Michael Boughn: A Special Feature
About Michael Boughn
by Miriam Nichols
He has loaded and unloaded boxcars, agitated against the Vietnam war, operated machinery in a metal stamping factory in Silicon Valley, and taught in the English Department at the University of Toronto for twenty-three years. Michael Boughn was born in Riverside, California in 1946. Twenty years later, he headed north to Canada to avoid what he calls an “illegal and immoral war.” In Vancouver, he made his way to classes at Simon Fraser University with Robin Blaser, who introduced him to Blake, Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Olson, Spicer, Creeley, Dorn and others since associated with the New American poetry, so-named after Donald Allen’s famous 1960 anthology.[1] He remembers Blaser’s classes as “life defining.” Boughn joined the poetics program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1980, where he was Robert Creeley’s graduate assistant and a cataloguer in the Poetry / Rare Books Collection. After graduation, he stayed on at Buffalo and worked with John Clarke, one of his teachers, on the magazine intent: a newsletter of talk, thinking and document. Later, he would start his own small press, shuffaloff, which has published work by Creeley, Clarke, Blaser, Elizabeth Willis, Jorge Guitart, and Lisa Jarnot, among others. More recently, Boughn produced the online poetry newsletter Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (2016–2020) with poet and satirist Kent Johnson. An editor, scholar, teacher, small press publisher, and above all poet himself, Boughn has published ten books of poetry, three of prose, and five substantial editions.
If there is a word that catches Mike Boughn’s energies and considerable accomplishments, it would have to be “furthur.”[2] Rather than follow North American poetry communities into language writing, identity politics, or the expressivist lyric, Boughn has stayed on the magic bus, riding the cosmo-poetics of the New Americans into a 21st-century practice.[3] There are some big reasons for this, despite the fact that the NAP has dropped off the agenda in most poetry circles. Foremost is the view that poetry is a distinctive mode of knowing the real and has a place alongside other discourses from the sciences or social sciences. What poetry knows, as Whitman remarked, is a pathway between reality and the soul. So, for instance, Olson saw the embeddedness of humanity in planetary life years before ecology was recognized as a crucial leading science. The ontological dimension of such a “stance” (Olson’s word) meant that persons, places, and things were to be understood as the unique inflections of various living geo-historical zones rather than a series of discrete entities. This “special view” turned out to be wildly at odds with formal literary elegance, dualisms of any kind, capitalist economics, and the sociology of human manyness. Pushing off from this perspective, Boughn speaks of being-in-common, a concept of plurality that holds open the possibility of as-yet-unheard-of creative alignments as opposed to social or psychological determinisms. He describes Dispatches, for instance, as a Temporary Autonomous Zone, set up against the Doom Program, “the forces levelling the world through the cultural economy of general equivalence and universal commodification” (Measure’s Measures 108). How, in the face of such, to keep imagination alive? How to re-make one’s givens rather than simply (dis)identify with them. The issue here is agency.
Agency from poetry? That abject, marginalized discourse? Poetry measures the world, Boughn says, but measure in this context does not derive from rulers or iambs, but from “furthur” articulations. This is measure as creative an-archē. In a farewell letter that marked the closing of Dispatches, Boughn and Johnson (Fric and Frac, they called themselves) urge readers “Never to be afraid to speak what is righteous to cynical power, no matter how entrenched that power is, no matter how ‘progressive’ it purports to be. . . . Poetry is the living Word. Fight for it and it will take root in your heartmind, where it will blossom and renew the world.” (Dispatches, 20 May 2020). I can’t think of a better introduction to Mike Boughn’s work than such an admonition.
[1] Donald Allen, Ed. The New American Poetry 1945–1960. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
[2] The word “furthur” [sic] was the name of Ken Kesey’s magic bus (a 1939 International Harvester school bus), as fitted out for a 1964 cross-country road trip with Neil Cassady and the Merry Pranksters. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg joined the crew to party when the bus hit New York. Tom Wolfe memorialized Kesey’s adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and Alex Gibney has made the trip into a documentary in Magic Trip (2011).
[3] See “The Interstices of Poetry Wars” (106–112), “Olson, Empire, and the Thinking of America” (169–192), and “Who Put the ‘X’ in O
Miriam Nichols is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of the Fraser Valley where she taught literary theory, Canadian and American literature, and international modernism. Her publications include scholarly editions of the poet Robin Blaser’s The Fire: Collected Essays and The Holy Forest: Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2006) and The Astonishment Tapes (University of Alabama, 2015). She is the author of Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of Outside (Alabama, 2010) and A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor (Palgrave, 2019).
- Publications by Michael Boughn
- Poetry
- Iterations of the Diagonal (shuffaloff, 1995)
- Dislocations in Crystal (Coach House Books, 1998)
- 22 Skidoo/Sub Tractions—Opus Minus One (Book Thug, 2009)
- Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (Book Thug, 2010)
- Nine Blue Moments for Robin (BlazeVox, 2012)
- Great Canadian Poems for the Aged—Vol. 1, Illus. Ed. (Book Thug, 2013)
- City—A Poem from the End of the World (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016)
- Hermetic Divagations—After H.D. (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)
- Uncertain Remains (BlazeVox, 2022)
- The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual, Vol. 1 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022)
- Prose
- Into the World of the Dead—Astonishing Adventures in the Underworld (Annick Press, 2006)
- Business as Usual, A Novel (NeWest Press, 2011)
- Measure’s Measures—Poetry and Knowledge (Station Hill Press, 2023)
- Editor
- H.D.—A Bibliography 1905–1990 (University Press of Virginia, 1993)
- The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, with Victor Coleman (U of California P, 2011)
- Resist Much, Obey Little—Inaugural Poems for the Resistance, with 18 others (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017)
- Narthex and Other Stories by H.D. (Book Thug, 2011)
- Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, with Kent Johnson (2016–2020, archived at the Contemporary Literature Collection, Simon Fraser University Library)
Michael Boughn, The Book of Uncertain: A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual (Book One)
Spuyten Duyvil, 2022, $16.00
Review by John Tritica
“…and if I keep skipping from one story to another it’s because I keep circling around that story as if it were the first day of my escape…”
—Italo Calvino,
If on a winter’s night a traveler
Michael Boughn does not write what Jack Spicer called one night stand poems, those shiny, reader-friendly, award-winning, readily consumable poems so prized by mainstream anthologies and awards institutions. The Book of Uncertain: A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual (Book One) is not produced as a part of commodity culture, and it generally resists any easy paraphrase. This first book of a proposed multi-volume long poem, on the order of Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, divides into ten chapters and a coda, and concerns itself with an historical critique of poetic innovation. The language bristles with energy. This intensity arises from the process of semantic layering of what Boughn calls the “interlinear.” The de-centered speaker of the poem is shapeshifting and malleable, so that Boughn creates a range of possible readings in his lines. The vectors of sense are polyvalent, packed with possibilities. Such skills provide kaleidoscopic blending of the contemporary and the archaic. Pop culture collides with Latin phrases and hermetic references. There is sheer beauty in the book, along with political wrath at the militant ignorance of the extreme rightwing of American capitalism and imperialism.
Boughn’s language rearranges syntax, such that objects and subjects exchange roles strategically, making for greater complexity. For example:
Love, language
death pull chairs up to the table
raise the stakes with divinatory
gestures invoke the faculty intuits
a movement of descent into matter (63)
In the third and fourth lines, the object of the first clause, “divinatory / gestures,” becomes the subject of the next clause, “divinatory / gestures invoke the faculty intuits / a movement” which changes the emphasis from “Love, language / death” to a meditation on the nature of matter. To make the process yet more complex, the verb “intuits” pivots the poem from “divinatory gestures” to a descent into matter. Thus, the movement of the poem is both horizontal, along the syntactic lines, and vertical, along lines of aspiration and descent.
In related fashion, the de-centered speaker of the poem exists in multiple places and times. The speaker is located variously in Canada, the U.S.A., Italy, Mesopotamia and ancient Greece. Sometimes the voice is contemporary, sometimes it speaks from antiquity. Implicit throughout The Book of Uncertain is Ezra Pound’s notion that in the mind, all ages are contemporaneous. Boughn’s references range from Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” to quantum physics, to our contemporary time of Covid and civil strife, in no linear order. Though there is a wealth of references, Boughn’s approach to poetry undermines stable reference or linear narrative. Rather, due to the shapeshifting of the speaker, significance is mobile.
For example, at one point, Boughn engages in a strategy that undermines easy significance:
If the words out
of the blue seem to refer to the word sky
where is it and how deep
is the ocean? (177)
This is a strategic non-sequitur that the poet employs to disrupt routine discursive thinking and to enlist the reader’s participation in the unfolding of the poem. Meaning is uncertain, and Boughn uses the figure Uncertain as one kind of mask for the speaker, a mask that links the uncertainty of our time to the drama of the uncertainties of the ancient Greek world:
She enters
a figure Uncertain glances in the distance
as the Kykeon at Eleusis shows up
along with the dog and fungal
intoxicants’ enlarged depth
of field… (126)
The poet refers here to Kykeon, a psychoactive fungal drink which was consumed after fasting at the climax of the religious ceremonies during the Eleusian Mysteries. Elsewhere in the poem Boughn refers to a parallel hallucinogenic experience induced by LSD: “then the acid hits / big time, can opener moment / cosmic death horror spilling / from the burst continuum / machine’s infernal roots…” (82-3). Boughn thus parallels the experience of mind-altering substances from one age to another; in both cases the experiences are risky and uncertain.
Boughn’s genre here, broadly speaking, is satire. In a time when a former U.S. President is hawking $60 Bibles on the internet to raise money for legal fees, the public discourse is ripe for satire. Boughn’s satire is rooted in his personal history of war resistance. He left the USA for Canada initially in 1966, before the host country stiffened regulations against those fleeing the draft. It was a time of chaos and uncertainty throughout the world, and Boughn captures how the pathology was massively disruptive to the planet’s order and well-being, “a chaos of sudden resistance / within larger chaos…” (23).
The speaker evokes war’s carnage in a visceral way: “…bodies heaped / in War’s corners, / where children bleed / in bombed out remains / of various agreements…” (22). At the same time the reader is taken on a fugitive’s flight across Canada, “Slipstreaming in the wake / of big rigs across the prairies because only / three cylinders are firing” (47). This race across Canada is fraught with tension, propelling the poem through time and place.
The satire becomes apocalyptic when Boughn sketches out his conception of the Doom Program, the engine of catastrophe, fueled by war, ignorance, and human consumption. Ecological disaster looms as we consume fossil fuels and pollute the planet:
Styrofoam trays stained
with blood and engineered
to withstand eternity’s
patient work (108)
As the poem tells us, such products of fossil fuels invade oceans, inundate rivers, line landfills, and have a half-life of eternity. It is the complicity of unbridled greed, and the desire for unlimited economic growth, that accelerates the Doom Program.
Uncertainty figures as one of the central consequences of climate change and this poem takes us on a ride that blends excitement and terror:
A fugitive apparition on a speeding motorcycle
breeds a small riot in mnemonic harbours
of proletarian transit, disrupts chatter
precedes entrance into labour’s loveless
rearrangement of Stuff’s flow, closely chased
by flashing red Doom lights, disappears
into the maze enormous trailers cast
in uncertain night (128-29)
The “mnemonic harbours / of proletarian transit” refer to the syntax of the mind itself, how perception orders memory and reality, so that the fugitive apparition not only disrupts endless discursive chatter, but also provokes an alternative discourse, based on connection. The whole process is policed by the Doom Program. Verbs energize the poetry: “breeds,” “disrupts,” and “disappears.” What disturbs is the commerce of the shadowy labyrinth of tractor trailers on highways, messengers of the Doom Program. The demands of industrial and bureaucratic labor short-circuit the “rearrangement” of “Stuff’s flow,” the vital energy of its participants. The “fugitive apparition” appears prominently in the book. For instance, “Fugitive apparitions evade linear / designations of directional flow / find themselves in strange places” (130). Boughn uses these ghostly figures to defamiliarize perception, adding to his non-linear poetics.
Also central to The Book of Uncertain are evocations of the “interlinear,” “encounters / with mind’s landscapes preserved” (106). The “mind’s landscapes” recalls the poets of The New American Poetry, especially Charles Olson and Ed Dorn. It is these psychic maps that the speaker of the poem pursues. The interlinear represents a kind of semantic excess, so that multiple readings are not only possible, but necessary. While the poem is in constant motion, the movement is not necessarily forward, but rather a type of “linguistic nomadism’s / unquiet circling and circling” (201):
Closely related to the satire of war is the consequence of the exile:
Interlinear to simplified
examples of chaos disappears
in the night outside
Detroit headed west
looking for geographies imagination
fed the exiled heart (119)
But the position of the “exiled heart” is not necessarily within any one country, but rather in the “geographies imagination.” Boughn purposely does not make a possessive of “geographies” to emphasize the existential plurality of the noun. It is these locations of the imagination that “fed the exiled heart…”. Once again, Boughn draws on Olson, about whom he has written extensively in Measure’s Measures. For Olson, geography is not just a place, but a state of mind, of imagination. For Boughn these geographic regions of the mind extend the scope of what poetry is capable of accomplishing, what the poet refers to as “a range /of gestures…” (11).
Boughn dramatizes the exile’s position with extensive references to “leaving,” “belonging,” “not leaving” and “not belonging.” The first chapter, entitled simply “Leaving” and the final chapter (something like a coda), entitled “Leaving Art,” keeps the poem moving in a circular motion. Leaving signifies in several ways. In one sense, it is the poet leaving one country for another, the role of the exile: “the desert slips into dream form / the road winds by torrents through gaps / in peaks till the din of war dims / and the border looms” (13). In another sense leaving is the transition from one perception to another. But most importantly, leaving is the departure of one state of mind for another. To use William Blake’s terminology, leaving is the movement between the part of the mind that devours and the part of the mind that is prolific. In this sense leaving also suggests liberation from the mind’s consumptive restraints. Of course, the destination is fraught with uncertainty. Likewise, belonging is never a stable condition of assimilation into another country or community. Belonging depends on not belonging, and Boughn devotes “Chapter 4” to what he calls “The Pragmatics of To Belong as Not Belonging…” Estrangement is the exile’s lot as “excommunication looms / within the familiar clutch of hard / hands” (71). The hard hands are an integral part of the coercive Doom Program.
In the midst of this commentary on uncertainty and exile is the poet’s poetics:
Dreaming, thinking, and loving fall
with persistent rhythms infiltrate
uncertain direction to the refuge
long felt to nestle among peaks (17)
Here Boughn’s syntactic sleight of hand is to turn the object of the poem’s first clause, “persistent rhythms,” into the subject of the following clause: “persistent rhythms / infiltrate uncertain direction to the refuge.” This shifts the subject position of the “mind’s landscapes.” Boughn suggests that in the words of poetry, there is no refuge, except in the rhythm of how the poet constructs syntax provisionally as a jazz musician might. At the end of “Chapter 3,” he writes: “It does go on, letter after letter, word / after word, a book / unwritten being writ” (58).
The Book of Uncertain should be read in conjunction with Michael Boughn’s critical essays collected in Measure’s Measure: Poetry & Knowledge (2024). These essays reveal Boughn’s grounding in The New American Poetry, especially in the continuing significance of the work of Charles Olson. Boughn includes also essays on Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Robert Creeley as well as writing on the poetics of William Carlos Williams and H.D., who knew and corresponded with the poets of The New American Poetry. The Book of Uncertain is the first book of a projected multi-volume work that is a major contribution to the long poem. This poem combines history, art, and poetics into a book that is the fruit of a lifetime of work. As co-editor of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book (with Victor Coleman) and co-editor (with Kent Johnson) of the on-line journal Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (2016-2020), Michael Boughn has played a crucial role in exploring and defining innovative American poetry. The Book of Uncertain is certain to keep poets, scholars and students engaged in conversations about the nature of what makes innovative poetry a vital force in contemporary literature.
John Tritica’s books of poetry are How Rain Records Its Alphabet, Sound Remains, standing in astonishment, Spruce Bark Text,and Prior to Wings. With Mary Rising Higgins and Gene Frumkin, he is a founding member of L)Edge (1986-2011), a poetry circle that met bi-weekly to discuss and develop their poetry and poetics. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Michael Boughn, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge
Station Hill Press, 2024, $23.99
Review by Norman Finkelstein
It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet
—Charles Olson, “Maximus, to himself”
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet
—Charles Olson, “Maximus, to himself”
1.
Like Charles Olson, the central figure in Measure’s Measures, Michael Boughn approaches poetry with a sense that there is business left undone. The essays in this collection, some of which date back thirty years, seek to rectify that situation. There are arguments to be made, positions to be defended, and scores to be settled. For Boughn, this is the case not only for Olson, but for Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser, Ed Dorn, and Jack Spicer. Donald Allen’s New American Poetry 1945-1960, remains a touchstone for him—and a site of controversy. Olson’s poetic and intellectual development, from “Projective Verse” through the entirety of Maximus and in such later essays as Proprioception, is still of the utmost moment. Throughout Measure’s Measures, Boughn is determined to establish his stance in relation to his precursors and mentors, and at his best, he is an inspired reader and a vigorous interpreter of these poets, who, at least for me, remain of great significance. (Cf. my book of essays, Lyrical Interference [2003], which ironically takes its title from “Projective Verse,” in which Olson inveighs against the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego.”) But at this late date, certain questions hang over the book, not only in regard to Boughn’s specific readings of the poets, but in regard to the overarching rationale for many of the essays’ positions. Reading these essays, all of which are engaging and provocative, I often get the sense that Boughn is fighting a rearguard action, obviated, at least to a certain extent, by more recent developments in American poetry. Then again, Boughn implies, and sometimes declares outright, that our failure to understand what Olson and his companions wanted for poetry—the cultural work it is intended to do, the visionary recital (to borrow Henri Corbin’s term) it offers us—is why so much is amiss in poetry today. And while I am not prepared to fully acquiesce to his insistence, following him on his quest, as he follows Olson on his quest, takes on a special urgency, and yields great rewards.
In “The Poetry of Initiatory Transmission,” his useful introduction to Measure’s Measures, Charles Stein notes that Boughn “finds the measure for the work of a network of poets in the twentieth century for whom the participatory, inductive, indeed initiatic sense of poetry takes precedence over its ‘appreciation’” (11). This resonates strongly for me, since I have argued that a number of important figures in the generation after the New Americanists, such as Nathaniel Mackey, are also initiatic poets. As I understand it, this means transmission of the art to a given poet through a deep immersion in the work of older poets and of related cultural traditions, such as Olson’s reading of Corbin and Jung, or Duncan’s study of Freud and Gershom Scholem. But initiation is not simply study: it is a trial, an ordeal of reading. One is called to the task. It often involves struggling with, and writing through, recondite, esoteric work, and transforming one’s own poetry accordingly. In his discussion of H.D. and Duncan, Boughn notes that “the esoteric is hidden, but it is not the stasis of a tradition or a body of knowledge. The esoteric exists in relation to a process of revelation and vision that is not predetermined in some dogma or belief or set of texts, but is always available in some new form to those who are open to it” (84). This is as true for readers as it is for poets. It is never only a matter of aesthetic apprehension (though aesthetics must play its part), or to use Stein’s loaded term, “appreciation.” Rather, as Boughn declares, “Poetry is (among other things) knowledge as multiple, layered simultaneity, the experience of meaning in multiple registers at the same time, an experience of gnosis” (34).
As some of my readers know, gnosis is a term which has fascinated me for a long time, ever since I encountered it in the writings of Harold Bloom and then again in Peter O’Leary’s book on Robert Duncan, Gnostic Contagion. The New Gnostics, that loose and only half-serious gang of poets and critics with which I have been associated, certainly have their roots in the esoteric and initiatic aspects of such poets as Olson and Duncan. How does Boughn understand the term? In his essay “Maximus IV V VI—Measuring the Incommensurable,” he connects gnosis “to poetry’s potential for transformative knowledge (experiential insight), which poetry achieves through the rhythmic manipulation of nested sonic/ideational/image fields—Pound’s melopoeia / logopoeia / phanopoeia” (205). This formulation nicely brings together a modernist (i.e. Poundian) understanding of poetic form with what has come to be the standard definition of gnosis, as in, for instance, Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels, which sees gnosis as “an intuitive process of knowing oneself,” or in Bloom’s Agon, where we are told that “in Gnosis the knowledge is neither of eternity nor of this world seen with more spiritual intensity. The knowledge is of oneself.” And yet, as Boughn rightly notes, for all the esoteric and initiatic qualities of this poetry, “if you want to understand it, you can. Commitment is what counts, not immediate availability” (206). Potentially, the transformative gnosis of poetry is available to everyone. But as we shall see, for Boughn, this potential in recent years has been lost, and that loss is due largely to a failure on the part of many poets, critics, and academic institutions, to heed the lessons which Charles Olson taught.
According to Bough, Olson’s transformational gnosis conceives “of language not as limit or restriction, but as the stuff of creation. It is a move toward what he calls in Proprioception the secular that loses nothing of the divine, a language that incarnates the ineffable in the specific materials of the world” (127). This understanding of language synthesizes the Objectivism of Williams’ “no ideas but in things” with a virtually kabbalistic view of words and letters as constituting a divine force which can be harnessed through theurgic practices, as Robert Duncan came to understand his poetry. (Olson read deeply in Henri Corbin, but it’s too bad that he didn’t also study Corbin’s friend Gershom Scholem.) To simplify matters, we can say that, following poets such as Olson and Duncan, Boughn believes that under the aegis of (post)modernity, one of the few sites where the secular and divine come together is poetry, and that “Poetics, as Olson understood it, was a quest, a spiritual ordeal that led to a transformative gnosis that opened the poet to certain energies informing the world” (131).
What happens to poets once they are opened to these informing energies? I italicize the word because Boughn knows full well how complicated the issue of form becomes for the New American poets, with Olson’s “Projective Verse” at the center of the conversation. Boughn observes that Olson struggled to extend the ideas he proposes in that famous essay, seeking “how to move beyond the thinking of form as an extension of content, which, while it broke the back of prescriptive formalism, still was caught in a dangerous dualism and a temporal precedent” (113). Whether Olson succeeded in this quest is an open question. Boughn sees Proprioception as just such an advance, and unpacks the piece with great dedication. He concludes that
Neither an exposition nor an analysis, it is a complex Event, a happening of language
that identifies a sense of the real in its multiple explications of body, word, syntax,
history. In Proprioception, Olson presents us with a new world in a way “Projective
Verse” was unable to because there, form was an extension of content, and the projective
was still a kind of dream or memory of what was to come. Just as there are no contents
of the body, no interior, there is no content in Proprioception to extend a form from.
There is one surface, one stream of sense weaving itself in and out of infolded and
unfolded complexities of flesh, language, event. (121)
I quote at length to give the reader a sample of Boughn’s theorizing (more on that below). He is an eloquent interpreter, but after returning to Olson’s text, I find Boughn’s reading unconvincing. Proprioception looks to me like a set of notes toward what could have been a compelling essay, but it simply doesn’t compare rhetorically or conceptually to “Projective Verse,” which, despite some reservations I have about it, remains an enormously provocative and useful work.
Similarly, Boughn argues that a dramatic change takes place in Maximus IV V VI, which he sees as “a unique event” (203). As I mentioned above, in Boughn’s essay on this work, he derives a number of important formulations regarding poetry and gnosis. But again, returning to Olson’s book after many years, I come away disappointed. It is far less engaging than the first volume of Maximus, too fragmentary, too prosaic, too full of pronouncements, which was always Olson’s greatest poetic weakness. Boughn’s use of the term event to describe Olson’s later writing is revealing. Immediacy is fundamental to Olson’s poetics, as it was for Williams, and for Olson’s contemporaries. But for the poet, an awareness of what Blake calls “the bounding line” can never be lost, and at a certain point, Olson sacrifices that awareness. For the record, the poem of Olson I most admire is “As the Dead Prey Upon Us,” with its stunning opening stanza and charged, visionary world that is still intimately our own. That poem, along with “In Cold Hell, in Thicket,” “The Distances,” “The Kingfishers,” and perhaps half a dozen poems in the first volume of Maximus, will always stay with me—and I’ve been reading Olson & Co. now for over fifty years. Perhaps this is a matter of “taste,” and Boughn might argue that I remain too much the aesthete, unwilling to relinquish what Boughn, following Lyotard, calls “the solace of good form” (203). Perhaps. That’s for my readers to decide.
2.
For Boughn, the vision of poetry that Olson articulated has in the past few decades become neglected, corrupted, coopted, or lost. So it is that Measure’s Measures not only gives us strong readings of the New American poets, but also a number of attacks on those whom Boughn sees as responsible for all the corruption and loss. Boughn’s understanding of poetry has its roots deep in Blake and Emerson, which to say, in a tradition which values the imagination above all else (Blake again: “The world of imagination is the world of eternity.”) He’s also a pretty irascible fellow, especially when it comes to what he sees as contemporary poetic careerism. Keep in mind that along with the late, irrepressible Kent Johnson (to whom Measure’s Measures is dedicated), Boughn was the editor of the brilliant, cranky, occasionally scandalous website Dispatches From the Poetry Wars. Boughn’s book opens another front in these wars, though as this crucial interview reveals, Dispatches shares the same origin as at least one of the essays in Measure’s Measures.
That essay is “Robert Creeley’s Anger,” in which we learn of Boughn’s vexed relationship to Creeley, beginning when Boughn was Creeley’s graduate assistant at Buffalo in the nineteen-eighties (Boughn, who had worked in a factory for ten years before returning to graduate study, was older than the average grad student). Boughn’s own wrath was kindled by Robert Archambeau’s review of Creeley’s Selected Letters, which appeared in The Notre Dame Review, in addition to a similar consideration of Creeley’s correspondence in Archambeau’s “Hating the Other Kind of Poetry” (which may be found in the volume Inventions of a Barbarous Age). Full disclosure: Bob Archambeau is a buddy of mine, but I barely recognize him as the “Archambeau” depicted in Boughn’s attack. Boughn sees Creeley as a figure for whom “poetry was a moral force in a world given to degraded language, mindless war, endless spectacles, and spiritual gluttony” (53). The notion that Creeley had a “career” in poetry is simply unacceptable to him. Thus he resents Archambeau’s sociological approach to Creeley when applied to his letters, following Olson’s prejudice against such an approach. Archambeau is a deep reader of Pierre Bourdieu, whom Boughn apparently despises. But how else, one wonders, is one to analyze an author’s letters.
Boughn especially dislikes Archambeau pointing out how Creeley went from an antagonistic (and—let’s face it—highly competitive) outsider to a comfortable insider, still maintaining a view of himself as marginalized, yet knowing full well that he had become one of the most revered and influential poets of his generation. This is related in turn to what Boughn regards as Creeley’s betrayal of Olson by neglecting Olson’s later work; helping found the Buffalo Poetics Program, where Olson’s legacy was marginalized if not condemned outright (he was supposedly replaced by Louis Zukofsky); supporting Language poets such as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe in the Poetics Program (both were severe critics of Olson); and defending Tom Clark’s biography of Olson, which Boughn, among others, considers a disaster, since it arguably misrepresents the poet’s work and behavior in the last years of his life. It was that dispute which led to Boughn’s final parting of the ways with his mentor.
This theme of betrayal runs through a number of the essays in Measure’s Measures, and given the events which Boughn recounts, the presentation of which is every bit as “sociological” as Archambeau’s essays, it’s no wonder that Boughn sees “poetry wars” as a perpetual phenomenon, spanning the generations. We know how the modernists revolted against the Victorians, how Eliot’s influence then spawned the Fugitives and New Critics, how the New Americanists turned back to Pound and Williams to counteract such mid-century formalism, and how in turn the Language poets (selectively) criticized the New Americanists. The poetics of each movement is enacted in both poems and in theory (a term which Boughn detests, though broadly speaking, he himself is an able theorizer). The birth and death of the avant-garde is endlessly reenacted, as if poets of every generation are possessed of a repetition compulsion, summoning forth the antagonistic ghosts of their immediate predecessors, and never laying them to rest. [1]
Along the same lines, Boughn also believes that Olson’s work was part of the communalism and cultural resistance of the sixties, “where hierarchical/anti-hierarchical orderings were dissolved in a synergistic circulation of authoritative finitudes that egged each other on toward their further possibilities—which were the further possibilities of the self-revelation of the being-together as well” (235). I’m not sure I fully understand this description, but it certainly sounds idealizing, to say the least. What then happened, according to Boughn, is that
The constrictive energies of the late 70’s and 80’s (Just Say No) which rose up against this opening took multiple forms from the rise of Creative Writing to the academic institutionalization of formations calling themselves avant-garde. Just as emergent neo-liberalism reenergized the thought of creative work as individual, massive monetary grants and institutional largesse in the form of jobs, promotions, grants, book deals, and prizes flooded the poetry market from the streets to the classrooms, rewarding individual “excellence,” while reimposing Literature’s disciplinary orders. (235-236)
While I am, in the main, sympathetic to this account, I am also suspicious of Boughn’s tendency to generalize about “constrictive energies,” literary individualism, and “Literature’s disciplinary orders.” (This last phrase sounds like Foucault, one of the “theorists” I would assume that Boughn regards with suspicion, if not disdain.) The industrialization of creative writing and the absorption of certain avant-garde formations into the academy are unfortunate to say the least, but they, along with much else Boughn blames on the neo-liberal emphasis on cultural individualism and careerism, are also a fait accompli. Are these tendencies to be resisted? Certainly—but what troubles me a lot more these days is the attack on the humanities tout court, so that poets who once had at least a chance of getting tenure-track positions are reduced to contingent, adjunct teaching or leaving academia to work minimum wage jobs.
3.
There is much more to be said about poets in academia, the creative writing industry, and what Paul Mann long ago called “the theory-death of the avant-garde,” but for the present, the question I would pose after reading Measure’s Measures is this: why are Boughn’s illuminating readings of the poets he loves inextricably bound up with his fault finding and finger pointing, his righteous anger? I let his heroes (and mine) answer. Blake: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Emerson: “The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed” (“Compensation”). Duncan: “within our American ‘world’ and the particular language that the art of poetry creates there are communities of all kinds; each idea of poetry is so far as it is vitally concerned is charged with the conviction that it has a mission to change, to recreate, the heart of poetry itself” (“Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife”). Among the American communities of poetry, Boughn finds himself pricked and stung and sorely assailed, but from the contraries in his soul and among poetic communities, comes great progression indeed. His book calls upon us, as poets and readers, to come to terms with these contraries.
A last personal note: when I retired from teaching in 2020, it was my intention to write more reviews of contemporary poetry. Having published a few in Dispatches, where my work was always welcome, I assumed that was where these reviews would appear. But soon after, Dispatches closed up shop. Rather than face a frustrating search for other sympathetic editors, I decided to start my own blog. So in a certain respect, Restless Messengers owes its existence to Kent Johnson and Michael Boughn.
[1] Here I would recommend the work of Alan Golding, in his From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (1995), and his recent Writing Into the Future: New American Poetries from The Dial to the Digital (2022). Golding is one of most nuanced scholars of modern and postmodern American “poetry wars,” with an encyclopedic knowledge of the players and issues, and remarkably few axes to grind.