As in T as in Tether, David Bromige’s most recent book, is divided into four sections: “T as in Tether,” and three others recognizably titled for different stages of the PC booting process – “Initializing,” “Establishing” and “Authenticizing.” On my PCs at least – & I’m a true agnostic, having one each of Dell, Compaq, HP and IBM systems around the house – that last stage is called authenticating, the process of verifying authenticity. That Bromige has revised the term here for his own purposes – “Authenticizing” might be the process perhaps of adding authenticity – is characteristic both of the sorts of devices he employs & the surgical wit this revision embodies. 

 

Indeed, the book itself appears to have been originally entitled T as in Tether, the additional As in coming sometime after the “forthcoming books” web page at Chax Press was uploaded.* There is a history of book titles going through this sort of evolution – Robert Duncan, for example, refers in several places to Opening of the Field simply as The Field as late as 1959, the full title apparently showing up at the last minute.

 

Reading Bromige has always been an experience requiring close attention. Thus the third poem from “Authenticizing,” which has the title of “Two Highs, One Image, Many Melodies,” begins by turning on what seems the blandest of homonyms:

 

Eating hash will get you high

But not weed. When somebody likes us

We pass on wisdom.

This is the stage  people like us

Tend to get stuck at.

Because I do like you

And I am the news, which is bad.

 

Bromige is the sort of writer whose understanding of normative grammar is excellent – as it needs to be to construct the longer, almost Faulkneresque sentence structures he has used at different moments in his career – so ending that third sentence with a preposition is a device that leaps out to a familiar reader in a way that it might not to someone who was encountering his poetry for the first time. Bromige uses the device to accomplish a number of different ends:

 

1. It maximizes the sound symbolism of the line – every word is a single syllable term defined by its use of the phoneme t – the first two at the beginning, the last three at the end – the prosodic equivalent of a great hoofer pretending to stumble.
2. The syntax enables Bromige to position “people like us” parallel to the phrase at the end of the second line – the positioning almost makes us forget that the second like is not the same term as the original likes.
3. The positioning of “people like us” also drives the second comparison, again using what I can only think to call homonymic contrast, with “I do like you.”
4. The terminal t sounds of the fifth line set up the accentuated stop at the end of the seventh line’s bad. The effect may be comic, but it’s comedy in the sense of a Swift, which is to say completely serious. Note also how this device at the end of the seventh line echoes the fainter (but still perceptible) comic hard stop at the end of the very first sentence: weed.

Bromige makes this all look so easy & “natural” that it’s almost scary once you begin to delve a little more closely into any of his texts. He pulls a very similar sequence in the middle of the next stanza within a single stanza:

 

Those feathery leaves, light green

Once leathery, bring out

A sinewy cadaver quality.

 

That leathery rhymes with feathery seems simple enough, but what is impressive is watching how the f in feathery sets up the v in cadaver in the third, while the terminal y moves outward in both directions in this line, into sinewy & into quality. The sound of these lines makes such strong sense that you almost don’t notice just how loopy the connotations are – what precisely is a sinewy cadaver quality? And if we pull back just a little, we discover that Bromige has been setting this sound sequence up since introducing the image of the oak in the meadow in the first stanza: “Being an old oak / Isn’t all gravity. . . .” In fact, the first stanza ends with “attractive virtue.”

 

Bromige’s use of the image of the “failing tree” in a meadow that is “barely middle-aged” is at once both playful & entirely serious. Yet in the end it leads into a sequence in the final stanza that is ultimately far more ominous:

 

It’s mere analogy, each tells the other,

And the next step can obliterate

The gain. Initialize me

You cool hunk. Make my body

Drool & drunk. The gentle touch

Of nothing

We can understand

Lulls like a false establishment,

A Senate, House, Motel, CW

Bar. I could have danced all night

But it wasn’t on the jukebox.

Split.

 

As in sinewy cadaver quality or even And I am the news, which is bad, each move here functions by undercutting: the tree leads into the recognition of the trope. Lust leads to a list of progressively déclassé establishments (in which House functions as its own homonym). Note also how the titles of earlier sections of this book turn up.

 

The constant undercutting, the allusion to pop music – especially to music that is at once retro & hokey – and ending on a single word line that can be read as an abrupt rejection of whatever hope the poem offers are all devices that Jack Spicer used a lot, for example in the third of his “Ten Poems for Downbeat” in Book of Magazine Verse:

 

“With two yoke of oxen and one yellow dog, with one

    Shanghai rooster and one spotted hog.” Light baggage. Pike

County music.

What we carry with our bones is much like that. Light baggage that no unfriendly Indian can take from us.

Ourselves. Yet pointed to like the compass of the needle. “Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike?”

Don’t.

 

Even the line that focuses in on Of nothing is a signature move of Spicer’s.

 

I don’t think of Bromige as being particularly Spicerian – Bromige uses humor with a softer touch, for the most part, and his most visible influences among the New Americans have always been the Projectivists. While the undercutting logic was visible, say, in a relatively early book such as Tight Corners & What’s Around Them, issued by Black Sparrow in 1974, I certainly didn’t make a connection to Spicer then. Possibly it was because the short prose pieces that appear in the volume were what drew such attention & comment when the book first came out. But today I turned that earlier book open to ”The Plot”:

 

Christmas 6 feet deep

Christmas 3 feet wide.

Christmas 6 feet long.

Stuffed with straw.

 

Absolutely a poem that could have appeared in almost any of Spicer’s books from Heads of the Town Up to the Aether onward. Yet I’d never read it as such before.** What these two pieces share in common – they’re radically different poems in some ways, written nearly three decades apart – is that each confronts death & does so with none of the believer’s sense of closure or completion. The darkness of the humor in the earlier poem is not so much the description of a graveyard plot (even then Bromige texts were turning on puns), but the insistence on Christmas. Again like Spicer, an element whose content can only be accounted for outside of the rational.

 

There is a post-face at the end of As in T as in Tether, in which Bromige gets to the idea that

 

Poetry is the theory of heartbreak. That sentence can be rearranged so that its nouns are in any order of precedence, and still be true. 

 

Though Spicer would never have put it in exactly those terms, that’s as succinct a description of where these two poets’ systems of belief – or perhaps systems of disbelief – converge as one might find.

 

 

 

 

NB: Go here for an earlier review of As in T as in Tether.

 

* The book has been out now for at least seven months.  

 

** Some of the short poems in Threads, the 1971 book the contains work immediately preceding Tight Corners, might similarly be argued as echoing aspects of Spicer, although generally I think they’d be more of a stretch.