David Bromige, 1933 - 2009

Sad news in the Northern California poetry community: David Bromige died at home in Sebastopol on June 3. Born in London in 1933, he lived through the World War II Blitz as a child, studied at the University of British Columbia and UC Berkeley in the 1960s, published many of his books with Black Sparrow Press, and was a professor at Sonoma State University for many years until his retirement in 1993. He was well known and will be fondly remembered by many, many poets — he met Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Duncan in his early years in Vancouver, BC, he knew Ron Silliman and many of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets during his time in the Bay area, and he influenced several generations of younger poets as teacher and organizer of literary journals and poetry conferences at Sonoma State and the University of San Francisco.

Bromige described the place of poetry in his life in a long interview published by Electronic Poetry Review in 2001: “It’s given me my life. It’s given me being. It was my entry to being. I didn’t know what else to do with my life. I had no idea what to do with my life. It seemed like there wasn't anything to do, with a life, and that in itself is a poetic recognition, I think. I didn’t get there as soon as I might have, but I had a very strong "get a job" ethic instilled into me, so I guess I felt the purpose of life was to find a job, and do it as well as you could, and then have all the fun you could fit in, around the edges of it. But when I started to write, then I realized that there was something else that I could do that filled me and was a space I could keep filling with myself. And also that it was something to be obedient to. It was a reason to have conscience, for me, because I really didn’t have much reason to have a conscience. I believe this is often an affliction of the young. So that I wouldn’t consider other people’s feelings. But as a poet, I felt like I had to. Now I’m sure you can meet plenty of people who will tell you I didn’t consider their feelings, thanks very much, but at least I was trying. It’s an incentive to consciousness. It’s an incentive to be conscious, because if you can notice things, you never know when the next thing that you can join with is going to appear. So it was an instigation of consciousness.”

James Garrahan has been putting together a documentary film on Bromige, and has posted a trailer/sound test clip on YouTube, and Sonoma poet and former student Maureen Hurley has posted a lovely remembrance of Bromige. When he died, he was working on a memoir entitled Til There Was You, and an edition of his collected poems is forthcoming in 2010 or 2011 from Reality Street Press in England. In the meantime, here are several places where you can read his work online:

• A feature on David Bromige in Jacket Magazine, Vol. 22 (May 2003)
• Poems, an interview and an excerpt from his memoir at Big Bridge
• A sequence of short poems at the Bromige memorial Web site