Discourse on William Bronk

Walk with me past your workplace,
down to where the river runs
unabashed, where the light sifts
between the trees and disease
is nowhere. Now, in the
accustomed earth from which
we see, hold out your hand

so that I might behold it
in the here-now hour of day
when eternity vanishes,
when ritual absconds,
and only in the turning
of the world may we hear
the still uncontestable music.

Andrew Field’s poems are full of feeling and thought; they are big poems with big subjects, concerned with the world and how we move in it. Field is a probing critic and thinker; gleeful, opinionated, and one of my favorite aesthetic interlocutors. I had the pleasure of talking with him about “Discourse on William Bronk” and his poetic practice through email and face-to-face conversations over the course of a few months.

Charles Kell: Thanks for your time, Andrew, again; it is always such a wonderful encounter and experience talking with you. Carrie and I were traveling this past summer a bit, and we hopped a quick flight from Dublin to Amsterdam. I brought along Hans Faverey’s selected poems, Against the Forgetting, as well as your poem, “Discourse on William Bronk,” which I had folded in my pocket, and would take out, intermittently, jotting down notes, marginalia, rereading, letting my eyes linger over its lines. In the preface to Faverey’s selected, Eliot Weinberger writes, “Among American poets, his [Faverey’s] company would have been George Oppen, William Bronk, Gustaf Sobin” (xiv), and a quick second later, Weinberger relates, “Like Bronk, paradoxes in plain language, and lines that erase the preceding line” (xv). Also, recently I was rereading Forrest Gander’s Be With, which opens with an epigraph from Bronk:

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
          but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
          I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

The notion of lines erasing preceding lines that is evident in Faverey and Bronk, is also evident in your poems, I feel, and in this poem, through the echoes of movement, of inviting / requiring the reader to reread, rethink, linger. However, your poem also works in a number of different ways, ways that are predicated on different types of movement. It pushes the speaker and reader forward in ways that differ from a great deal of Bronk.

I am drawn, immediately, to this movement. Movement in all of its guises: physical, emotional, intellectual, philosophical. Can you speak to both the impetus of “Discourse on William Bronk” and also the various types of movement the poem enacts?

Andrew Field: Thanks, Charles, for asking me to do this interview, and for your attention to my small poem about Bronk. In terms of the impetus of “Discourse on William Bronk”—the kind of force with which the poem moves—I was working on a manuscript of poems earlier this year. I had completed a section of a bunch of longer poems, and I wanted to do a section of shorter poems, to fight monotony and keep the manuscript moving. I don’t know why, but I started to try and write poems that sort of captured my own inner sense of what various poets, thinkers and artists meant to me. In a poem, of course, so not a discursive essay, though I called the poems “discourses” because I probably liked the weight of that word, how it sounds philosophical. It’s actually defined online as a “formal and orderly expression of thought,” and so it really suggests a form of argument. I’ve always liked what is sometimes called, admittedly pretty strangely “philosophical poetry” (as if other poems aren’t philosophical…)—I’m thinking of poets like John Koethe, Stevens, and of course Bronk, too. Stevens actually has a poem with the fabulous title “Academic Discourse at Havana”—it’s wonderful because it’s a sort of fabulous creative swipe at some of the pretensions of philosophy, along the lines of his “Rationalists, wearing square hats, / Think, in square rooms” from “Six Significant Landscapes.” Stevens’s poems are a sort of argument, a kind of discourse, as every poem is, but they are also completely removed from the more dusty arguments you might find in a philosophical treatise, say. They are less interested in logic, in a way, and more in imagination, though that is probably too simply phrased.

CK: Another initial moment that is striking is that your poem enacts the movement of “in-between,” of dwelling in the interstice, as well. “Discourse,” the term itself, as you mention, lets us know we will be in for serious thought, serious discussion, serious work and reflection; however, the poem is simultaneously welcoming, playful, inviting, friendly in the sense of an Ashbery poem. This juxtaposition, then, made me think, joyously, that intellectual discourse, oftentimes, is both cognitively rigorous and pleasurable, that these experiences overlap and intertwine. I think of your first few lines: “Walk with me past your workplace, / down to where the river runs / unabashed, where the light sifts / between the trees and disease / is nowhere.”

The speaker of the poem invites the other for a walk—there is nothing more friendly than a walk together!—but there is also the specter that something serious will be discussed. They walk past the addressee’s “workplace,” which denotes that the usual work will be bypassed for something different, something beyond, that they are embarking on new work, in a sense, a discourse that can, in fact, involve both work and play. The note, the “river runs / unabashed” is key, like the river, I see the speaker and partner walking and thinking with a certain freedom, with no immediate constraints; a freedom of thought, perhaps; “light sifts / between the trees,” and we move to a place where “disease / is nowhere.” Can you speak to some of the opening, inviting moments of the poem, how there seems to be an equal amount of attention on the pastoral and the intellectual, and how these elements play and brush up with one another?

AF: For sure, thanks. You know, I think a long walk, whether we are solitary or walking and talking with a friend, is also conducive to experiencing both the “work and play” you described, and in that sense a different sense of time, and therefore a sense of freedom. I haven’t read Teju Cole’s novel from a few years ago, Open City, but I got the sense that there was a tight relationship between walking, thinking, and freedom, as I believe the entire book revolves around a narrator walking around New York City, and how his actual thinking becomes more ambulatory, let’s say. And of course there are a bazillion great writers and thinkers who were very serious about walking and its relationship to fruitful thinking—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Stevens, Baudelaire, Jay Wright, Dorothy Wordsworth, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, A.R. Ammons, even the solemn Kant. And, speaking of another book I haven’t read yet—I’ll be reading it this January, for a book discussion at my library, and I am outrageously excited, “glad to the brink of fear”—I think Don Quixote’s conversations with Sancho Panza, in the context of their walks together, is also probably relevant, though there is a level of irony to that freedom that is hard to describe.

This whole matrix of walking, thinking, freedom—whether in more urban, rural, or pastoral contexts—definitely means we ourselves are walking around in flâneur territory, which means “wandering without purpose,” an idea and experience which I like, the way it incorporates elements of chance and contingency. One of my favorite contemporary writers, Ben Lerner, once compared Ashbery’s wandering to Whitman’s loafing, an analogy which I love, since it both activities are sort of purposelessly purposive, and hence flâneurish—also, in a way, endearingly lazy.

I should say that Bronk actually took a walk most days at some point during his workday. (That’s why I suggested taking a walk with him.) He ran his family’s business, “Bronk Coal and Lumber,” in Hudson Falls, NY,which I also do not think gave him (the work) much pleasure. I do think and hope that taking these walks were restorative for him. And I’m glad the poem made you think or experience, however indirectly, a sense of joy. I wonder actually if I wanted to impart that sense to Bronk himself, during our walk in the poem, since I often find Bronk, to be honest, quite depressing and intensely despairing, to a point that I cannot read him, especially some of the later stuff, with too much pleasure. Maybe we can talk about that in a bit.

CK: I love Cole’s Open City, and was obsessed with it upon release in 2011. I am so pleased you mentioned the flâneur, and the notion of “wandering without purpose.” There’s a great book of essays, edited by Keith Tester, The Flâneur (1994). I immediately think of one of my biggest influences, W.G. Sebald, and his wonderful novels of walking; I think of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, I also think of Guy Debord’s, and The Situationists’ notion of dérive (an unplanned journey through a landscape in which individuals drop what they’re doing and “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there”). And I am tickled you bring up Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, two of my favorite people and probably my favorite book…I also think of the young female narrator in Joanna Scott’s Arrogance who is an inveterate walker, a wanderer…. A lot of walking in Beckett and Bernhard, and Joyce’s Ulysses…. I could talk all day and night about this topic. In your poem, though, there is an abrupt change, a stop that takes place in the fifth line, a stop that also denotes a momentary stop in movement, as the speaker remarks: “Now, in the / accustomed earth” where the occasion of discourse that is introduced is pushed further, as the speaker asks the other to “hold out your hand,” where a closeness intensifies, a welcoming is integrated to an even greater degree. This moment strikes me and makes me ponder a question we know the answer to: is all thought, maybe, all discourse equally repetitive and equally new? This is a pleasurable paradox. And as we’re in the middle part of the poem, in the middle of the sonnet, can you speak to this middle, this in-between space of thinking?

AF: That’s an interesting comment about how discourse involves a difference-in-sameness or sameness-in-difference. It’s weird that you bring up the subject of repetition, because tonight, when I was driving home from work, I was listening to one of my favorite albums, the live Dylan album from 1966 from Royal Albert Hall. It has two discs, and the first disc is an acoustic set, which is great, but the second disc is even better, I think, and it’s a set where Dylan plays with members of The Band. This is the concert with that famous moment where someone in the audience shouts, “Judas!” And Dylan says, in a weird, possibly drugged voice, sort of slow and slurred, “I don’t believe you! You’re a liar!” Then, if you listen closely, you can hear Dylan turn to his bandmates and sort of whisper-shout-command, “play it fucking loud!” And then the song explodes into “Like A Rolling Stone.” It’s great. But yes, I’m mentioning this album because there is a version on it of “One Too Many Mornings” that is so wonderfully, utterly different from the studio take on The Times They Are A-Changin (and of course the same can be said for that explosive “Like a Rolling Stone,” compared to the version on Highway 61 Revisited, which might be one of the only songs that I don’t seem to get sick of, no matter how often I listen to it). The live version – of “One Too Many Mornings,” of “Like a Rolling Stone” – is a repetition, we could say, of the studio version (the sameness emphasis). Yet the arrangement on the live versions bring out a new and different song, a song seen from a totally different angle, a re-vision (the difference emphasis).

Actually, I think revision might be a better word for this – repetition sounds too neurotic to me. Isn’t there something called a “repetitive compulsion”?

CK: I am intrigued by your Dylan note, and it reminds me of Joni Mitchell’s live album, Miles of Aisles, at the beginning of “The Circle Game,” when she talks about the differences between painters and musicians; she says, “Nobody ever says to Van Gogh: ‘paint another Starry Night again, man.'” And, not to get off topic, but it makes me think of my favorite musicians—Dylan, Coltrane, Nina Simone, James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen—how they always are doing something different, pushing toward new boundaries, and a lot of time the public wants the same record, they want Neil Young to make Harvest over and over, but for the great artist it doesn’t work this way. Anyway, I was thinking more along the lines of the pleasurable paradox of repetition (and I don’t, personally, associate repetition with a negative connotation, though it can easily veer in that direction; part of me loves that fine line); I am thinking, initially, about writing: we repeat the act, the practice, knowing that most of what we produce will be no good; however, the very practice, (for me, “repetition”) is a mixture of pain and jouissance, along with all of the things in the middle. I also think of practice in sport; practice in music; practice in any work or trade we want to get better at.

These thoughts bring me back to Bronk, particularly one Bronk poem that stands out to me and has haunted me, “Futurity,” from Manifest and Furthermore (1987), and reads in its entirety:

Not anything I made, not these brief things,
but things I saw about the natural world:
I wish that these could hold there, never be gone.

This poem, its brevity noting our briefness, and the transience of our made things, hits me hard. The speaker relates a wish for the things about the natural world, that they “could hold there, never be gone.” An impossible wish. This is a very Bronkian poem and I wonder how your poem engages with Bronk on multiple levels. In what ways does it echo, pick up, break free from Bronk, and/or work within a discourse on Bronk?

AF: I do agree that it’s an impossible wish Bronk is expressing, and that the poem is sort of enacting and embodying a sense of impermanence, and with that impermanence a sense of loss, a form of mourning or grieving. But this is exactly why I (lately at least) have been resisting Bronk’s poems. And here’s why: I feel there is a clinginess to the poem–an attachment, to keep up the Buddhist idiom–that I find a bit…overkill, overmuch, something like that. In other words, why does impermanence need to get us down? I’m thinking right now of Richard Rorty’s work–I used to be really into him–where he says something similar, but in the context of contingency. Why can’t these things–impermanence, contingency–be liberating? And I feel like they are only not liberating when we are still trying somehow someway to be in control. Which I think is a recipe for disaster.

Harold Bloom is my favorite critic ever. He has a quote at the beginning of a book he wrote on Stevens that I have always liked and found intriguing and suggestive. He writes, “American poetry since Emerson follows a triple rhythm: It must be broken; It must not bear having been broken; It must seem to have been mended.” Bronk, to my current thinking, seems to move through “It must be broken” into “It must not bear having been broken,” but to not push often enough past this into “It must seem to have been mended.” I mean, not even “It must be mended,” but “It must seem to have been mended.” Even that seem, it seems to me, is just not there enough in the work. He dwells too much, to my mind, on disintegration. For that reason, I feel like he does not seem to experience integration enough in the poetry–especially the later stuff–which I think is necessary (“must seem to have been mended”) in some sense for a poem to work, I guess, though I’m aware this is a contentious claim. I’m definitely biased–this is why I find Sylvia Plath’s poetry really uninteresting, and Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry endlessly thrilling–the sense that Plath seems to deliberately wallow in her pain, while Bishop transmutes it into something else. Marianne Moore talked about Plath as being “unrelenting” and lacking a “spiritual resilience.” I know many people would disagree, but I agree with Moore, and think her critique is relevant for aspects of Bronk’s work as well.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I came across this quote, from an essay on Bronk by Norman Finkelstein, that seems to help me make this argument. Finkelstein writes, “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.” Okay, fine: but why would or should we desire the world, especially if it can never be known as a totality? Also, when it comes down to it, what does that sentence even mean? What does it mean to have “’desire for the world”? The world, the way I see it, is a massive, never-ending, absurdist mindfuck. How could Bronk not see that? Or, why did Bronk not see that?

I suppose it’s obvious to say now that my poem wants to move past Bronk’s fatalism. But it also wants to take Bronk with me, because I have learned a lot by reading his work over the years–his voice appears in different ways in the manuscript I’m sending out–and we should never abandon our friends. But what I mean is, I think it’s important to feel the pathos in many of Bronk’s poems, but also to recognize that we don’t always have to suffer, and that we should be honest and clear-eyed about that. I think the world is suffering, yes, but how we interpret the world can change things and lead to less suffering. For whatever reason, I feel like Bronk often does not realize this, or achieve this (and same with Plath)–he chooses to stay with his mostly negative interpretations, his grumblings and moanings. For that reason, his poems don’t seem to change or grow. He writes the same poem over and over again, pretty much.

There’s an essay by Susan Schultz about Bronk and Ashbery, comparing them. And she tries to be even-handed, but it’s totally clear in the end that she prefers Ashbery. And I guess, if I’m being honest, that I do, too. Why? Ashbery revises, but he really does not repeat, for the most part. Look at Some Trees, then The Tennis Court Oath (even if the book is honestly mostly awful, I think at least, agreeing with Bloom again, and disagreeing with Ron Silliman), and then something like Three Poems. There is real change there, a kind of accrual, let’s say, growth, development, vision, “expansion,” etc. Difference-in-sameness, sameness-in-difference. Dylan fans know what I’m talking about–listen to early Dylan, Christian Dylan, late Dylan. How to explain it? “Feel like my soul is beginning to expand / Look into my heart and you will sort of understand.” One cannot grasp these artists’ works–they slip out of your grasp, because they are not repetitive. They are constantly in a state of becoming, revising, growing. (There is a great book about Dylan in this context, called Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 60’s by John Hughes.) That, I think–not stagnating, but growing spiritually, aesthetically, what have you–should be a criteria for thinking about the value of poetry–not change for change sake, but becoming our own quixotic selves. Ashbery does this, Dylan does, Bloom also does this. (In his tribute piece to Bloom in The New Yorker from last month, James Wood writes, “Bloom can be faulted for not changing and developing, for not overhearing himself attentively enough.” But I find this, to be honest, absurd–in the preceding paragraph, Wood speaks of the “several Blooms,” and I can’t help but feel that this severalness is quite compelling evidence for a very attentive process or experience of overhearing. I don’t know if Wood is attempting to call attention to the fact that Bloom was probably a hedgehog, in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, and his single defining hedgehogian idea was probably “influence”–but to be a hedgehog does not preclude changing and developing, at least the way I see it.) Anyways, to get back to Bronk, unfortunately, to my understanding (and I’m sure a critic like Henry Weinfield would disagree), I can’t say Bronk does this often enough in his poetry.

CK: Again, your note makes me think of one of my favorite writers, the great grumbler, the great master of the complaint, Thomas Bernhard, and how his knotted sentences twist, repeat, revise, recreate thoughts and emotions before threading them to form either a different way of looking or madness, an end: two of my favorite novels that practice these thoughts are The Loser (1983) and Correction (1975). And I appreciate your critiques of Bronk and Plath, and your note that we don’t always have to suffer; however, I find much pleasure, much aesthetic subtlety and practice in both Plath and Bronk; that each poet, though definitely despairing, are not completely subject to the desultory dirge. I have been taken with Plath’s poems, “Words,” with “Little Fugue” of late, rereading these poems, and they strike me, they are important to me; not simply for their darkness, which is there, but for their grasping and scratching toward otherness. And I also think we get into tricky territory to question why Bronk did not see the world as “a massive, never-ending, absurdist mindfuck.” And whereas I agree wholeheartedly to not give ourselves over to suffering, to despair (there can be something seductive in that); yet, at the same time, we enjoy to momentarily despair, to gnash our teeth and howl at the sky in abject pain, and I’m thinking now specifically of the blues music I love so much, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” or Mississippi John Hurt’s “Got the Blues, Can’t Be Satisfied,” songs that momentarily revel in abject pain. All of these thoughts and feelings are such fine lines to tread (again, this is why I like them so much); there is not, to me, at least, an either/or, a choosing completely one way or the other. And I know we disagree, but I like The Tennis Court Oath quite a bit, in the same way that my favorite Dylan albums are Self-Portrait (1970) and Infidels (1983); in the case of The Tennis Court Oath and Self-Portrait, there is an immediate “what the fuck is this?” that I love about certain art; when I totally do not know what to do with it, to apprehend it, that it is so slippery.

And this, in a completely different way, is why I’m drawn to and so taken with your poem, that it dwells in this middle ground. The second half of the poem, particularly the break, emphasizes and prolongs the notion of “hold out your hand,” the invitation, and equally brings the addressee close while keeping a distance with the subsequent two lines: “so that I might behold it / in the here-now hour of day”—I’m intrigued by “behold”; the speaker “might behold” the outstretched hand, which notes a tentative act of looking, to see or observe the hand, without necessarily reaching for and touching it; “behold,” as well, notes that the hand is of importance, remarkable in some aspect. This moment in the poem seems to extend some of Finkelstein’s ideas of desire in Bronk, a desire to “behold” and points back to your question of what does “desire for the world” even mean? I suppose we could follow things down a pluralistic rabbit-hole, so to speak, and start to say that “desire for the world” might entail “desire” for all the world has to offer: fleeting moments of pleasure, of pain, and feeling the vast range of in-between; knowing that the world, for most, or for many, is suffering, but that there are moments of happiness and transcendence as well. These thoughts do not specifically define “desire for the world” but are simply an opening range that come to mind, having not read Finkelstein. So, my question is, is to “behold” the hand, or the move where the speaker “might behold” the outstretched hand, enacting a possibility of “desire”? Is this an attempt, by the speaker, to extend desire in any way?

Also, it is never more than at this moment when I feel as though I—the reader—exist in the complete present of the poem. Time appears and feels like it stops (this is such a fabulous moment in the poem). For you, Andrew, are there correlations with “desire” and “time” at this moment in the poem and in general?

AF: Another great question. Thanks. Actually, I don’t think reticence means one is not howling in abject pain. I actually have a section in the manuscript that listens to Ray Charles and tries to convey my astonishment in a poem somehow while listening to him sing. He is a master of channeling pain into art-sublimating, really- so i try in that section of the poems to do something somehow similar. But, for my money, I guess I don’t find baring one’s wounds relentlessly very interesting, and I think doing so is different from what Ray Charles does. Plath, to my mind, seems to show off. “Look at me, my suffering,” and, maybe by extension or strange logic, “my brilliance.” But the blues, the howls, Ray Charles-that to me seems less disingenuous. Both are performances, yes, but I am convinced by Ray Charles, and for some reason not by Plath.

Poetry shouldn’t be a contest for who suffers more. Sometimes that seems to be the case in our culture. It should be a contest for who turns their suffering into something…idk, actually funny, compassionate, dark, moving, artful. If I’m going to read “confessional poetry,” whatever that means, I’d much rather read a poet like Dorothea Lasky, who to me is interesting and funny in a way Plath (and to my mind, Lowell, Berryman, etc.) is not.

I know readers will say, “but Plath is all those things-dark, funny, etc.” But to my mind she is artlessly artful, and tries too hard. Poets like Bishop and Ashbery are the opposite-they are artfully artless. Theirs is a light touch that can, and often does, just completely astonish. They seem to sublimate more successfully, I guess, in terms of creating poems. That’s at least how I see it.

I think when I used the word “behold” in the poem, I was thinking about Stevens’ use of the word in “The Snow Man.” Here is that poem (“behold” is in the second line in the second stanza):

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I’ve always thought Stevens’ word-choices for seeing here were fascinating, how he moves from “regard”–which implies a kind of respectful aloofness–to behold–which implies a different affective valence, a form of reverence, a deeper closeness and far-ness, even a sense of the numinous or holy. I think your invocation of desire in the context of the word “behold” is quite incisive, Charles, and also related in interesting ways to Bronk and my hopefully not too muddled critique of him. Because, if you notice, Stevens’ beholding of the “junipers shagged with ice” is not free of suffering, I guess we could say. I mean, I think good readers of poetry can and should pick up on the phrase “And have been cold a long time” and just hear, sense, feel the immense sadness in that line. How does it feel to have been cold a long time? But the phrasing is restrained, understated, reticent, which for me makes it even more intense and meaningful. (Elizabeth Bishop pulls this sort of thing off constantly, displacing and sublimating sadness in all sorts of ways.)

I think, in our earlier conversation, we were talking about how Bronk in his poetry seems too attached to the world–that clingy quality–so, when the world changes, as it does and will forever, Bronk becomes upset. He can’t really stomach impermanence. That’s how I understand Finkelstein’s point–Bronk desires a changeless world. I can definitely relate to that, in the sense that, as someone who meditates and believes in God, I think about God as a sort of “place” that is changeless. But I feel like Bronk displaces this changelessness onto the physical world, and for that reason is constantly being disappointed. It’s a failure of attribution-in philosophy they call it a category error.

Stevens, at least the way I see it, in “The Snow Man” does not make that mistake. Any suffering in “The Snow Man”–“And have been cold a long time,” “any misery in the sound of the wind”–is absolutely and utterly dwarfed by the shockingly mysterious “sound of the land / Full of the same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place.”

And actually, Charles, I think your last question, about time and desire, is very relevant for “The Snow Man.” Because, in that last stanza, there is a volta–“For the listener” and what follows. We travel in a different direction, and time–I think one can feel this here, in that poem–just stops. Time stops, and the listener “listens in the snow.” Why does time stop? How? I think, as you pointed out, that it has to do with desire. In that moment, Stevens has swapped one desire–“desire for the world,” say–for another–desire for God, nothingness, what have you. He attributes correctly. How does he do this? Because he himself is nothing. It’s like when Dickinson writes,

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

Stevens, Dickinson–Whitman, too–what they are doing is imaginatively witnessing. They are not really interested in being “somebody.” And because they’re not, they wind up becoming, well, somebody I guess. Lose yourself to find yourself, etc. To witness means, in some sense, to be free from the more conventional illusions–both the “nothing that is not there” and “the nothing that is.”

CK: What jumps out to me about the next two lines is the brief anaphora of “when” at the beginning of each: “when eternity vanishes, / when ritual absconds”; I love these moments—and I’m snapped back from my time-less sensations. But I am within a paradox here: I feel as though time is pressing again, yet in the future eternity will vanish. Does this, then, look at, balance, or attempt to go past our “transience” or “impermanence”? I also love the use of “absconds” in that it denotes that “ritual” will cease hurriedly and in secret; absconds connotes a legal term that typically means to avoid detection and arrest for an unlawful action. What will it mean when “eternity” and “ritual” vanish and abscond? Is this something we can even contemplate?

AF: You know, the more I try to answer these great questions, the more I am realizing how indebted my poem is, not only to Bronk, but also to Stevens (who definitely incontestably influenced Bronk in very many ways). When I write about eternity vanishing and ritual absconding, I’m really thinking of moments in Stevens where the sort of normative pieties are abandoned, to make room for something more radical, fun, interesting and creative. Think of “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.” I think we are still talking about attachment actually, since we can be overly attached not only to the physical world, or our experience of the physical world, but also to concepts and ideas. And I think, for many people, ideas like eternity do become a sort of sad and boring ritual, of doing but also of course of thinking. And we get bogged down in that, instead of just shucking it off, incrementally and/or suddenly, and, like Stevens writes in “Sailing After Lunch,” rushing “brightly through the summer air.”

CK: The ending of the poem focuses back on movement, but it is movement of a different sort: “and only in the turning / of the world may we hear / the still uncontestable music.” For me, this poem is both highly musical and one that might follow musical movements (fugue and toccata?). At the beginning the speaker and the addressee’s movements are physical, they walk and talk, and at the close both seem still but are listening to the movement, the “turning / of the world” where in the turning both “may…hear” the “still uncontestable music”: the music of the world turning, music that plays regardless of people, art, events; music that is “uncontestable” despite these things. You may disagree, but I find the “still uncontestable music” very Bronkian in that the specter of impermanence is there, but there also is a distinct break from Bronk in enacting the move toward a different plain of being and artistic creation. What are your thoughts on the relationship with the “turning of the world” and the world’s “uncontestable music”? What is your aesthetic and/or personal relationship with these things?

AF: I completely agree with your point, Charles, that the whole notion of incontestable music is Bronkian–the idea, the phrasing, everything about it. And, although I’ve been giving Bronk something of a hopefully not too ungrateful thrashing, I’m glad to return to aspects of his work that I personally do like and even (let’s be honest) love. And one of those aspects is the role that music plays in his work. I’m thinking especially of some of the earlier books. The first section of “Some Musicians Play Chamber Music For Us,” which opens his Light and Dark, is wonderful and lovely (and uncannily relevant for our discussion about repetition, revision, development, movement…):

Well, that’s a proposition well composed;
the very justice of it states a demand
for some response, a further phrase, its tone
asking perhaps, or adding, or simply “yes.”

It requires several voices, even assent
requires several voices, not to repeat
but to confirm if possible, to try
a variant statement in a different way, to define

in more than one direction, a moving space
constantly pushing outward, here, then there,
then there, which becomes at all because it moves,
because it holds itself to certain lines.

What is stated is simply what is stated.
Nothing at all is said of something else.
It is only this phrase, then this phrase,
though therefore, perhaps, or furthermore.

But this is serious business even so;
for what is stated is clearly what there is.
“There is this,” you say; and “Look, there is also this.”
These incantations conjure the form of the world,

ah, not known, not known, except by this,
– and this; not ever finally known except
as some response among all these responses, ah,
that’s a composition well, so well, proposed.

That “ah, not known”–to me that is so (wonderfully) Bronk. That particular lyricism, the music of it, the movement of his thinking (Anne Carson talks about the importance of thought moving in a fascinating lecture I watched recently–the relationship between moving thought and living thought, or thought that moves as thought that lives), and that sort of finger waving in the air near the end–“but no, let’s pause, but ah” and so on. Is there a sadness to that “ah, not known”? In this particular instance, I think the tone is more cautionary and remonstrative.

CK: I am so pleased you end with this Bronk poem, how it threads the way we’ve been briefly touching upon both music and poetry, how they overlap and work together in so many ways. I thank you for your generous time, your generous attention to details, and I hope we will continue with these topics very soon. Until then, what are you working on now? What’s next?

AF: Well, I have this manuscript, with the Bronk poem, that I’m sending out. Many of the poems in that manuscript, especially the longer ones, are pretty freewheeling and associational–it’s kind of my own homage to the New York School, especially Ashbery, also early Padgett. I’m also writing some new stuff, but I’ll keep my lips zipped about that for now.

Anyways, thank you so much, Charles, for such great questions, as well as your attention to this poem. I’d take a walk with you, anytime.

Andrew Field is a poet, librarian and essayist living in Cleveland Heights, OH. His website is andrewfield81.squarespace.com, and he tweets @AField81.