The Drift of the World

American Review BOOK REVIEWS The Drift of the World Jon Curley The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk Lyman Gilmore Talisman House http://www.talismanpublishers.com 388 pages; paper, $28.95 The Mind's Landscape: William Bronk and TwentiethCentury American Poetry David W. Clippinger University of Delaware Press http://www2.lib.udel.edu/udpress 288 pages; cloth, $53.50 The poet William Bronk, who died in 1999, was our great, very own, apostate from realism. His poems, written over fifty years, were an antidote for the supposition that the world as considered was the world as it really was. Bronk made the distinction between the "actual" and the "real," seeing the former as the artifice of the constructed consciousness of our world understanding and the latter as the unprobed, inestimably richer world that lay beneath conventional beliefor understanding. Something like an Utopian vision from an Utopian imagination, this attendant universe, lurking beyond imagination and knowledge, was located nowhere and yet seriously striven for in Bronk's poetics—a mysterious, unattainable realm of our real lives and real ends. In a phrase, the unfounded, never-to-be-discovered truth of life in all its majesty. Bronk was neither a theologian nor a deconstructionist , but a wayward searcher after meaning to whom epistemology was a Convenient ruse. "The World," written in his casual, paradoxically aphoristic style, distils the recursive features of his entire body of work: "I thought that 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. / 1 thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world." With this sensibility, he ventured to question after the essence ofthings, knowing that any such poetic or philosophical venturing was doomed to failure—but worth the effort. In this formulation, he sounds like Sisyphus or Beckett; in truth, he was our American Hume, a deeply cynical ethicist, looking beyond the veil for value and clinging to the twin curtains ofbeliefand unbelief. He was one ofour most rigorous interpreters of conscience and an architect of a profoundly sensitive artistic consciousness. He is also not as widely read or recognized as his life work warrants. Two new studies make the case for Bronk's central importance in contemporary American poetry and admirably visit the enigma that was the man and his poetry. Lyman Gilmore's The Force ofDesire: A Life of William Bronk is solid bio-criticism, delving into the poet's family and literary forebears, geography, and sexuality to get to the heart of the poetry, poetry which Bronk said was his sole reason for living, and which he came to as its "instrument." It is published by Talisman House, which has done more for championing Bronk (as well as keeping him in print) than any other publisher in the past three decades. David W. Clippinger's The Mind's Landscape: William Bronk and Twentieth-Century American Poetry is a lucid study of Bronk's poetry that seeks to both adjudicate the work in relation to canon-forming literary agendas as well as survey the poet's predecessors, contemporaries , and descendents. Attentive readings of the poems handily navigate Clippinger's consideration of Bronk's significance toAmerican poetry, yet the work itself gets less scrutiny than the conception of Bronk in the broad sense of the canon. Each study is a valuable guide to the man and the poet, and each proves the futility ofever fully understanding the magic and mystery of William Bronk. Such observation is not meant as negative criticism of either book. Strategically different in their approach to the poet, Gilmore and Clippinger give access and context to Bronk in all of his complexity, yet access and context will never entirely explain away this solitary philosopher-poet. We should be happy for the shadows that still shroud his figure and forms. Bronk was ourAmerican Hume, a deeply cynical ethicist. Gilmore's thesis is that much of what motivated Bronk's inquiries into our perceptions of the world was his closeted homosexuality. This assertion may be overdetermined in Gilmore's reading, but I don't think we can be...