21:4 Summer 1970

DAVID BROMIGE

A Poem & Only Fair

These two poems by David Bromige (as well as the next selection by Al Young) were published in Summer 1970 in a special section edited by Ron Silliman and David Melnick and titled “Fifteen Young Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area.” Ron Silliman has provided some commentary on editing that selection; it appears with his poem, “Text VII,” immediately after Al Young’s poem in this anthology. David Bromige, who has subsequently published in several anthologies on Language poetry, also recently reflected on this section:

What “young” entailed in this context isn’t exactly clear—I was 36, and poets Joanne Kyger, George Stanley, and Ken Irby couldn’t have been much younger. But all of us had published first books recently, or first poems in magazines. Twenty-six years later, I am still in touch with the work of about half of these poets; several of the others were unknown to me even then.

I was a TA in the English PhD program at UC Berkeley in that year, and the poems Chicago Review printed (and several more besides) were handwritten in red pen in a University of California blue book. The date on the front reads ‘May 31, 69.' Many of these poems were gathered into my collection Threads, published by Black Sparrow in 1971. Minimalism was in the air—that rubric in which all the i’s sound alike—and some of my blue-book poems are very short: “Example/This burg isn’t big enough for both of us / I just pulled the strings.” The specter of representational imposition was already stalking my compositional space.

As it was on the political level. “Poem” stems from my first encounter with the Free Speech Movement—a crowd blocking Sather Gate when I was in a hurry to get a part-time job at Fybate Notes. Told this mob were free-speech advocates, I called out, “Well what about freedom of passage?” This indignant yelp was greeted with good humor, and a path was made for me through itself by the crowd. That was 1964; the poem, however, came some five years later, and by then I and others had learned bitterly the cost of protest, and the possibilities of betrayal both political and aesthetic. (I felt we “Bay Area Poets” were a tough bunch: I figured the photo of the James Gang reproduced on this issue’s cover was meant to be us.) It’s called “A Poem” because poems stay stable by changing through time, and in its stripped-down condition the content struck me as so clearly what a poem was. It records a change of heart that alters the meanings of the words and allows the poem to go on emitting.

“Only Fair,” given it emanates from Berkeley in 1969, sounds to be stoned wisdom; in fact, the words of a dream. So much of our thinking then had to do with conundrums of justice—social, personal, and interactive—and this poem appears to be saying “fairness is the death of many a good thing.” (Why the name Lennie? I didn’t know any Lennies: it must have been an Id-driven item, or conversely a distancing device.) A banana is a funny object to invest with trust. So is the present, but what other occasion is there? Emphasis must fall upon that “later,” a word with much energy in those days.

[DN, 1996]

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