Michael Boughn
Georgian Bay, Ontario
Readings
A poet or book of poetry from the early-twentieth century
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (Contact, 1922)
Spring and All is arguably, if not the most important book of poetry published during the great outburst of extraordinary poetry in the early 1920s, certainly one of them. As many poets were working out how to be “modern,” Williams already understood that we were past the modern, entering a new time that called for new relations to writing. This was at a time that saw the publication of a lot innovative poetry including Pound’s early Cantos, H.D.’s Collected Poems, Wallace Steven’s Harmonium, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Vachel Lindsey’s The Golden Whales of California, Hart Crane’s White Buildings, and more. Among them all, however, only Williams fully understood that “literature” as a ruled discipline was over and that the extraordinary-ordinary reality of Emerson’s America could only be addressed by shattering the forms that held poetry in bondage. He was a prophet of postmodern time, and the energies in Spring and All are just as fresh and timely today as they were over a hundred years ago. His address to and defense of the imagination continues to call out to poets.
A poet or book of poetry from the mid-twentieth century
Charles Olson, Maximus Poems IV V VI (Cape Goliard, 1968)
Maximus IV V VI registered a major leap in Olson’s thinking of the poem, a leap that itself reflected the radical outbreak of unrestrained creative energy that surged through the culture at that moment. Olson had moved beyond the institutional poetry reading, finding it to be little more than a performance rather than an engagement with the real. He was after a numinous transcendence through language, to open the world toward its further self. At Berkeley in 1965 he took to the floor to argue for a nation of nothing but poetry, hoping to head off the professionalization of poetry that was underway and to keep the spirit of the new American poetry fresh and open. Maximus IV V VI is as far out as Olson took it. He was responsible for every aspect of the book. He died before he could finish Volume Three, and however you value George Butterick’s editorial choices putting the book together from bits and pieces, they weren’t Olson’s choices. Maximus IV V VI like Dylan’s contemporaneous performance of “Maggie’s Farm” at Newport in 1965, marked the beginning of a new understanding of order and creation. It continues to astonish if you are able to surrender.
A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time
Odgen Nash, The Private Dining Room (Little Brown & Company, 1953)
My grandfather’s small collection of undisturbed books dwelt in shadow behind the pipe stand in his study. I raided it when I was about 12 years old and took away two books of poetry. One was an historical anthology of love poetry. Over the next few years, I found it useful in my pursuit of romantic engagements. It gave me a sense of the utilitarian side of poetry, it’s uses, or worldly powers. The other book was a collection of poems by Ogden Nash which I adored—and still do. Nash taught me two important lessons about poetry. Perhaps most important was the understanding that poetry can be, even should be, fun, a pure lark, as long as you love the language. And related to that lesson is the knowledge that you can do anything you want with language in a poem. You are truly free. The only limit is your imagination: “Come crown my brows with leaves of myrtle / I know the tortoise is a turtle. / Come carve my name in stone immortal; / I know the tortoise is a tortle; / I bet on one to beat a hare, / I also know I’m now a pauper / Because of its tortley turtley torpor.” How can you beat that? It continues to create hilarity.
A book of poetry from the past five years
Billie Chernicoff, Amoretti (Lunar Chandelier Collective Press, 2020)
I know of no work that can compare to Billie Chernicoff’s numinous lyricism. It’s as if she is made of poetry. Like Chloris in Botticelli’s Primavera breathes out flowers, Chernicoff breathes out poetry. She brings the lyric to a state of attention that constantly opens the world to new perceptions, new revelations, new understanding. Olson’s gripe about the lyric—what he called “private soul at any public wall”—took aim at a particular mode of lyric that proceeds from a self seen as personal identity, and its song becomes a whine or triumphant bleating or personal complaint. Chernicoff, like Emerson, understands that the self is not personal and that its entanglement with the world reveals orders of self beyond it—“I am island say what I listen.” Her words touch the ordinary world and it becomes numinous, luminous. Magic. “Who knows what now is? / Something shy, swollen, / worshipful, scared, / hopeful, inventive, / tensing and loosening / its limbs.” Her poetry never fails to stun, delight, and enlighten.
A work of theory or criticism
Miriam Nichols, Radical Affections: Essays on the Poetics of the Outside (University of Alabama Press, 2011)
Miriam Nichols’ mind at work is an awesome thing to behold. There seems to be nothing of importance she hasn’t read, addressed critically, and absorbed into her marvelous thinking. She is equally at home with Anne Bradstreet and Susan Howe, Matthew Arnold and Jacques Derrida, Aquinas and Whitehead. A servant to none, she brings her reading into play in a way that constantly enlightens the complexities of her intellectual engagement without occupying it. Radical Affections takes on the dismissal of what’s referred to as the new American poetry, after the title of the anthology that introduced it to the world. Looking closely at the work of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, and Susan Howe, she engages the current criticism that dismisses their work because it operates outside sociological dogma. Developing the crucial distinction between critique that offers access to the world as undergone rather than the world as known, Nichols leads us through a brilliant reading of these poets as they engaged in the ordeal of writing the Open.
Writings
Augur’s Auspices
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”
—W. H. Auden
“To be quite honest, it’s just a fucking brownie.”
—Chef Kwame Onwuachi commenting on The Cosmic Brownie
Birds scatter into the poem every
which way, swallows, wrens, vultures, and geese,
eagles of course, etch indecipherable
prophecies on the sun's face
as raven’s stark slash
interrupts the sun, speaks of god
knows what, fire perhaps
quickly erasing whatever settled illusion
of happy mastery in the roar
of our own vast indifference to light
stone, water, earth, scent of smoke
the news, travels fast littered with Hittite
names for house and tenebrous allusions
haunt chiaroscuro implicated
announcement of earthquake, plague,
tempest, corruption, war and collapse,
a veritable catastrophic kit
and caboodle, ultimate doom prophecy
undone by the children’s laughter
down the beach on the verge of the Bay
Yeah, but what
do kids know about the Council of Trent
and inquisitory constrictions condemned
art’s knowledge of humandivine
matter-of-fact-god-joy
in food and good company, one
eye on Gesthemene, the other
on the wine (landed Veronese
on the Hot Seat, too much
fun for the Bishop) opens
a geography of world secretes
its own light, earth of emerald cities,
geosophical co-ordinates entwined
cross-roads’ limbs heave with joint passion,
a word emerges from suffer to point
to mind of uncertain compass in heat
of caring’s embrace of matter of fact
That old butterfly flap to tornado yarn
haunts current street’s dawn peach glow,
so still, waiting for the wave to hit, far away
joyboys disconsenting the liberal consensus
to activate lower regions of imagination’s
infernal geography disgorge gangs
of pain monkeys, impish creatures pour
from Moloch’s arse to inflict
maximum suffering on the poor
suckers who empowered them in the first
place and turn the joint over to
The Lordly Ones ™
who aim to reconstitute the Constitution
in the name of Divine Right of the Strongest
to kick the living shit out of everyone else
and make them thank God for it
Inaugurate This!
“Beauty and Justice are alike in that humans do not make them. They make us human.”
—James Hillman, Aphrodite’s Justice
“—this body made of this place
now silent but for all the night of metallic sound,
keeps strict visual contact, which is like memory itself—
as the McDonald’s truck takes off, puffing the air brake—
while the flesh connected to the mind is all blind
as in any religious (Praise the Lord) mystery, how can I
be here without where? Oh yes, Tender is the Night.”
—Jack Clarke, “The Butterfly Sleeps under the Temple Bell”
Where you wake up is where you begin
with or without angelic attendance
though that often has to do with how
you wake up as much as interdimensional
visitation rights
Day’s grey face a sign
of yet to be determined inflections
of nasty weathers stuck in today’s craw
anima mundus
as conjunctio monstrum
Your hyper-bio-what-not is fine
and dandy, Jack says looking in from
1987, but it’s over and left you
looking back, pay attention to your
reactivated orientation and it doesn’t
much matter where you are, a Best Western
in Bowling Green or sick bed at home,
Polaris in your heart knows which way
is loose, beats the hell out of non-somatic
thralldom to a scentless hell of words
miss their mark every time, returns again
and again to rehashed encounter
with vanished meaning, well, not meaning
itself which wouldn’t be vanished,
but say the blank stare and cardio
excavation site left behind, though Jack
reminds me it’s not really mine, more like a sign
of the storm churns in moment’s heart, unfolded
frenzy for glib promise of tomorrow
dressed up as yesterday, all shiny and run by
somebody good
It’s an invisibility he says, stirs
within visibilities so don’t take it
personally, or maybe it’s both ways
around since both are caught in current
circulates through days’ recent
Thanatos eruption renders the demos
yearning for a state of great again
acidic segregated spiritual
rigor mortis leaves Beauty and Justice
outside looking perplexed
by the Geist’s insistent backward
Zeit lurch into a stall of perpetual
cruelty and mean-spirited exclusionary
pale face hate outbreak disguised
as order’s wholesome missionary
position orphans human
in some desolate 14th century
lockup
It ain’t the first Time, hon,
and it sure as hell ain’t the last
but that’s not much solace when the King
in the grip of unadulterated testosterone
overdose bolts up in a rage leaves
the Queen subject to random declarations
of dependence and constitutional
subjugation to hormonally challenged
avatars of chaos, unhappy dropouts
from MIT, always lurk around somewhere
but freed to really fuck things up in the name
of the same greedy self got Lucifer in that big
Dustup back in the day when it all
seemed so hopeful before the Black Sun
rose and I took over, all damn the torpedoes,
fuck the boss and toss the bloody tea
in the harbour, Milton had that down,
then the Shit hit the Fan
left us subject to mass distribution
of declamatory hails to individual
stupidity which Schelling located
at the origin of being only to have
his hand slapped by Hegel who couldn’t
handle the thought of imperfectible evil,
but then he never had the pleasure
of meeting current dark angel eruption
and what is this Satan after all, that tears us
away from Eternity’s call to bring
mind to attend to who’s speaking not
lose your lonely I in communion’s
mindless rhetorical sway
Michael Boughn is a poet whose most recent books include The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual Book 2 (shuffaloff, 2025, in an edition of 25 copies), The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual Book 1 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) and Uncertain Remains (BlazeVox, 2022). Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (Book Thug, 2011) was shortlisted for the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Poetry. He co-edited Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book for the University of California Press, and with Kent Johnson produced the online disturbance, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, from 2014 till 2019. Measure’s Measure—Poetry and Knowledges, a book of essays, was published by Station Hill Press in 2024. He lives in Toronto. His website can be found at https://www.razzamatootie.ca/