Michael Boughn, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge

 

            The word “poetics” has been around for a while, thoughits meaning changes. Aristotle’s Poetics was primarily a set of genredefinitions (tragedy, epic, comedy), desire effects (fear, pity, wonder), theirresult (catharsis), and the rules and methods necessarily to create them. Miltonrefers to poetics as the “laws of a true Epic poem.” Purely technical in thesense of addressing poetry (and drama) as governed by laws external to andformative of its composition, poetics became identified (and discussed) asprosody and aesthetics in later thinking. The only question facing the poet iswhether or not he or she knows the rules and is able to master them well. (“Poetics’Bodies—Some Poetry Wars, 1913-1990”)

I’mvery much enjoying Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn’s latest, Measure’sMeasures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024),with an introduction by Charles Stein, a delightful and lively collection ofessays of consideration, reconsideration, histories, accumulation, agreementsand disagreements, attending a sequence of curiosities around some importantdecades of contemporary poetic form and thought. Boughn focuses his collectionaround The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), the infamous poetryanthology edited by Donald Allen that attempted to define the upcominggeneration of American poets, as well as connect a diverse array of contemporarypoetics around the country for the first time, clustering poets into genres(some thought, arbitrarily), from the Black Mountain poets, the New York Schooland San Francisco Renaissance. Stretching multiple essays on the anthologygenerally, and on specific poets such as (and specific arguments upon or around)Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser, H.D., Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, as well aspieces surrounding multiple of these and their concerns, battles and poetics,Boughn provides a wonderful foundation of information around an incrediblylively and productive period of American writing that still holds ripplingeffects across contemporary poetics across the United States, Canada (in partthrough influences into 1960s TISH, Talon and Coach House poets and poetics)and far beyond. His essay on the long poem, for example, I found particularly compelling,pushing me to reconsider my own long-held presumptions upon the form and itshistory. “But the questions lingered: Is a poem a long poem, as many have askedbefore me, just because it’s—long? And if that’s the case, then how long islong enough to be a long poem? Or is a poem a long poem because it can layclaim to some common generic feature—beyond indetermine length—some, say,structure or convention? Or, as Smaro Kamboureli has argued, to an ’evolvedform,’ a specific, restless resistance to generic definition?” (“How Long IsLong Enough?”). Boughn has that most interesting blend of curiosity and resistancethat provides new ways of thinking across questions that have run across poeticsfor decades; some of these may never find answers, but his questions extend newthinking beyond those original boundaries.

Thereis something incredible in the way Boughn writes from within the moment in andaround the activity he articulates—he was co-editor and one of the co-conspiratorsof assembling Robert Duncan’s infamous The H.D. Book, after all (somethingdiscussed here but also within Lisa Jarnot’s recent lectures [which I reviewed over here])—but with the distance of time: years of working through and withthis material as writer, critic, teacher and reader, all of which bring considerableweight to his arguments. If you want to know why the mentors of your mentors,the heroes of your heroes, didn’t get along, and what the disagreements wereand how they began, for example. The essay on Robert Creeley’s anger, forexample, is remarkable; but one remarkable piece within a collection of remarkablepieces.

Ina culture that seems to hold too many young poets featuring content not only abovebut seemingly to the exclusion of a comprehension of form, Boughn offers histake on a myriad of threads, and an incredible background on a period of writingthat exploded onto the larger consciousness in ways that most would either haveforgotten about or have been completely unaware. As he writes to close theessay “The New American Poetry Revisited—Yet Again,” an essay that reallyshowcases his strengths as a professor:

            This is a long, devious way from where I started, typicalof the course conversations take in relation to this book. And it still doesn’tbegin to cover the depths of thinking The New American Poetry brings tothe table. The impossibility of fully opening those depths to the blank facesaround the seminar room can be overwhelming, or it can become part of a movetoward unleashing a ruckus in the room. At least if you’re lucky. That’s whatmakes teaching it, thinking about it, different than any other anthology. For theyoung people coming to it cold, in complete innocence, not just of the book,but of poetry itself beyond some meagre exposure to the Romantics and Eliot, itcan be like running into a wall face-first. But if you can get them to addressthe wall as something they bring to their reading, and then show them how tobegin to take it apart, it will begin to yield the book’s astonishments andclarities, introducing the students to a new modality of thinking and knowing. Somemore than others, of course. But it seems to me that you probably couldn’t askfor more than that from a book.

Theforce of that anthology when it landed was immense, and there is a great dealof contemporary writing still feeling the effects. There is just such clarityhere. One of the more readable critical volumes I’ve read in a while, and I actuallyfound myself wanting more, once I worked through to the end.

Stan Persky, in a recentconversation, suggested to me that the first step in teaching poetry is toexplain to students how poetry is a “linguistic mode of knowledge,” comparableto narrative or mathematics. A mode of knowledge, or, say, thinking, is likewhat I just called a register.