Michael Boughn, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge

 

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

I’m very much enjoying Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn’s latest, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024), with an introduction by Charles Stein, a delightful and lively collection of essays of consideration, reconsideration, histories, accumulation, agreements and disagreements, attending a sequence of curiosities around some important decades of contemporary poetic form and thought. Boughn focuses his collection around The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), the infamous poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen that attempted to define the upcoming generation of American poets, as well as connect a diverse array of contemporary poetics around the country for the first time, clustering poets into genres (some thought, arbitrarily), from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School and San Francisco Renaissance. Stretching multiple essays on the anthology generally, 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 as pieces surrounding multiple of these and their concerns, battles and poetics, Boughn provides a wonderful foundation of information around an incredibly lively and productive period of American writing that still holds rippling effects across contemporary poetics across the United States, Canada (in part through 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 its history. “But the questions lingered: Is a poem a long poem, as many have asked before me, just because it’s—long? And if that’s the case, then how long is long enough to be a long poem? Or is a poem a long poem because it can lay claim to some common generic feature—beyond indetermine length—some, say, structure or convention? Or, as Smaro Kamboureli has argued, to an ’evolved form,’ a specific, restless resistance to generic definition?” (“How Long Is Long Enough?”). Boughn has that most interesting blend of curiosity and resistance that provides new ways of thinking across questions that have run across poetics for decades; some of these may never find answers, but his questions extend new thinking beyond those original boundaries.

There is something incredible in the way Boughn writes from within the moment in and around the activity he articulates—he was co-editor and one of the co-conspirators of assembling Robert Duncan’s infamous The H.D. Book, after all (something discussed 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 with this material as writer, critic, teacher and reader, all of which bring considerable weight 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 were and how they began, for example. The essay on Robert Creeley’s anger, for example, is remarkable; but one remarkable piece within a collection of remarkable pieces.

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

            This is a long, devious way from where I started, typical of the course conversations take in relation to this book. And it still doesn’t begin to cover the depths of thinking The New American Poetry brings to the table. The impossibility of fully opening those depths to the blank faces around the seminar room can be overwhelming, or it can become part of a move toward unleashing a ruckus in the room. At least if you’re lucky. That’s what makes teaching it, thinking about it, different than any other anthology. For the young 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, it can be like running into a wall face-first. But if you can get them to address the wall as something they bring to their reading, and then show them how to begin to take it apart, it will begin to yield the book’s astonishments and clarities, introducing the students to a new modality of thinking and knowing. Some more than others, of course. But it seems to me that you probably couldn’t ask for more than that from a book.

The force of that anthology when it landed was immense, and there is a great deal of contemporary writing still feeling the effects. There is just such clarity here. One of the more readable critical volumes I’ve read in a while, and I actually found myself wanting more, once I worked through to the end.

Stan Persky, in a recent conversation, suggested to me that the first step in teaching poetry is to explain to students how poetry is a “linguistic mode of knowledge,” comparable to narrative or mathematics. A mode of knowledge, or, say, thinking, is like what I just called a register.

 

Katie Naughton, The Real Ethereal

 

the question of address (elegy: apartment)

with you I have reached
the limits of reason with you
described the trajectory
you had two chairs and mine
was never close enough
at breakfast I want to you
close to you be to you
I tell you everything I see
the kitchen every day I map
my heart the morning for you
the cat circles us lies in the sun
the large room at the top
of the old house
everything I said to you failed
it my self and the limits
of what I could know I felt

Following chapbooks through above/ground press and Dancing Girl Press [see my review of such here] (the second of which is folded into this current work) comes Brooklyn, New York-based poet and editor Katie Naughton’s full-length poetry debut, The Real Ethereal (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2024). Set in four sections of staggered, staccato lyrics—“day book,” “hour song,” “the question of address” and “the real ethereal”—Naughton examines fragments, frictions and accumulations, allowing individual points and posits to gather, cluster and group into larger structures that reveal themselves slowly, as the forest through the trees. There is something of the collection that offers itself as a single through-line, a single, extended thought or lyric sentence that runs the length and breadth of it, from one moment unto the next. “the billowing bright day is gone we did not / have the money to keep it,” she writes, as part of the opening section-sequence “day book,” “the picture taken / upstairs the light and heat coming through / the window then the house / torn down the waste mass / of drywall plaster and beams that was the most / money I ever knew and so much [.]” The accumulations are layered, and propulsive: one line and then another in sequence.

I would presume that Naughton would be well aware of the implications of composing such an opening sequence, especially writing from Buffalo (where she has been a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program, only recently relocating to Brooklyn), as an echo of the late Robert Creeley’s infamous A Day Book (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). While it has been more than fifty years since the publication of that particular work, Creeley’s shadow looms large across contemporary poetics, after all, and nowhere more than Buffalo, where he taught for thirty-seven years as Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetics, from 1966 to 2003. “the image world shimmers in our neighbor’s windows / the vacant house,” she writes, “and who left it / pink hearts and red a sugar crystal glitter / in winter [.]”

Naughton begins this collection with her “day book” poems, suggesting a movement through time, but the poems of The Real Ethereal hold to an immediacy, a perpetual moment across the American present through parsed and penetrating short-form lengths. “morning takes me take the street traffics / daily time through me though morning,” she writes, to open “my love in strange places,” the poem that begins the second section, “comes already strange and I leave / the choirs of history and their small bells [.]” Her lyrics really do propel with their expansiveness, their ongoingness, offering a simultaneous, infinite and open-ended present. “dawn is not mine day still breaks yellow,” begins the poem “warming ending what it may you persist.” Naughton seeks questions of elegy and address, between what is real and what is less than, and what makes the difference, striding the line between concrete and abstract. She seeks questions around the complexities of ethics vs. capitalism, and what can be held, or held against; seeking answers to how not only to be present, but to somehow survive. As part of the sequence “a second singing,” set in the final section, reads:

Some days are my inheritance
gray and November I want
to see out of them and also
to be inside them though
the endless dissipation the body
turning to heat to waste pass
or spend a life its imagined
or remembered textures. So most time
stopped to remember happens
in an empty room with the internet
the flat word of the screen
standing in for some other place
where something happens. The
news is who stays poor in
the necessary rooms waiting
for dinner. I’m in some threshold
looking through two doors.
The rooms are empty but feel
like weight   like world.

Stacy Szymaszek, Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals

you ate

all the

cured

meat

__

Rachel’s cat

licks my

knuckles

never a parody

of care i.e.

when there

is ground

everywhere

sleeps in

own beds (“austerity measures”)

New York poet Stacy Szymaszek’s fourth full-length poetry title is Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2016), a collection built from five extended poem sequences of short lyrics composed as sketched out notes and fragments: “austerity measures,” “late spring journal [2012],” “summer journal [2012],” “5 days 4 nights” and “journal of ugly sites.” Her journal/ notebook poems favour quick thoughts, overheard conversation, observations, description and complaints, and the occasional list, all set up as an accumulation of collage-pieces reminiscent of the work of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, as well as various “day book” works produced by Robert Creeley, Gil McElroy and others. There is such an incredible immediacy to the quick notes in this collection, one that manages an intimacy while, as she says in her 2013 “12 or 20 questions” interview, dispenses with persona:

My recent work has dispensed with persona. The longer I live in NYC, the more autobiographical it gets. One idea I have about this is that I had always wanted to live here but I was convinced that I didn’t have what it took, so in my mind this was a city of especially savvy people, a city of heroes—so being here I’ve become heroic, or the persona is now the hero named Stacy. The book I just completed is called Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals and takes up the idea of poetic journalism in different forms. The centerpiece is “Journal of Ugly Sites” which is a year-long journal I kept which documents, among other things, the life, illness and death of a Beagle that my partner and I rescued.

One could say that Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals exists as an exploration of the private and the public selves, writing on and around daily elements of internal and external being, from the meditative and the sublime to stretches of grieving and frustration to the mundane, routine and even magical, as she writes as part of “austerity measures”: “cut self / slack day // org. better / be sea- / worthy // five years / before / the mast [.]” Through such quick notes seemingly, and deceptively, jotted down into these accumulated narratives, they begin to provide intriguing portraits of this semi-fictional “Stacy,” in these, as she calls them, forms of “poetic journalism.” How different is this, one might wonder, to the “I did this, I did that” poetry of New York School poet Frank O’Hara? Both poets moving their art through their days in similar ways (his first drafts were also written relatively quickly during lunch breaks), although Szymaszek’s poems read more natural, somehow, which could easily be as simple as the difference between her journal-poems and his poems composed more traditionally as “poems.”

What is interesting, also, is in how Szymaszek shifts the format slightly between each section, as the first section is dateless, but with the note that it was composed “during the months that followed the death of my dog Isabel on July 8, 2011,” the second and third sections include a scattering of dates within, and the final section is composed more as a straightforward (in comparison) poetic journal, with dates opening each section. As the “3.30.13 – 4.19.13” section of “journal of ugly sites” ends:

East Village: breathing into a paper bag before checking email any phone ringing increasing heart rate // photograph revealing how tired I am appearing on all the hot poetry sites with Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” sure rub my ugliness in my face // publishing my shit list as a list poem? “Better to keep two chronicles?” (Harry Mathews) // when the poet said thank you for inviting me most people knew he hadn’t been invited so much as he wore me down // “do you make a livable wage? // Arlo as bearer of bad news today announcing “a bomb just went off”

            if burnout is disavowed grief will I come back to life if I publicly admit how bereft I am?

An extension of this project (and its structures) has already been seen in her short chapbook JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST (Projective Industries, 2015), making me curious to see just how far she might further her exploration into the poetic journal. Might there be further volumes?

therapist lets me take

notes in session now

that she understands

it’s not distancing

jot down

“stoic”

*

in 6 days I will be a 43 yr. old

lacking emotional outlets

a protégé

the wasp incident

glory of suffering

burden of an EpiPen

in your purse

get a holster (“summer journal [2012]”)