Bronwen Tate

Reading chair with foster kitten, Vancouver, BC. Art by The Itinerant Printer, E.A. Farro, and my kids.

Readings

A few first poems you remember loving (and how you feel about them now)

W.B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child,” (1886) (and the Loreena McKennitt song version of it [1985])
Charles Baudelaire, “Chanson d’Après-Midi” (1857)

I spent a year of high school as an exchange student in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and for whatever pragmatic school reason, I ended up at a science-focused high school. I’d only done two years of high-school French, so it was very much an immersion experience. We had a literature class where we read Hugo, Lamartine, all this French poetry. Even though my French wasn’t great, I think the teacher could tell that he had a humanities kid in a class of scientists and that I was responding to this poetry. When I was leaving, he gave me a collection of French poems. I spent a lot of time with it and even memorized Baudelaire’s “Chanson d’Après-Midi.”

During the same year, I took a trip to Greece where I was supposed to stay with relatives of a colleague of my dad, but they misunderstood when I was planning to come and weren’t home when I arrived in Athens at age 16 alone! Long story short, I ended up spending a week with a woman named Debbie who taught English there. We swam, ate yogurt and honey, listened to her Beatles records. She also played me a Loreena McKennitt version of Yeats’ “The Stolen Child,” and I think she must have had a book of Yeats as well because I remember reading “The Stolen Child” and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” and then buying a book of Yeats myself shortly after.

Looking back at “Chanson d’Après-Midi” and “The Stolen Child,” I can certainly see why they appealed to high school me: the obsessive attention to eyebrows and the “eye soft as the moon” in Baudelaire, the child stolen by fairies and all that lush rhyme in Yeats. But I’m struck also by the ambivalence and friction in both poems: “The Stolen Child” is full of “reddest stolen cherries” and chasing “frothy bubbles” but then it has this deeply melancholy—even creepy—side in “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” And the Baudelaire is a love/praise poem, but it’s all about contrasts: kiss and bite, heat and cold, mocking laugh and soft as the moon. So, I see an early love for these sounds, the little shivery feeling they gave me, but also an appreciation already for how a poem can hold contradiction and chaos within a seemingly ordered shape.

A book of poetry from the past year

Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, 2021)

In my work advising MFA theses, I’ve been thinking about how the first poem in a collection sets a tone and introduces key concerns but also “teaches” a reader how to engage with the book. In Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, the title of the first poem “Seeds and Crumbs” names small objects that seem similar but have important differences: a seed could sprout and grow into a plant (an optimistic beginning) while a crumb is a remnant of something consumed and might even evoke Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail—a path devoured by birds and no longer capable of leading them home. Right away, I’m asked to pay attention to connection and differentiation. Then the poem begins, “yes a famous mise-en-scène / ‘when I was just a little girl’”—what a way to begin in media res! As a reader, I feel like I’m joining a conversation that has been ongoing for some time.

The remainder of the poem further references and distorts the song “Que Sera Sera,” showing how reference can invoke a whole cultural context but also subject that context to questions. The lines “angle looks too much like angel / and vice versa,” preview the rebel angel figure of Nguyen’s trick-motorcycle-riding mother, the book’s emotional center; they also prompt a reader to think about the inconsistencies and difficulties of English orthography. Building on this attention to materiality, the lines “scatter the song / clavichord it” introduce language itself used against the grain: the denominalization of “clavichord” suggests the plural, the old, the odd, practice (rather than performance), and also previews a contrast with the đàn bầu, the single-stringed instrument that sounds “like the Vietnamese voice / they say” (18).  From the first page, I can tell that this is a book that will require and reward my most keen and capacious scrutiny.

A book that was important at a certain time

Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (University of California Press, 2002)

As I look back at the poets I wrote about for my Ph.D. dissertation in Comparative Literature, I see how several of these writers shaped my own poems and relationship to writing as well as being subjects of my scholarly inquiry. I’ve written a bit about how attention to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day helped me see how caregiving and chores coexist with serious aesthetic and intellectual work, for example. Another would be Lorine Niedecker, whose haiku-inspired five-liners I both wrote about and wrote after. I’d been writing a lot of prose poems and working with syntax, but after spending time with these poems, I was curious to do more with the line. Niedecker’s five-liners, often published in magazines in groups titled “In Exchange for Haiku” have a rhyme or slant rhyme between the third and fourth line, but then end with a non-rhyming fifth line. In rhyming but declining to conclude with rhyme, these poems, brief though they are, give an impression of continuing past the conclusion. This form also appealed to me as a “manageable” size of poem to attempt amid teaching, writing articles, applying to jobs, and caring for two small children. I spent several months writing one five-liner per day. I see Niedecker in the “For the Colors of a New Place” (below—the first poem in my new book The Silk the Moths Ignore) in the use of “dye” that brings an echo of “die,” in the “shrill thread” that is both my daughter’s voice and the yarn I wanted to dye (and eventually did dye!) with bright goldenrod flowers, in the desire to color everything “all yellow” (bright, hopeful) that also reveals a lurking opposite impulse.

A book you like to teach

 Barbara Jane Reyes, Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, 2020)

 I’ve enjoyed assigning this book (or groups of poems from it) to both graduate students and undergraduates. Last spring, I taught a BFA workshop focused on seven pleasures of poetry: specificity, sound, intimacy, pattern, excess/restraint, surprise, and insight. By assigning poems from this book like “Brown Girl Consumed,” “Dear Brown Girl [After all this,]” and “Dear Brown Girl [Remember those diaries]” as part of a constellation of poems that explore intimacy, I was able to offer students of color who may have felt alienated in past writing classes a sign of welcome.

I also love the way these poems invite all students to think about audience. By addressing the “young brown girl” of the title directly and including a rich array of cultural reference points that students may or may not have familiarity with, Reyes prompts us to really dig into what it feels like to be addressed or not addressed, what references we expect to have to work for and which we might expect to have explained to us, etc. This, in turn, prepares us to think about questions of audience in the students’ own work: who students want to read their work and what that means for their aesthetic choices, how workshop members might offer useful feedback on work even when they’re not the eventual target audience, what it means to read and respond with someone else’s aims in mind. The book also prompts terrific craft conversations about things like pronoun use, use of detail, code-switching, and voice.

A book in which you were interested by the use of imagery

 Alice Oswald, Falling Awake (Norton, 2016)

I became interested in Alice Oswald’s work when I was teaching at Marlboro College, and a student in my poetry class chose Oswald for a poetic apprenticeship assignment. The student was a super polymath, focusing on plant taxonomy, biology, and history, and was interested in looking at Oswald as someone who brought the combined vision of a classicist and a gardener to her work. The apprenticeship was focused on “naming the world”—what kind of language, what degree of specificity did Oswald bring to her descriptions of the natural world? Oswald was a fantastic poet to study for someone interested in naming, and the student wrote beautiful apprenticeship poems.

Along the way, I also became fascinated with Oswald’s work for other reasons: her use of sound, her work with metaphor (connected to “naming the world” for sure), and her history of performing her work entirely from memory. In Falling Awake, “Fox” was one of the first poems to really capture me. I love the sly subtle slant rhyme pattern here and the atmosphere of being awake at night and encountering wildness. This poem is somehow both graspable and entirely strange. The fox comes “in such serious sleepless/ trespass . . . a woman with a man’s voice / but no name.” The final image: “my life / is laid beneath my children / like gold leaf” conveys so much of the risk, treasure, and vulnerability of being a parent for me. Utterly gleaming and so fragile.

Writings

FOR THE COLORS OF A NEW PLACE

White agate             goldenrod
now walk ahead
               hear daughter cry
shrill thread         I want to dye
all yellow

TYRANNY OF THE PARTICULAR

Up late, my husband eats Raisin Bran from an empty ice cream quart. I bleed with daily dull red clotting. No one washes the dishes.

Here, let’s admire an orchid, that conspicuous fringed lip called cattleya. I am yours where the snipped bud engraves jasper. Sea of leaves, carpet of pebbles.

Any word can be an elevated bridge leading into fog. What’s beyond, obscured. Yet transport.

My friend says any day now. Instrumentalist for whom the moment has not yet arrived to execute her part. At her feet a trunk of folded cotton. Layette I too would prepare.

Neglected succulents strain in tangles against a window I wander past. Learn to savor blind-spots, revelation infinitely delayed.

How a hart inhabits the stagger. How adamant contains a piece of rock.

Bronwen Tate lives in Vancouver, where she is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She completed an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Before coming to UBC, she was the entire Creative Writing department at Marlboro College in the Vermont woods. Her poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore (Inlandia Institute, 2021) is available for preorder. Recent poems have appeared in Tinfish, The Rumpus, Typo, Carousel, and Court Green. Bronwen also has a few new essays: a brief one on participating in a collaborative homage to Bernadette Mayer (the project is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press) and longer one in Contemporary Literature on how ambivalence, complicity, and feeling can coexist with critique in the work of Harryette Mullen. You can find her on Twitter or IG at @bronwentate or on her website at https://www.bronwentate.com/.