Michael Boughn, THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2

 

Tropos remains a matter of immaterial
condensation turns the poem against the current
tattered grimace peers between cracks
in the Mall’s magisterial façade mutters
glory and grace can be yours as well
as that three-dollar Armani shirt Progress
delivers from tiny foreign hands to your
doorstep
              Away borders on leaves
seasoned with pulsion’s direction
as restless negativity, not to haggle
over minor inflections
but to indicate bent philosophical
familiarity and Hegelian digressions
through back-and-forth interruptions
sometimes mistaken for tropological
ontologies’ second cousin
twice removed (here incest reveals
blurred edges lead intrepid
into mansions of the Night

and surprise’s incubation
lost in words’ headstrong connections
this way, that cave the River Alph
pours from, where uncertain still leads it in
spike of Porlockian Interference|
Patterns universal downer) (“Tropological Ontology / of Uncertain Emotions”)

I’ll admit 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’s Measures: 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 his work, 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 and thinkers. Wrapped together as eleven chapbook-sections and pamphlet coda is THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2 (2024), the first edition of which is produced in a 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 extends across eleven sections, each of which are set in their own numbered chapbook-binding—“Tropological Ontology of Uncertain Emotions,” “Uncertain Micro-Politics in Pirate Utopias,” “Uncertain Wave Functions in Local Populations,” “The Box of Uncertain,” “The Box of Uncertain: Subsequent cats/eats,” “New Loves and Other Tales of Lurid Uncertain,” “Etiquette Lesson #3—Politely Escaping Knowledge in the Application of Uncertain,” “Treating Uncertain Symptoms,” “Uncertain Times & Nomadic Conclusions—A Mythic 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’s posthumous Gifts: The Martyrology Book(s) 7& (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1990), offering itself as a kind of furthering, of incompleteness akin to hinting what might come next, whatever that might be (I think for the editors of the bpNichol title it sat as simultaneous grief, hopeless optimism and archival possibility). There’s also something of the physical structure of this collection reminiscent of how Warren Dean Fulton reissued the ten poem-sections of 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 gone out of print (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986), just prior to the reissue (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008).

Boughn’s is an extended and packed lyric sentence of collaged language, reference, sound and 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 a far denser language and heft of materials. “Midden heap / of nothing’s discarded remains,” he writes, in the first section of the fourth poem-chapbook, “layer // after layer after layer has already / signified more than decency would have / circulate in polite company , a normative / exclusionary sig-fix designed to keep power / well-contained and ordered according / to bleach requirements […].” There is just so much happening, so many simultaneous directions, 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 the Donkey in 2019:

Well, this is really the crucial question facing us at this moment of intensifying crisis. Modernity destroyed a mode of being-together that was an intimate proximity, both to other people, to other animals, and to the divine. It wasn’t idyllic by a long shot. It was by all accounts brutish, violent, and horribly intrusive. But it was 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 to us for privacy, where the only animals we ever encounter are domesticated pets, where our meat is purchased in cellophane wrapped packages, and where the divine, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, no longer flutters except exsanguinate and grimacing.

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

I’m intrigued by the potentially-endless ongoingness of such a project as this, even before the consideration of this as a second volume, and makes me curious as to see what that larger arc of his published work actually looks like. Should someone be working on a selected poems of Michael Boughn? And how far might this current work extend, whether to a BOOK 3 or beyond? As part of the same interview, he speaks of his larger, ongoing work, saying: “Well, it’s really all 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 beinghere in language.” Of language itself, one might say. Of being in that exact, single moment, however many languages and gods may have been or have ever been. Or, as the final poem in the collection, the coda-pamphlet “Numinosum Aftermath” reads:

                                                    but in the difference
lies soul’s challenge to embrace
what’s beyond yet within it, what we bring
to it as it is brought to us, light and dark,
seen and unseen, known and unknown
twists us around being’s poles, flings us
willy nilly into the roil of common day
where we catch a glimpse of a new world
in confusion’s pain and grief
and are surprised by the greeting
of a stranger
                     who is us