Michael Boughn, THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2

 

Tropos remains a matterof immaterial
condensation turns the poemagainst the current
tattered grimace peersbetween cracks
in the Mall’s magisterialfaçade mutters
glory and grace can beyours as well
as that three-dollarArmani shirt Progress
delivers from tinyforeign hands to your
doorstep
              Away borders onleaves
seasoned with pulsion’sdirection
as restless negativity,not to haggle
over minor inflections
but to indicate bentphilosophical
familiarity and Hegelian digressions
through back-and-forthinterruptions
sometimes mistaken fortropological
ontologies’ second cousin
twice removed (hereincest reveals
blurred edges leadintrepid
into mansions of theNight

and surprise’s incubation
lost in words’ headstrongconnections
this way, that cave theRiver Alph
pours from, whereuncertain still leads it in
spike of Porlockian Interference|
Patterns universaldowner) (“Tropological Ontology / of Uncertain Emotions”)

I’lladmit I’ve seen but a scattering of titles by Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn over the years, from his incredible collection of essays, Measure’sMeasures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024)[see my review of such here], to poetry collection Great Canadian Poems for the Aged, Vol. 1 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) [see my review of such here],as well as the chapbook The Battle of Milvian Bridge (shuffaloff, 2021)[see my review of such here], not to mention his chapbook In the shadows (2022) that I produced through above/ground press. Whenever I do encounter hiswork, I’m always curious why it hasn’t received more attention than it has,Boughn somehow sitting as one of our unheralded senior Canadian poets andthinkers. Wrapped together as eleven chapbook-sections and pamphlet coda is THEBOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2 (2024), the first edition of which is produced ina hand-numbered edition of twenty-five copies (mine is number twenty-five). Subtitled“A Hyperbiographical Users Manual,” this book-length assemblage follows THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 1 (Brooklyn NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), and extendsacross eleven sections, each of which are set in their own numbered chapbook-binding—“TropologicalOntology of Uncertain Emotions,” “Uncertain Micro-Politics in Pirate Utopias,” “UncertainWave Functions in Local Populations,” “The Box of Uncertain,” “The Box ofUncertain: Subsequent cats/eats,” “New Loves and Other Tales of LuridUncertain,” “Etiquette Lesson #3—Politely Escaping Knowledge in the Applicationof Uncertain,” “Treating Uncertain Symptoms,” “Uncertain Times & Nomadic Conclusions—AMythic Phantasmagoria in Love’s Dark Heart,” “Leaving 3” and unnumbered “&:Numinosum—An Alchemical Reverie in a Blakean Mood,” as well as the coda, the pamphlet/poem“Numinosum Aftermath.” The “&” section holds echoes of bpNichol’sposthumous Gifts: The Martyrology Book(s) 7& (Toronto ON: CoachHouse Press, 1990), offering itself as a kind of furthering, of incompletenessakin to hinting what might come next, whatever that might be (I think for theeditors of the bpNichol title it sat as simultaneous grief, hopeless optimismand archival possibility). There’s also something of the physical structure ofthis collection reminiscent of how reissued the ten poem-sectionsof George Bowering’s classic Kerrisdale Elegies through his chapbook press, Pooka Press, produced in a limited edition run of eighty-two copies in 2008 for a class at Carleton University, after the initial run had long goneout of print (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986), just prior to the reissue (VancouverBC: Talonbooks, 2008).

Boughn’sis an extended and packed lyric sentence of collaged language, reference, soundand influx, a poetics reminiscent of Toronto poet Stephen Cain’s recent Walking &Stealing (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], but with afar denser language and heft of materials. “Midden heap / of nothing’sdiscarded remains,” he writes, in the first section of the fourth poem-chapbook,“layer // after layer after layer has already / signified more than decencywould have / circulate in polite company , a normative / exclusionary sig-fixdesigned to keep power / well-contained and ordered according / to bleachrequirements […].” There is just so much happening, so many simultaneousdirections, to his ongoingnesses through these lines. As he spoke of the project,then still very much in-progress, as part of an interview for Touch theDonkey in 2019:

Well, this is really thecrucial question facing us at this moment of intensifying crisis. Modernitydestroyed a mode of being-together that was an intimate proximity, both toother people, to other animals, and to the divine. It wasn’t idyllic by a longshot. It was by all accounts brutish, violent, and horribly intrusive. But itwas a different mode of being-together than what awaited us in the cities.Living cheek by jowl, we insulate ourselves from the people who live closest tous for privacy, where the only animals we ever encounter are domesticated pets,where our meat is purchased in cellophane wrapped packages, and where thedivine, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, no longer flutters except exsanguinate andgrimacing.

What’s missing isbelonging in a human sense of being-together. We struggle to live among thewold vagaries of vast markets, including labour markets that force people intomotion all the time. Witness what just went down in Oshawa. Society is a placeof probabilities and statistically verifiable behaviours among alienatedindividuals determined by a set of social imaginary significations and governedby imposed norms. We are seeing the result of that process that has been goingon now for some 500 years in the rise of reactionary populists like Trump andBolsonaro who are able to exploit that deep alienation by creating a “movement”in which people experience a sense of belonging to something with others whoalso belong – a being-together, but one that is finally based on exclusion andviolence against those who don’t belong.

I’mintrigued by the potentially-endless ongoingness of such a project as this,even before the consideration of this as a second volume, and makes me curiousas to see what that larger arc of his published work actually looks like. Shouldsomeone be working on a selected poems of Michael Boughn? And how far might thiscurrent work extend, whether to a BOOK 3 or beyond? As part of the sameinterview, he speaks of his larger, ongoing work, saying: “Well, it’s reallyall the same work, ever since Iterations of the Diagonal back in 1995.It’s the work of finding ways to weave the complexity and mystery of beingherein language.” Of language itself, one might say. Of being in that exact, singlemoment, however many languages and gods may have been or have ever been. Or, asthe final poem in the collection, the coda-pamphlet “Numinosum Aftermath”reads:

                                                    but in the difference
lies soul’s challenge toembrace
what’s beyond yet withinit, what we bring
to it as it is brought tous, light and dark,
seen and unseen, knownand unknown
twists us around being’spoles, flings us
willy nilly into the roilof common day
where we catch a glimpseof a new world
in confusion’s pain andgrief
and are surprised by thegreeting
of a stranger
                     who is us