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When Professor Wade Hall chose the poem “Blue Fall” for inclusion in The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State in 2005, he referred to the “reclusive” Bruce Bennett Brown as “one of the least known of Kentucky’s important literary figures.” In fact, Brown’s obituary in 2016 makes no mention of his writings. These are sad reminders to those of us who knew this brilliant poet at the peak of his career.
Bruce Bennett Brown, born June 9, 1937, lived most of his adult life at Zebulon, Kentucky, or as he preferred to call it, Zebulon-on-Coon. Although he once admitted he could not write a single line of poetry anywhere but his own home, his life was by no means cloistral. A graduate of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, he was a fulltime librarian at Pikeville College until his retirement. He later worked behind the scenes in county government, writing, editing, researching and traveling.
In the 1960s and 1970s, while performing his duties as librarian at Pikeville College, Brown edited the school’s literary journal Twigs, publishing talented unknowns alongside established authors. He taught a class in Advanced Writing using a “hands off” approach when possible. Categorically rejecting the whole canon of poetry written before the Modernist Period, he introduced his students to the experimental writings of bohemians Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley and Phil Whalen, as well as the madness of “Beats” Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. He dared his students to take chances, to explore, as did he, the endless possibilities of the avant-garde. “Don’t tell the reader everything,” he advised. “Mystery is the thing.”
The period from the mid 60s to mid 70s found Bruce Brown at the height of his powers. While juggling his many duties at Pikeville College he found time to write hundreds of poems, many of them appearing in prestigious national journals such as Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, The Writer and Trace based in London. In 1977 his poem “The Return” was included in the national anthology Traveling America with Today’s Poets, published by Macmillan. While at Pikeville College he published Hands of Winter, a book-length collection of poems, and wrote a widely acclaimed play titled Broken Pots. In 1970 he was listed in International Who’s Who in Poetry.
Although he was gaining a reputation as a strong and innovative voice on the American literary scene, Brown’s career took a down-turn following the 1970s. For reasons we will never know, he seemed to be writing less and publishing only in small obscure magazines. He had a passion for cooking and sometime in the late 80s opened a small restaurant on Town Mountain Road in Pikeville called The Quail’s Nest. It became a gathering place for students and writers and anyone else who enjoyed a good meal and a good poem. After all, as Brown once said: “Poetry…is human food.”
When one reads a poem by Bruce Bennett Brown, he comes to realize that mystery truly is the thing. The enigmatic “Blue Fall” doesn’t tell us everything, nor do we wish it to. We only know that after reading this poem, we have touched, smelled and tasted something mysterious, something sublime, and nothing more should be written. Bruce Bennett Brown died January 29, 2016, a great poet who never received the credit rightfully his.
Contributor – Gayle Compton
Blue Fall
Dreadful is the singing of the hymn in this chilly afternoon before the oblong blunted tale becomes a bell, walking in a peal unshaped three colors make a sound you say; freckled egg in the shaded nest, history of the flapping flock and the flight and the light slanted right, rain cuts the sparrow down to size. You talk confusing things about leaving for France, questioning the architecture of the human column, how soon the low wind again over emptiness and the trembling setting in, the cherry in the wooden bowl splits its final seed. We give enough attention to the dry moon, listening for the catch in the blood and the floating leaves, a lost bee from the hive a hand flung up for speech and is that Silence forever and right now. Don't leave the cry open with a why. Let the cry close. In the courtesy of country places your hands quiet the furious fruit and the last whimper of the sun. You would not try to spell my curses or my praise. My private language is my own worn book. You will stay and be, will doubt and hold out. Dreadful is the singing of the hymn and the terrible gesture of amen, the echo and the scream lead out the celebration From Contemporary Kentucky Poetry 1967
The Return
All she took from her land was a rose sprout, the meadow patch quilts and a pack peddler's guitar, given to her that day in blue, with raspberry stains on her hands. Her wish to return grew into the hardest diamond of her years, cached in the safest alcove of her mind. "A home is built with rafters of memories, stones of love and windows of desire." A peddler told me that once, she said. Left alone in a place that is not one's childhood country, a journey is the easiest thing to take, and one morning beyond the great clumps of asparagus and lavender hedge the land looked young to her. Haddon, a son long dead, drove a flock of geese up from the creek and she spread her white apron to their screams. From Traveling America With Today's Poets 1977
