Artzar - William Bronk Interview

How did you feel about receiving the American Book Award for Life Supports?

BRONK: That prize, so far as I was able to see, actually did nothing for me. I went down to New York City to receive it. I’d never had that kind of recognition before. The important thing is the work itself. I take the satisfaction from it. I’m glad that somebody else can discover the poems the way I discovered the poems. I’m glad that Life Supports is back in print as well as Vectors and Smoothable Curves. I have never sold well. The World, the Worldless, which was published at a time when there was more of a literary public than there is today, was reviewed in daily papers around the country. That would be out of the question for a book of poetry now. It simply wouldn’t happen. When I received the book prize I had a lot of newspaper people who wanted to come talk to me. I said, "Have you read the work?" "Oh no, no," they said, "but we know that you wrote certain things." They wanted all sorts of personal information, which meant nothing to them, really. And they would not have considered writing about their experience with the work because in that case they’d have to read the work. I think it’s proper for somebody else to write about a writer if he says this is my experience of the writer. In which case he’s writing about himself. And I think that’s perfectly legitimate. Read the writing and write about the writing. Ignore the author.

But if you’re really interested in someone’s work, aren’t you also interested in their life?

BRONK: A necessary aspect of biography is that it’s mistaken. It has all sorts of wrong information. It’s unavoidable, maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. My friend John Earnest, who knows my feeling about biographies, wants to write a "biography" of the poems. He isn’t quite sure what that means, and I said I’m not either, but it sounds like a good idea.

I like the human element. The stories.

BRONK: Well, that’s what I’ve been doing lately, the other way around, with the man who’s cataloging my art collection. He teaches art history at the local college. He’s having me describe the works and get the facts down about them. The circumstances when I acquired them, who the artists were, that kind of thing. Discussing a piece brings back a lot of memories.

You say, "Don’t look to Olympus, nobody’s there."

BRONK: Olympus was the house of the gods. As far as personalities are concerned, there are no gods. There may be a god but it isn’t in the form of a person. It’s an abstract idea. It’s the traditional Jewish belief that god doesn’t even have a name. It’s unspeakable.

If, as you write, "All worlds are temporary," is anything permanent?

BRONK: Yeah. I think there is permanence. It’s not worldly but that nevertheless we are living in. We’re living in a very precise location. Hudson Falls, New York or Binghamton, New York or wherever in the last years of the twentieth century. Those things seem important to us. But somebody from Sumner or Thebes or Babylon felt the same way; that they were in a very distinct time and place. But those worlds are all gone. And presumably ours will go also.

Everything’s relative?

BRONK: What isn’t?

What is the real world?

BRONK: [laughs] How could you ask me what something inexpressible is? I don’t know. I have a feeling that there is, somehow, somewhere, a reality, and that, possibly, we are even in contact with it. All this business about aliens and other civilizations…our own civilization is as relative and temporal and foreign really as alien civilizations are. There may be alien civilizations but we have no idea what they might be. I wouldn’t be able to begin to make any description of a real world any more than I could make visualization or a physicality of a god. Those are concepts which are beyond our temporality and our relativism.

The Cloud of Unknowing (Poem)

What is art?

BRONK: I don’t know. [long pause] What I do. I expect. I hope. I intend. No, I don’t intend. I hope, I hope.

Do you believe, in any way, shape or form, in reincarnation?

BRONK: No, I don’t. I don’t think that the terms life and death, as we commonly use them, have much relation to what may be going on, really. I’m not sure that we truly have an incarnation let alone a reincarnation. Incarnation is as mystical and immaterial as anything could be. If you believe in reincarnation you pretty much have to believe that you’re leading a real life, that you’re really alive. Which I find hard to believe. That we live in those kind of hard terms. In the sense that we speak of the computer world, there is a text of some kind that can be printed as a hard copy but what comes out as hard copy is not a reality. A belief in reincarnation says that there are material realities that get repeated, that get restated in other terms. I don’t feel confident of that at all.

Isn’t it said that energy is never lost but just changes form?

BRONK: I know there’s a visible role that energy is never lost. That doesn’t bother me one way or the other. I don’t think in the terms that are commonly used. I use that language but it doesn’t necessarily mean what other people mean by it.

Do you think there are other intelligent life forms in the universe other than on earth?

BRONK: Not that I know of.

Because of the size of the universe…the sheer number of planetary systems…

BRONK: I’ll read you a poem. "We go looking through the universe for someone other than us/We are other than us/Turn Hubbell here, look at us/We are other than us." That is, we are other than the way we speak and think of ourselves. We take ourselves for granted as an undeniable reality. I have no quarrel with material evolution. Of course it happened. We are created in a mortal form. The terms don’t interest me. Some people are very satisfied with one story or another, of who we are and why. I don’t find any such explanation satisfactory. And there’s no point in arguing against it. If anybody wants to believe that, OK, but it does not represent my experience. I can’t specify what I think as an argument against what most people are thinking. But I feel quite certain that there explanation is not correct. [imitating W.C. Fields] All right, give us another one. I don’t have one to give. But I don’t accept someone else’s. And that’s what I mean, "We are other than us." We are other than we are commonly spoken of. Let the Hubbell telescope turn around and look at us and see if they can find something that they haven’t seen before. The most recent statement is called For All We Know. "Don’t we know it all!/Everything/Language is what we lack/Neither the words we have nor our syntax say certain things." But I have the feeling that, yeah, we may very well know it all. Everything. We just simply can’t articulate it. Have no way to say it in comprehensible language but I think possibly we actually know it. Have you ever read Jabès?

Yes. A little.

BRONK: He’s engaged at a deep level but doesn’t have the kind of solidity that Beckett has. Too much hors-d’oeuvre. Bits of highly flavored food that never make a solid meal. And do you know a book called The Cloud of Unknowing?

I’ve heard of it.

BRONK: 11^th or 12^th century.

Mystical Catholic thing?

BRONK: Yeah. Apparently he was a monastic figure. Nobody knows exactly who he is. But it is, very definitely, even though it was written in the 11^th or 12^th centuries, a 20^th century book. A great deal of which I wrote, actually. When I read it I’d find whole paragraphs, hey, I wrote this!

There’s a big mind transmitter somewhere, I don’t know.

BRONK: The whole point of The Cloud of Unknowing is that there is a great view of reality which we simply cannot formulate. And he doesn’t make any attempt to formulate it. Which is, I think, pretty much what I do. My writing is not so much about what I know as about what we don’t know. And what is unknowable.

William Bronk poems courtesy Rare Books and Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University.

Gallery Design by Mike McCaffrey