David Bromige
Encyclopedia
David Mansfield Bromige is a Canadian
poet
who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author. Bromige is often associated with the language poets, but this connection is based mainly on his close friendships with some of those poets. It is difficult to fit Bromige into a slot. He departs from language poetry in the thematic unity of many of his poems, in the uses to which he puts found materials, with the romantic aspect of his lyricism, and with the sheer variety of his approaches to the poem.
, England
. At an early age, he showed signs of being tubercular and was sent to an isolation hospital, but after four months, his condition improved, and he was discharged. That hospital was the first of four crucial interludes, which molded his adult life. The second of these interludes came during the London Blitz. A stick of bombs falling in their customary sequence appeared likely to destroy the Bromiges’ house, with them inside. The next interlude involves his schooling and work experience. When the war ended, Bromige won a scholarship to Haberdashers' Aske's Hampstead School and a chance to study at a socially superior school. After completing his School Certificate, Bromige accepted an offer to be a dairyman on a farm in southern Sweden. Each of these interludes changed him. The first made him suspicious of his family; the bombing made him vow to be someone else; work and study gave him the worldly experience to be a poet.
, Frank Davey
, David Dawson, and Jamie Reid
, and they encouraged him to write and publish his work. At the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival Bromige met Robert Creeley
, Charles Olson
, Denise Levertov
, Allen Ginsberg
, and Robert Duncan
.
The result of this endeavor led to the publication of many poems. Robert Hass
, the chairman of the Western States Book Award Committee, wrote glowingly of his work and chose his 1988 book, Desire: Selected Poems, 1963-1987 to win the first prize for poetry. He has twice been honored by the Poetry Foundation
, once with a $3,000 and again with a $10,000 prize. And he has twice been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts
. He won the college prize for the first poem he ever published.
Three years later, Bromige won a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. The rules stated that he had to do his graduate work at a different university. In 1962, he chose the University of California at Berkeley after graduating from the University of British Columbia
. At UC-Berkeley, Bromige studied with Frederick Crews, Stephen Booth
, and Thomas Parkinson. Living in the Bay Area also brought him into contact with a younger generation of American poets, including Ron Loewinsohn
, Ron Silliman
, David Melnick
, Pat Nolan
, Alistair Johnson and more.
In 1968, his third book, The Ends of the Earth, was published by Black Sparrow Press. It was the beginning of a twenty-three-year partnership that produced eleven of his books. The poems in this book have a ghostly tone. It is as though Cocteau was doing a very detailed description of Bromige’s life. The change apparent in his fifth book, Threads, is startling. It reads as though the ghostly presences from The Ends of the Earth had fleshed out and learned to speak a language from the various lives whose talk fills the book.
in 1970. Then come seven books in two years. This is Bromige at an early peak. Ten Years in the Making began it. This book consisted of some of his early work, going back to 1960, work engagingly open to the merest reader. Then come selections from The Gathering, followed by poems from Threads. Next came Birds of the West, from Victor Coleman of Coachhouse Press in Toronto
. This book consists of three sections: a journal of gardening and visitors; a section of more finished poems, filled with a landscape of Western Sonoma County; and a single, long poem written in sparse triplets to reflect a white-tail kite’s hovering flight.
Soon afterwards, Tight Corners and What’s Around Them was issued by Black Sparrow. Bromige has stated it was the most interesting to him of this clutch of books. “I was using a fairly familiar sort of sentence, in prose, with a last line that either boosted sales or fell flat as a flapjack. I didn’t care. Banal or brilliant, it made no difference in the world I was living in. Besides, sometimes the banal turned brilliant as I listened.”
He also did three pint-sized books about this time for the “Sparrow” series. In 1974, he also published a book of occasional poems, Spells and Blessings.
Bromige continued to publish prodigiously in magazines and, in 1980, published a book called My Poetry.
The 1980s started with a Pushcart Prize
for My Poetry and ended with the Western States Poetry Award for his selected poems, Desire. In between, Bromige devoted himself to his wife and young daughter while carrying a full-time professor’s responsibilities in the English Department at Sonoma State University. He coordinated poetry conferences at SSU, published a collaboration with Opal Nations, wrote an analysis of Allen Fisher’s four-day residency at Langton Street in San Francisco, and was himself the subject of an issue of Tom Beckett’s The Difficulties. In 1990, John Martin, who had moved Black Sparrow Press to Santa Rosa, published Men, Women & Vehicles, a book of selected prose.
Bromige retired early from Sonoma State University in 1993, and he continued to publish and give readings. Tiny Courts in a World Without Scales, Brick Books, is a book of fifty short poems, showing Bromige at his droll and sarcastic best. He had fun with They Ate, a cut up from a turn-of-the-century detective novel, before producing A Cast of Tens (Avec Press). Each stanza has 10 lines but in each poem is distributed variously. The Harbormaster of Hong Kong (Sun and Moon) came next with many kinds of writing in it including a perfect sonnet. Bromige’s final book from the 90’s was Vulnerable Bundles, a limited edition of thirty, from Potes and Poets Press.
Missing teaching, Bromige returned to it part-time at the University of San Francisco
, and he also began writing what would later be As in T as in Tether, which was awarded A Best Book of the Year (2003) recognition from Small Press Traffic. Bromige published Indictable Suborners and Behave or Be Bounced with dPress, Sebastopol, in 2003. For the past few years, Bromige had been collaborating with poet and dPress editor Richard Denner
on 100 Cantos. Spade: Cantos 1-33 was published in 2006.
Bromige lived in Sebastopol
, California
. He died on June 3, 2009 of complications from diabetes.
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author. Bromige is often associated with the language poets, but this connection is based mainly on his close friendships with some of those poets. It is difficult to fit Bromige into a slot. He departs from language poetry in the thematic unity of many of his poems, in the uses to which he puts found materials, with the romantic aspect of his lyricism, and with the sheer variety of his approaches to the poem.
Early life
Bromige was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. At an early age, he showed signs of being tubercular and was sent to an isolation hospital, but after four months, his condition improved, and he was discharged. That hospital was the first of four crucial interludes, which molded his adult life. The second of these interludes came during the London Blitz. A stick of bombs falling in their customary sequence appeared likely to destroy the Bromiges’ house, with them inside. The next interlude involves his schooling and work experience. When the war ended, Bromige won a scholarship to Haberdashers' Aske's Hampstead School and a chance to study at a socially superior school. After completing his School Certificate, Bromige accepted an offer to be a dairyman on a farm in southern Sweden. Each of these interludes changed him. The first made him suspicious of his family; the bombing made him vow to be someone else; work and study gave him the worldly experience to be a poet.
Becoming a poet
He met other poets at the University of British Columbia such as George BoweringGeorge Bowering
George Harry Bowering, OC, OBC is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He has served as Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate....
, Frank Davey
Frank Davey
Frankland Wilmot Davey is a Canadian poet and scholar.Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he grew up in the Fraser Valley village of Abbotsford. In 1957 he enrolled at the University of British Columbia where, in 1961, shortly after receiving his BA, he became one of the founding editors of the...
, David Dawson, and Jamie Reid
Jamie Reid
Jamie Reid is a British artist and anarchist with connections to the Situationists. His work, featuring letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note, came close to defining the image of punk rock, particularly in the UK...
, and they encouraged him to write and publish his work. At the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival Bromige met Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
, Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, and Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
.
The result of this endeavor led to the publication of many poems. Robert Hass
Robert Hass
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials.-Life:...
, the chairman of the Western States Book Award Committee, wrote glowingly of his work and chose his 1988 book, Desire: Selected Poems, 1963-1987 to win the first prize for poetry. He has twice been honored by the Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is a Chicago-based American foundation created to promote poetry in the wider culture. It was formed from Poetry magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly....
, once with a $3,000 and again with a $10,000 prize. And he has twice been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
. He won the college prize for the first poem he ever published.
Three years later, Bromige won a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. The rules stated that he had to do his graduate work at a different university. In 1962, he chose the University of California at Berkeley after graduating from the University of British Columbia
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...
. At UC-Berkeley, Bromige studied with Frederick Crews, Stephen Booth
Stephen Booth
Stephen Booth is a professor emeritus of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Marshall Scholar and studied at the University of Cambridge...
, and Thomas Parkinson. Living in the Bay Area also brought him into contact with a younger generation of American poets, including Ron Loewinsohn
Ron Loewinsohn
Ron Loewinsohn is an American poet and novelist.Trout Fishing in America is dedicated to Loewinsohn and poet Jack Spicer.- Works :* Watermelons, New York: Totem Press, 1959...
, Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
, David Melnick
David Melnick
David Melnick is an American poet. Melnick has written four books of poetry to date: Eclogs ; PCOET ; Men in Aida, Book One , and A Pin's Fee.Melnick is commonly regarded as a language poet...
, Pat Nolan
Pat Nolan
Patrick J. Nolan is an American lawyer, politician and conservative activist.-Early Political Activism:Nolan began his career as a conservative activist at the age of 14 in the Goldwater for President campaign. Pat was a leader in the Youth for Reagan for Governor in 1966 and in each of Reagan's...
, Alistair Johnson and more.
In 1968, his third book, The Ends of the Earth, was published by Black Sparrow Press. It was the beginning of a twenty-three-year partnership that produced eleven of his books. The poems in this book have a ghostly tone. It is as though Cocteau was doing a very detailed description of Bromige’s life. The change apparent in his fifth book, Threads, is startling. It reads as though the ghostly presences from The Ends of the Earth had fleshed out and learned to speak a language from the various lives whose talk fills the book.
Academic career
Leaving UC-Berkeley A.B.D., (All but dissertation), Bromige took a teaching position in the English Department at Sonoma State UniversitySonoma State University
Sonoma State University is a public, coeducational business and liberal arts college affiliated with the California State University system. The main campus is located in Rohnert Park, California, United States and lies approximately south of Santa Rosa and north of San Francisco...
in 1970. Then come seven books in two years. This is Bromige at an early peak. Ten Years in the Making began it. This book consisted of some of his early work, going back to 1960, work engagingly open to the merest reader. Then come selections from The Gathering, followed by poems from Threads. Next came Birds of the West, from Victor Coleman of Coachhouse Press in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
. This book consists of three sections: a journal of gardening and visitors; a section of more finished poems, filled with a landscape of Western Sonoma County; and a single, long poem written in sparse triplets to reflect a white-tail kite’s hovering flight.
Soon afterwards, Tight Corners and What’s Around Them was issued by Black Sparrow. Bromige has stated it was the most interesting to him of this clutch of books. “I was using a fairly familiar sort of sentence, in prose, with a last line that either boosted sales or fell flat as a flapjack. I didn’t care. Banal or brilliant, it made no difference in the world I was living in. Besides, sometimes the banal turned brilliant as I listened.”
He also did three pint-sized books about this time for the “Sparrow” series. In 1974, he also published a book of occasional poems, Spells and Blessings.
Bromige continued to publish prodigiously in magazines and, in 1980, published a book called My Poetry.
The 1980s started with a Pushcart Prize
Pushcart Prize
The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured....
for My Poetry and ended with the Western States Poetry Award for his selected poems, Desire. In between, Bromige devoted himself to his wife and young daughter while carrying a full-time professor’s responsibilities in the English Department at Sonoma State University. He coordinated poetry conferences at SSU, published a collaboration with Opal Nations, wrote an analysis of Allen Fisher’s four-day residency at Langton Street in San Francisco, and was himself the subject of an issue of Tom Beckett’s The Difficulties. In 1990, John Martin, who had moved Black Sparrow Press to Santa Rosa, published Men, Women & Vehicles, a book of selected prose.
Bromige retired early from Sonoma State University in 1993, and he continued to publish and give readings. Tiny Courts in a World Without Scales, Brick Books, is a book of fifty short poems, showing Bromige at his droll and sarcastic best. He had fun with They Ate, a cut up from a turn-of-the-century detective novel, before producing A Cast of Tens (Avec Press). Each stanza has 10 lines but in each poem is distributed variously. The Harbormaster of Hong Kong (Sun and Moon) came next with many kinds of writing in it including a perfect sonnet. Bromige’s final book from the 90’s was Vulnerable Bundles, a limited edition of thirty, from Potes and Poets Press.
Missing teaching, Bromige returned to it part-time at the University of San Francisco
University of San Francisco
The University of San Francisco , is a private, Jesuit/Catholic university located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1855, USF was established as the first university in San Francisco. It is the second oldest institution for higher learning in California and the tenth-oldest university of...
, and he also began writing what would later be As in T as in Tether, which was awarded A Best Book of the Year (2003) recognition from Small Press Traffic. Bromige published Indictable Suborners and Behave or Be Bounced with dPress, Sebastopol, in 2003. For the past few years, Bromige had been collaborating with poet and dPress editor Richard Denner
Richard Denner
Richard Denner is an American poet associated with the Berkeley Street Poets and the Poets of the Pacific Northwest. He is the founder and operator of dPress, which has published over two hundred titles, mostly of poetry and most in chapbook format.-Biography:Denner was born in Santa Clara,...
on 100 Cantos. Spade: Cantos 1-33 was published in 2006.
Bromige lived in Sebastopol
Sebastopol, California
Sebastopol is a city in Sonoma County, California, United States, approximately north of San Francisco. The population was 7,379 at the 2010 census, but its businesses also serve surrounding rural portions of Sonoma County, totaling about 50,000 people...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. He died on June 3, 2009 of complications from diabetes.
External links
- David Bromige page at the Electronic Poetry Center
- David Bromige page at the University of Calgary
- An Interview with David Bromige
- Hear David Bromige reading his poems
- David Bromige 1933 - 2009 This "cyber-tombeauTombeauA tombeau is a musical composition commemorating the death of a notable individual. The term derives from the French word for "tomb" or "tombstone". The vast majority of tombeaux date from the 17th century and were composed for lute or other plucked string instruments...
" at Silliman's Blog by poet Ron SillimanRon SillimanRon Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
includes comments, tributes, and links