Bronk, Actually

I've been busy, this quarter. Busy since November, evidently.

Wrote a long Parnassus piece on Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, and Stanley Moss, whose page proofs I've just put to bed, so that should be out soon. (By long, I mean 41 pp. in print, which is long even for me.) Edited. Taught. Did family things. Lived, worried, fought off the glums. Wrote funny lyrics, worked on my voice and my dancing. (I'll be front man for the Alte Rockers next month, at the synagogue Purim spiel.) Little of this, little of that. The usual.

Didn't see much point in blogging, so I didn't.

Lately, though, I've been thinking about my projects and plans and research agenda, and as I do, blogging keeps coming to mind. Not as a publication outlet, but as a place or a way to do some thinking aloud.

I miss it; or, rather, I miss the man I was when I was doing it more often and more thoughtfully. Reflective, with time on his hands. "The man who has had the time to think enough," as Stevens says. Or drink enough, anyway!

So I'll probably ease back into this. Just so you know.

***

In the mean time, to hold the fort, here's a little poem by William Bronk.

Bronk's a poet I had to age into. When I was in my, what--late 20s? Early 30s? Something like that--my friend Mark handed me a copy of Living Instead at Chapters bookstore in Washington DC, because he thought I'd enjoy it. I did, albeit a decade later, and that process of coming to like something fascinates me.

Anyway, a year or two ago I bought a stack of remaindered Bronk collections at my local Half-Price Books. This is the opening poem of The Mild Day, a collection that Talisman published back in 1993:

SAFARI

It's like going to Africa to live
with animals all around us, animals
regardless of us and we not the life
of the place ourselves as in this universe,
on earth even, forces are
that we don't see the way animals
could be seen but are around and are
regardless of us who are not the life of the place.
Awed, we stand our foreign ground. We watch.

Maybe tomorrow, or the next day, I'll say a bit about why I like this poem. Wouldn't be the worst use of my time. And who knows what might come of it, or this?