Gary Sullivan on David Bromige

 

Gary Sullivan

My David Bromige

Excerpt

Twenty years before My Yahoo, fifteen before My Bohemia, five before My Emily Dickinson, five after Lally’s My Life (and simultaneously with Hejinian’s), David Bromige published My Poetry — the quintessential Bromige collection, and what seems in retrospect to be the book that finally shook North American poetry from the burnt-out hull of 70s self-absorption into the radical deconstruction of the 80s (assuming, of course that you buy into that particular art-historical narrative).       Bromige had been publishing since the mid-60s, and with each new title — The Ends of the Earth (1968), Threads (1971), Birds of the West (1973), Tight Corners & What’s Around Them(1974), to list a few of my own favorites — switched gears, reinventing his ‘style’ or ‘voice’ so completely that, to anyone following his development over the years, My Poetry might have seemed like the logical ‘next step.’ Or would it have? Even given shifts from book to book in Bromige’s previous output, My Poetry may well have been a complete surprise to his earlier readers.       Some of the titles: ‘Authority,’ ‘What the Person Believes is Part of the Poet’s Make-up,’ ‘My Career,’ ‘My Plan’ — whoa, this is too self-aware. It isn’t until Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures, Michael Gottlieb’s New York, Alan Davies’ ‘Peer Pleasure,’ and most recently Ben Friedlander’s ‘Poe’ essays that anyone in ear-shot of Bromige really begins to examine the site of contemporary American poetry’s production and reception in their creative work. In her ‘Annotated Bibliography,’ which appeared in the 1987 David Bromige issue of The Difficulties, Barbara Weber drops in the following from Bromige — it suggests how the book was ultimately put together:

‘I had sent a TS to Black Sparrow and John had written back that he loved the Bromige poems in it, but not the prose “cutups,” and would I omit these? Since these were what I found of chief interest, I wouldn’t; so I took the book to Geoff (Young, of The Figures), and he wanted to do it but thought that a lot of the ‘Bromige Poems’ could go. He got me to think of it from the book’s point-of-view, and not as a ‘collected works 74–79.’’ I love that quote, although I admittedly don’t think of My Poetry as being from the book’s point-of-view, though it’s certainly an interesting take, and probably what gave Bromige the license to put the book together as he did.       The first piece, ‘My Poetry,’ is a cut-n-paste of ‘interesting sentences taken from all my previous reviews’: ‘My Poetry’ does seem to have a cumulative, haunting effect — one or two poems may not touch you, but a small bookful begins to etch a response, poems rising in blisters that itch for weeks, poems like ball-bearings turning on each other, over & over, digging down far enough to find substance, a hard core to fill up the hand. ‘It’s through this small square that my poems project themselves, flickering across the consciousness, finally polarizing in the pure plasma of life. The reader grows impatient, irritated with my distancing style, coming at him in the rare book format, written under not one but two different kinds of dirty money, & knowing me to be an english teacher.’ This is a particularly brilliant gesture, especially given the historical moment in which it was made — isn’t there a way in which the gesture itself is as self-absorbed as the most traditionally confessional? Isn’t ‘My Poetry,’ in some very basic sense, a ‘confessional’ poem? I’d argue that not only is it as confessional a gesture as it is deconstructive, but that this fact must have tickled Bromige when he thought of it.       But I need to backtrack. I really should have said that ‘My Poetry’ is reputedly a cut-n-paste, because it does seem to include a certain amount of editorializing on Bromige’s part: ‘The blurb on the book says the usual blurb-things. “David Bromige writes carefully, with pleasure — which is the point.” Well, which is? I am the author of previous books, which is the point.’ — though I could be wrong. Whatever the case, it’s a tour-de-force, and the perfect opener, asking: ‘Well, how does the world, that part of it with which my work does engage, see me?’ Or, more to the point, how does it position, how does it categorize?       Bromige must have been especially sensitive to the ways in which one gets, despite the variousness of one’s output, pigeonholed. My favorite moment: ‘The hipper among you will be able to identify what drugs went into each o