) is “uncongenial” to her. And when she finally attempts to tackle reading The Making of Americans (for which I must commend her), she can do so only by tearing up the book into sections, reading it slowly over a long period of time. And as she continues the reading process, Malcolm suddenly breaks out in fit a despair that one rarely encounters in any supposedly objective, let alone “exhaustively researched” (the Houston Chronicle) study:

 

The anti-novel seems to be turning into a kind of nervous breakdown.

The author has regressed to a state where she evidently cannot differentiate

writing from shitting.

 

     I wonder how long any serious reader of James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, or even Laurence Sterne might tolerate such attacks.

     In short, it is clear that Malcolm cannot comprehend work that, at times, is certainly difficult, but no more impossible to read than any postmodern or experimental modernist work. Malcolm clearly has refused to see the Stein half full or even half-empty, but prefers to contemplate Stein as a stone that, completely impenetrable, has no possible entry.

      Did my students enjoy Malcolm’s unsophisticated attacks of Stein, Toklas, and Stein’s writing, I wonder, because it made them feel even more aware of their intelligence, since they seemed to have little of the difficulty with her work and her life that the journalist had? Clearly, they found joy in Stein’s writing and person that Malcolm rarely encountered.

     “Why,” reiterated poet and aphorist Nick Piombino this morning when I described Malcolm’s little grenade to him over the phone, “do critics who hate their subjects even bother to write?” Why, I wonder, does a university to whom Stein left all her manuscripts and who printed all of her previously unpublished writings, bother to publish such a whining complaint?

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2008

Reprinted from Shadowtrain, No. 24 (July-August 2008).

 

Henry Green | Party Going / 1939

SO AND SO

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henry Green Party Going (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939)

 

The elderly Miss Fellowes begins this wonderful comic novel, as she walks through a thick London fog toward the train station where she intends to see her niece, Claire, off on a trip the younger woman is making to the continent with several other friends. Suddenly, a dead pigeon falls from the murky sky to her feet below. For some inexplicable reason, Miss Fellowes, picks up the dead bird, washing in the lavatory sink, and wrapping it up in brown parcel paper. Soon after,

 

“Miss Fellowes did not feel well, so, when she got to the top of

those steps she rested there leaning on a handrail.”

 

    Slightly recovering, the woman decides to order tea at the busy station food shop, but when no one will come to wait on her, she decides to go over to the counter and orders a whisky instead.

     Meanwhile, the party-going group gradually arrives, each member finding it difficult to make their way to the others, but eventually gathering, with their luggage, at a central point. Their host, Max, is the latest to arrive, after having considered not even going. The others, Claire, Evelyna, Angela, Julia, Alex, and Robert gradually do link up, but by the time they encounter each other, the trains have been long delayed because of the fog, and Miss Fellowes has fallen into a faint at the restaurant. Max arranges for their party to inhabit rooms at the nearby station hotel, into which they also sneak Claire's ill aunt before the management pulls down gates over the entrances to protect the premises from the potentially marauding crowds beginning to gather at the station.

     So begins Green's satirical work. The rest of it is spent in close rooms, where the women each gossip and try to out-wit one other, manipulating the men in their group, while trying each to vie for the eligible, wealthy, and handsome Max. Alex, who is gay, spends most of his time whining and complaining, Robert retreats to the hotel barroom, and Angela's equally incompetent boyfriend, mopes nearby, sorry that he had not wished her a better farewell.

     Green's work, accordingly, is centered primarily on the women and their subtle and, more often, obvious put-downs of one another, just as they pretend long friendships and admiration for each another. Into this group, the beautiful and legendary Amabel miraculously finds entry, claiming her right to join them, even though she has been rather specifically uninvited by Max. Her visit, moreover, ratchets up the heightened tensions between these competitive harridans, and ultimately threatens to break-up the party. Nothing much else happens in this fiction, but the war of words and these women's mindless and often meaningless actions and disparagements of one another, along with Alex's aspersions, and Angela's discomfort (she is a first-timer in their party), creates enough comic energy to match any boulevard farce.

     All the ninnies gathered at the hotel, wealthy and/or spoiled, are, at heart, mean and bored, having no ideas with which to entertain their empty heads. And Green's satire soon turns somewhat vicious as we observe their selfish manipulations. Only the gravely ill Miss Fellowes, cared for by two of the women's nannies who have also come to see the group off, perceives anything of significance. In her fight against alcohol and possible death, she undergoes a kind of spiritual journey that transforms the empty connections made by the others into something meaningful and possibly salving.

     Claire, as well as the others, is described as being incapable of caring for her aunt, and gradually, we discover she is only too ready to leave her behind in the strange hotel room for her own escape, Green revealing that Miss Fellowes' herself cannot stand her niece, nor Claire's mother, the older woman's sister—feelings we share.

     The vast void of these individual's lives is less revealed in their catty statements and petty behavior, than it is in Green's own impeccable style—through the very language Green uses to convey their feelings. Among the author's several rhetorical devices, the most obvious is his use of the word "so" to convey the weak link of their logic. The conjunction and, at times, adjective, seems to convey an underlying relationship of events where there are actually no real connections. Three examples from many dozens of examples throughout the work will have suffice:

 

“She called him darling, which was of no significance except that

she had never done so before, and he did not at once tumble to it

that her smiles and friendliness for him, which like any other girl

she could turn on at will so that it poured pleasantly out in the way

water will do out of taps.” (p. 117) [italics mine]

 

“So she came over to where he was sitting, and, his hands taken up

with pouring out his drink, she kissed his cheek and then sat down

opposite.” (p. 113) [italics mine]

 

“They made noises which could be taken to mean yes and Julia ex-

plained to Miss Henderson how Max had already ordered tea so that

it would be easy to carry two cups along to them without Angela knowing.”

(p. 71) [italics mine]

 

    One need only compare that false connection of "so," with the adjectival and adverbial connections that actually suggest a subsequent relationship, used to describe Miss Fellow's nightmare adventures:

 

“And Miss Fellowes wearily faced another tide of illness. Aching all

over she watched helpless while that could rushed across to where

was wedged and again the sea below rose with it, most menacing

and capped with foam and as it came nearer she heard again the

shrieking wind in throbbing through her ears. In terror she watched

the seas rise to get at her, so menacing her blood throbbed unbearably,

and again it was all forced into her head but this had happened so

often she felt she had experienced the worst of it. But now with a roll

of drums and then a most frightful crash lightning came out of that

cloud and played upon the sea, and this repeated, and then again, each

time nearer till she knew she was worse than she had ever been. One

last crash which she knew to be unbearable and she burst and exploded

into complete insensibility. She vomited.”

 

     Here there is a specific relationship between events. The mental vision Miss Fellowes encounters a kind of apocalyptic tempest, results in an actual physical action. The mental vision she encounters directly relates to her own actions and behavior.

     For the others, there is "no significance," as they speak of pointless actions such as smiling, kissing a cheek, or carrying two cups of coffee. For the party-goers, action is pointless, and ideation, accordingly, has no real connection with the petty things they accomplish.

    Whereas, Max's gathering of nit-wits can only wait, twittering away their time before an equally meaningless adventure in the South of France, Miss Fellowes has responded to nature in her attempt to give the dead bird—itself a kind of symbol for the others' spiritual deaths—a properly ritualized burial. It is she, accordingly, who must suffer the storms and waves of angst that the others will not and cannot face.

     When the news finally reaches the group that the trains are running again, Julia—who throughout the early part of the fiction has worried over what she calls her charms, meaningless tokens from her childhood that she carries with her wherever she goes—rushes into Miss Fellowes' room bursting out with the news, oblivious of Miss Fellowes' presence:

 

"children we are to go, they've telephoned to say it's all over,

isn't it just wonderful and we're to get reading, darlings, just think."

 

     But, obviously, she and her friends cannot "think," for they have no "fellow" feelings, no empathy for anything or anyone in the world around them. Julia's tokens are all inanimate objects, things, as opposed to Miss Fellowes' formerly living being. In the world of the party-goers there are no true connections between anything they might do as opposed to something else, and, therefore, no difference between present or past. As Embassy Richard says, after he is asked to join their party:

 

"But weren't you going anywhere?" Amabel said to Richard, only she

looked at Max.

"I can go where I was going afterwards," he said to all of them and smiled.

 

     The relationship between human beings that characterizes Julia and her friends is summarized, again with the recurrent word "so," a few sentences earlier:

 

“So like when you were small and they brought children over to play with

you and you wanted to play on your own then someone, as they hardly

ever did, came along and took them off so you could do what you wanted.”

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2011

Reprinted from Exploring Fictions (September 2011).

David Bromige | Threads / 1971 || My Poetry / 1980 || Desire: Selected Poems 19633-1987 / 1988 || The Harbormaster of Hong Kong / 1993

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).