William Bronk

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William Bronk (born February 17, 1918 in Fort Edward (New York), † February 22, 1999 in Hudson Falls (New York)) was an American poet.

Life

Bronk was a descendant of Jonas Bronck , a European (presumably Swedish) settler after whom the New York borough of Bronx is named. Bronk entered Dartmouth College at the age of 16 , where the literary scholar Sidney Cox was his teacher and he met the poet Robert Frost, who was friends with Cox . He then attended Harvard University for a semester . During the Second World War he was drafted as a soldier. In 1945 he taught English at Union College in New York, but dropped out the following year and returned to his family's home in Hudson Falls. There he took over the family business, the Bronk Coal and Lumber Company. He led it until 1978. After he had toured South and Central America in particular in the 1950s, he later hardly left his place of residence, gave only rarely readings, but kept his house open to poets and artists. Although he lived with his widowed childhood friend Laura B. Greenlaw until her death in 1996, he has always been fond of men. He died as a result of emphysema .

Work and effect

Bronk's first major work was an essay on Herman Melville , Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman , "The Brother in Elysium" (1945, published 1980). The three writers it deals with, all of them from the area of transcendentalism , can be regarded as essential influences. In addition, a proximity to Samuel Beckett has been repeatedly pointed out , including by himself . Bronk's first volume of poetry, Light and Dark (1956) , went unnoticed, apart from a friendly response from the poet Charles Olson . Other poets and writers - besides Olson, Paul Auster , Robert Creeley , Cid Corman , Susan Howe , George Oppen and Charles Simic - held him in high regard . In contrast, he only became known to a public interested in poetry, if at all, in 1982, when he received the National Book Award for Life Supports , an anthology of his poetry . In 1991 he was also awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry .

Bronks poems offer thought poetry in a concise and clear, epigram- oriented, at the same time musical form. In a sometimes harsh, often sarcastic style, he deals with topics such as the unknowability of the world ( agnosticism ), loneliness, eternity and death. He is therefore often called a philosophical, metaphysical or even religious poet.

Fonts (selection)

  • Light and Dark. Ashland, Ma .: Origin Press 1956, second edition New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press 1975
  • The World, the Worldless . New York: New Directions 1964
  • The Empty Hands . New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press 1969
  • That tantalus . New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press 1971
  • To Praise the Music. New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press 1972
  • Finding losses. New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press 1976
  • My Father Photographed with Friends and Other Pictures. New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press 1976
  • Life Supports. New and Collected Poems. San Francisco: North Point Press 1981
  • Vectors and Smoothable Curves. Collected essays. San Francisco: North Point Press 1983, new edition Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House 1997
  • Death is the place. San Francisco: North Point Press 1989
  • Selected Poems. Edited by Henry Weinfield. New York: New Directions 1995
  • Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House 1999
  • Bursts of Light. The Collected Later Poems. Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House 2012

Literature on William Bronk (selection)

  • Cid Corman: William Bronk. An essay. Truck Press: Carrboro, NC 1976
  • Burt Kimmelman: The "Winter Mind". William Bronk and American Letters. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press et al. a. 1998
  • Lyman Gilmore: A Force of Desire. A Life of William Bronk. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House 2006
  • David W. Clippinger: The Mind's Landscape. William Bronk and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Newark: University of Delaware Press 2006
  • Henry Weinfield: The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press 2009

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Applebome, "William M. Bronk, 81, a Poet Of Depth and Haunting Vision" (obituary), New York Times, February 25, 1999, p. Web links.
  2. ^ As Bronk explained at a reading in the Scranton Public Library on November 8, 1978, the company traded in anthracite coal from Pennsylvania, among other things .
  3. ↑ His impressions and a. he describes the Inca city of Machu Picchu in "The New World", in: William Bronk: Vectors and Smoothable Curves. Collected essays . San Francisco: North Point Press 1983, pp. 1-44.
  4. ↑ His biographer emphasizes that Bronk described his homosexuality as essential for his poetry and thinking. ("Bronk declares that his homosexuality is central to all his writing and thought"). Lyman Gilmore: A Force of Desire. A Life of William Bronk . Jersey City 2006, p. XXVIII.
  5. ↑ However, his relationship with Whitman was already ambivalent while the essay was being written. In a letter to his friend Clemens Sandresky on July 17, 1940, he wrote: "But Whitman was too much of a baby, too eager for his candy, his creature comforts, his ugly Freudian little comforts." (But Whitman was too kid-headed, too greedy for his candy, his creature comfort, his ugly, little Freudian pleasure premiums.) Quoted from Lyman Gilmore: A Force of Desire. A Life of William Bronk . Jersey City 2006, p. 141.
  6. ↑ Burt Kimmelman: The "Winter Mind". William Bronk and American Letters. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press et al. a. 1998, p. 19.
  7. ↑ The bookseller Hugh Miller recalled a letter from Bronks in which he wrote that he had received only one friendly response to Light and Dark , albeit from Charles Olson. ("(Bronk) mentions in one letter that he received only one warm response to Light and Dark, though that was from Charles Olson.") Famous Poets and Poems, "William Bronk Biography", s. Web links.
  8. ↑ So Henry Wine Field in the preface to William Bronk: Selected Poems. New York: New Directions 1995, p. XII.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bronk, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Fort Edward
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1999
Place of death Hudson Falls