David Bromige - Becoming A Poet

Becoming A Poet

He met other poets at the University of British Columbia such as George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, and Jamie Reid, and they encouraged him to write and publish his work. At the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival Bromige met Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Duncan.

The result of this endeavor led to the publication of many poems. Robert Hass, the chairman of the Western States Book Award Committee, wrote glowingly of his work and chose his 1988 book, Desire: Selected Poems, 1963-1987 to win the first prize for poetry. He has twice been honored by the Poetry Foundation, once with a $3,000 and again with a $10,000 prize. And he has twice been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts. He won the college prize for the first poem he ever published.

Three years later, Bromige won a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. The rules stated that he had to do his graduate work at a different university. In 1962, he chose the University of California at Berkeley after graduating from the University of British Columbia. At UC-Berkeley, Bromige studied with Frederick Crews, Stephen Booth, and Thomas Parkinson. Living in the Bay Area also brought him into contact with a younger generation of American poets, including Ron Loewinsohn, Ron Silliman, David Melnick, Pat Nolan, Alistair Johnson and more.

In 1968, his third book, The Ends of the Earth, was published by Black Sparrow Press. It was the beginning of a twenty-three-year partnership that produced eleven of his books. The poems in this book have a ghostly tone. It is as though Cocteau was doing a very detailed description of Bromige’s life. The change apparent in his fifth book, Threads, is startling. It reads as though the ghostly presences from The Ends of the Earth had fleshed out and learned to speak a language from the various lives whose talk fills the book.