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.