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Oddly enough, the brief Bronk piece I read was - I think - in Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? I thought I'd better look at the New Formalists because I was writing a paper on poetic form. I didn't think their work was a great advertisement for it. I quite enjoyed the invective of their essays, but when it came to the poems, I thought it amazing that anyone was still writing such tired and conventional stuff, and that they could see it as in some way revolutionary. Best wishes Matthew Francis [mailto:[log in to unmask] 01443 482856 -----Original Message----- From: David Zauhar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: 05 April 2000 14:51 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: William Bronk On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Francis M (HaSS) wrote: > What do you all think of William Bronk? I came across a tiny, very > impressive poem in something I was reading recently, and thought I must > investigate. I'd never heard of him - perhaps he is not well known on this > side of the Atlantic, or it could just be that I haven't been paying > attention. There turns out to be quite a lot of stuff on the Web, mostly > criticism rather than poems. He seems like the kind of poet I'm always > looking for, offbeat but with great ambition and scope. His work isn't in > the library here, but his Collected Poems are available from Amazon for > about GBP 10. I'm tempted. > Yield to that temptation. Bronk, from what I can tell, didn't publicize himself very much, just worked his day job and wrote many many incredible poems when he was working his real job. His essays, called, I think, _Vectors and Smoothable Curves_ are also worth a look, especially for his lengthy considerations of 19th C. American writers like Melville and Thoreau. If I may put in a snide remark here, I would take the "New Formalists" more seriously if they would promote the work of poets like Bronk, whose work is more carefully crafted than that of the Neo-Expansive-Formalistos. David Zauhar %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%