I was recently running my eye over my bookshelves (as I do when woolgathering) and pulled out a thin resident of the top poetry shelf, something I hadn’t looked at in a long time though I love it dearly, William Bronk‘s That Beauty Still
A chapbook with only four poems, for which $2.50 seemed a little steep in 1979 (I was making minimum wage), and of an awkward size and shape (longer than it is wide, not easily fit on a bookshelf), but so beautiful with its muted blue seaweedy cover and its thick ragged paper that I couldn’t resist. (And there was the exclusivity factor: I had #436 of 500 copies!) And I liked the poems:
I can be glad in my death that, selfless,
the beauty of the world goes on; and then more:
even wordless, that beauty still.
I suddenly wondered why I’d never investigated him further, and discovering there was a convenient Life Supports: New and Collected Poems
I walk through city streets as once through woods
without the benefit of map or plan.
Failing to get to places when I should,
I learn a twisted pathway through the land.
Or lost, with nothing near to set me right,
where brick facades are similar as trees,
I walk along and suddenly come to a quite
familiar, remembered place, surprised and pleased.
This is a city the world will always remember
as one remembers Babylon or Thebes.
In the distant summer that follows our last November
the sifting screens and the shovels will fail to perceive
its being in me. I walked here once toward dark
and felt the wind come up across the park.
(There’s a brief discussion of it in this appreciation of Bronk by Thomas Lisk.) And here’s one of the bleak but bracing quatrains from Finding Losses (I cite it from this appreciation by Andy Grace):
The Yes of No
Did you think that our lives mattered? They don’t.
What is never brought into the present endures.
What is is our only present: it is.
We could wish it otherwise, are glad it is not.
Thanks very much, Clay!
Remarkably, New New York does not have a TV Tropes article.
Remarkably, New New York does not have a TV Tropes article.
That’s because it’s too specific to have one. There’s a generic TV Tropes article for New Neo City, combining New New York with Neo Tokyo and several less common examples.
Idly I wonder if Bronk was related to Jonas Bronck, after whose farm Bronck’s River, and then the (Annexed District of the) Bronck’s was named.
Ah yeah. What I had in mind is in the Live-Action TV examples.
As to John Cowan’s idle wondering, this piece from a not-obviously-unreliable source states that William Bronk was indeed a descendant of Jonas Bronck. “Not-obviously-unreliable” doesn’t mean true, of course.
https://pages.vassar.edu/library/2014/04/bronk/
An excellent find, and I see no reason to doubt it.
Well, if you’re going to proceed on the assumption that factual claims found via random googling are to be presumed true unless and until proved otherwise, that’s your lookout … But (assuming the Vassar writer got this from the subject or a member of the subject’s immediate family) many family traditions about ancestral connections to famous historical bearers of the same surname turn out not to hold up under closer investigation. A distant cousin of mine spent considerable time investigating and then debunking the pleasing family tradition that great-great-grandfather Allen had been a kinsman of Ethan Allen of “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress” fame. (You think Ethan got the vowels wrong? He prevailed in the conflict at hand, didn’t he?) Although obviously there are likely to be more unrelated lines of Allens in North America than of Bron(c)ks.
Yeah, I’m certainly not making that assumption in general, but as you say Bron(c)ks are more likely to be related than Allens, and it doesn’t seem quite grandiose enough a genealogical claim to attract automatic suspicion.
Ethan Allen’s actual demand to the commander of Fort Ticonderoga was, “Come out of there, you damned old rat.” In fact, the only person present with a commission from the Continental Congress was Benedict Arnold. Speaking of General Arnold, Ethan Allen was also a traitor; he just was not caught in his lifetime.
A traitor to whom? The British, certainly, but so were Washington and Jefferson and Adams and all the rest. To the United States in Congress assembled? They recognized Vermont only as a rebellious part of New York, an idea to which the Vermonters (who had begun with New Hampshire land grants that had been set aside by George III) objected fervently. To Vermont? Perhaps, but the situation was desperate, squeezed between the hostile British, the hostile New Yorkers, and the indifferent Congress. Without an alliance with one of these parties, Vermont would not survive, and the British seemed the most amenable to such an alliance (which would after the war have reincorporated Vermont into British America).
In the end, the three-year negotiations with Britain came to nothing, and New York agreed to drop its claims to Vermont in 1790, provided that those who had been granted Vermont lands by New York were paid $30,000 (about $39 million today relative to GDP per capita). Vermont paid and was duly admitted as the 14th state.
Yes, the whole issue of “treason” is murky in that context. (Insert John Harington quote here.)
Well, Ethan Allen did support the execution of at least two individuals who were merely negotiating with the British, on terms similar to what he was doing.
Hey, since it turns out he’s not my kinsman after all, I guess it’s not my job to defend the historicity of traditional claims against him against Debbie Downer revisionist history.
First “against” in prior comment should be “about.” I blame some sort of autocorrect-type obstruction of my actual typing.
Would it be even if you were? He’s not you.
In the end, the three-year negotiations with Britain came to nothing
Ha ha ha
And talking of Benedict Arnold, one of the more revolting incidents during the so-called American revolution is the hanging of Major André as a spy.
Are you alluding to much more recent events? 🙂
And talking of Benedict Arnold, one of the more revolting incidents during the so-called American revolution is the hanging of Major André as a spy.
Agreed. War (huh), what is it good for?
one of the more revolting incidents during the so-called American revolution is the hanging of Major André as a spy.
Why André in particular? If you mean that executing spies (as opposed to the treatment of prisoners of war) is barbaric, I agree, and the practice has mostly stopped since 1945 except in countries that don’t pay attention to the Geneva Conventions anyway. But I do not believe word one of André’s defense that he had had no intention of being behind American lines; he clearly went to Stony Point specifically to meet with Arnold. If you mean that he was hanged rather than being shot as he requested, all I can say is that it’s one of those military-morale things, like the difference between surrendering with the honors of war and without.
I also note that André was tried, whereas Nathan Hale was hanged out of hand.
Are you alluding to much more recent events? ????
Yes.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Why André in particular?
Because he was an old Pauline. Duh.
Oh. Well, in that case: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? / Old Paulines’ spying cannot be called treason.”
Harington, yes. Old Pauline and toilet designer. I wonder if his Metamorphosis of Ajax was responsible for the name of the bathroom cleaner. I can just see that meeting.