David Bromige
00:00:00.00
...the new book, Threads, that hasn't been published yet, and then I'm going to read some poems from the book The Ends of the Earth, that came out a couple of years ago. Add a few new poems. It's a book with poems that are not, some poems that are not, in any sense in theory, or are less important than others, but it moves from one tangle of threads to the next, so it moves in various stages or groups, but I'll read at least one poem from each group, so I think that'll make a story. This is the first poem in the book, and this is the presentation that decided me on the book. What the book, in a way, pushes against.
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00:01:02.60
Reads "In His Image" [INDEX: death, grave, sight, sky, camera, eye, voice, water]
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00:02:01.43
Reads "After the Engraving - For Tom Clark[e]" [INDEX: chisel, love, evil, luck, fortune, sculpture, craft, amulet, sky, stone]
David Bromige
00:03:07.85
And I got this take, this poem was printed in a magazine that George Bowering edits, Imago, Number 13, I think.
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00:03:21.50
Reads "First Love" [INDEX: couple, unity, work, city, anger, fortune, north, village, love, joy, grandparents, wave, sea, sex, music, dance, boat, Chicago, parting, loss, kiss]
David Bromige
00:07:08.07
See, what I was working there was both the delightful self-indulgence of being able to tell that story over to myself after so many years, but, what I had coming out in the poem before, the one about the light elves who danced the dark elves out into the light in order to petrify them, as an Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic conception, which has a lot to do with our idea of what a poem is or what a work of art is. And so then I had this matter of the one you love coming to you and enabling you to be both light and dark elf to yourself, so that the two of you...whose particular form had never been, without her, it was that cultural attachment to particular forms, also, that I was hoping to tell the story, part of the story of, again, there. Okay, here's “Psychoanalysis”.
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00:08:23.49
Reads “Psychoanalysis” [INDEX: sex, word, psychoanalysis, memory]
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00:08:32.49
Reads "You Too" [INDEX: orders, will, uniform]
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00:08:52.39
Reads "Why I Went There" [INDEX: knowledge, travel, audience, memory, Barry, editor, party, night, meeting, love, son, job, resentment, heavy, alone, nightmare]
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00:10:54.16
Reads "I Can't Read and Here's a Book" [INDEX: boy, son, book, reading, Hans Christian Anderson, fairy tale, alone, solitude, brain]
David Bromige
00:12:27.66
And so, yeah, and then that shifts into this prose piece, "They Want."
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00:12:33.73
Reads "They Want" [INDEX: identity, student, faculty, meeting, form, evaluation, pain, necessity, structure, rhyme]
David Bromige
00:14:11.30
This one came out of the same meeting.
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00:14:14.58
Reads "I can See" [INDEX: argument, meeting, intelligence]
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00:14:31.20
Reads "Only Fair" [INDEX: money, justice, banana]
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00:14:59.41
Reads "Example" [INDEX: competition]
David Bromige
00:15:11.59
Yeah, this would seem to be very useful here. "Choosing the Event." This came out of the troubles, the people's park troubles in Berkeley. Whenever it was, I can't remember now, the year before last, I guess.
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00:15:34.32
Reads "Choosing the Event" [INDEX: loss, luck, D-Day, suffering, forgetting, memory, feeling, interpreter, speaking, freedom, San Fernando, death]
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00:17:18.09
Reads "Logical Conclusions" [INDEX: friend, meeting, couple, door, welcome, trust]
David Bromige
00:17:47.92
I still don't know who it was. I figure if I keep reading it, sooner or later someone's going to break. But it's not very likely here. "An Invention."
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00:18:07.86
Reads "An Invention" [INDEX: moon, zodiac, Virgo, date, birth, fate, accident, determination, dread, sign]
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00:18:49.04
Reads "Fond" [INDEX: love, failure, couple, sleep, night, kitchen, house]
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00:19:45.96
Reads "So" [INDEX: animal, kitten, eye, sight, vowel, consonant, language, word, loss, mistake, voice, iamb, writing, happiness, lust, joy, death, misery, resentment, cat]
David Bromige
00:22:19.02
And so I want to read a poem from my first book. It was written in Vancouver, of Vancouver. Well, I'm not a...particular landscapes don't often come into my poetry but here all kinds of images came in, from Hampstead Heath, near where I spent my childhood, and also of Vancouver, and this poem also was published in Tish, a publication from those Vancouver days.
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00:22:52.14
Reads "We Could Get a Drink" [INDEX: sun, memory, remembrance, Hampstead Heath, morning, tree, couple, love, Vancouver, place, shadow, camera, girl, starve, news, soldier, bomb, birch, drink]
David Bromige
00:24:57.95
I'll read a few poems now from the book between--that was from a book called The Gathering. This is from The Ends of the Earth. And these, in their literal presence, these woods were the woods behind Deep Cove, where I was living in 1964, just up from Vancouver.
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00:25:24.54
Reads "In Deep Woods" [INDEX: place, Vancouver, Deep Cove, fish, salmon, bear, house, forest, animal]
David Bromige
00:26:17.57
This goes back to back with that, I guess.
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00:26:20.33
Reads "Just Think" [INDEX: reality, hypothesis, family, children, theatre]
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00:26:57.46
Reads "A Defect" [INDEX: doctor, defect, body, boy, meaning]
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00:27:32.23
Reads "Taking Heart" [INDEX: mouth, trust, doubt, body, ocean, love, couple, loss, lake, river]
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00:28:11.15
Reads "The Faster" [INDEX: night, time, play, statue, studio, representation]
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00:28:45.93
Reads "Why Not" [INDEX: hypothetical, clothes, reflection, wind, dawn, window, sky, sun]
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00:29:25.67
Reads "A Call" [INDEX: city, door, solitude, alone, street, sleep, room, silence, sight, mouth]
David Bromige
00:30:35.71
This is a...it's my own attempt to write a fairy story. And I just let come into it all the elements that I knew from various fairy stories, narrative tricks and devices and so forth, and tried to have my fun from them, but I didn't get away with it. They took me, even though I held off, as well as I could.
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00:31:03.15
Reads "A Final Mission" [INDEX: forest, place, fairy tale, wood, ownership, travel, friend, story, woman, naked, home, tree, listening, master, flower, nature, bridge, water, music, heart, sleep, dream, couple, semen, sex, flight, sight, body, star,
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00:38:04.34
Applause concludes this reading.
David Bromige
00:38:11.04
That's the closest, I guess, to a political poem I've ever written [Laughter.] So I want a bit to break that mood, because I can't do anything more with that mood.
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00:38:23.92
Reads "A Kind Numbness" [INDEX: morning, sleep, cold, animal, horse, skin, fly, sun]
David Bromige
00:39:19.47
I like that very much, that notion of the bargain by which we civilized beings live, it comes through for me very strongly there, but also, I mean when the sun gets up the flies get up, but also that you can focus on one or the other. Let's see how I'm doing for time. Okay, I'll read....I sent the manuscript of Threads off to the publisher about two months ago, and these are the poems I've written since then.
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00:40:06.82
Reads "Dear Night" [INDEX: night, window, reflection, village, story, alone, woman, city, body, perception, praise, fate, figure of speech, language, absence, lover, love, blindness, shame, drinking, song]
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00:42:29.51
Reads "The Spell" [INDEX: dark, danger, light, beauty, safety, pun, antonym, city, man, time, story, stone, word, gem, light]
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00:44:46.49
Reads "Tom Thumb: a Relation on a Measure" [INDEX: fairy tale, Tom Thumb, size, invisible, sight, child, soul, unique, island, Scotland, friend, betrayal, measure, memory, remembrance, house]
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00:48:23.60
Reads "A Rhyme" [INDEX: nature, animal, bird, Great Horned Owl, sound, sight, night, book, knowledge, voice, morning, silence, house, fire, cold]
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00:48:26.61
Cut/Edit in tape; Bromige reading poem's title is repeated.
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00:50:26.99
Reads "From my Mother" [INDEX: youth, mother, child, travel, father, home, wife, town, Pacific, Montreal, plane, meadow, St. Albans, education, woman, death]
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00:52:18.07
Recording ends.
