from the green notebook,

, reading Michael Boughn, Audrey Thomas, Maggie Nelson, Maggie Smith + Vladimir Nabokov
, further (spring 2024) notes from a work-in-progress,

[see multiple other sections from this project over at my substack]

 

 

Today is Aoife’s penultimate day of grade two. Rose finished grade five last week, and she is currently in Picton with Christine’s father and his wife, most likely in their pool as we speak. Christine is laid flat with a cold, a trickling virus that has tendrilled through the house over the past few days. It ignores Aoife, and Rose seems to have missed it, but I swat at the potential of impending summer cold with both hands. I will not get sick.

Reading through elements of Michael Boughn’s new Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (2024), I’m struck by his descriptions of some of those “poetry wars” during and around the period of American poetry that developed The New American Poetry (1960). The term “poetry wars” has come up a bit again recently, in reference to conflicts in Prince George, British Columbia a decade or two back, as Jeremy Stewart and Donna Kane were putting together their folio of poetry and prose to celebrate the life and work of Barry McKinnon (1944-2023) that I was posting online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Nothing any of the three of us wished to re-ignite.

I’ve never been interested in participating in wars. Ken Norris used to speak of poetry wars, some of which he got caught up with in the 1970s, with a kind of resigned inevitability. As I understand them, most of these conflicts didn’t seem to stem beyond someone saying something confrontational and others responding, or simply a matter of different aesthetics falling into the perceived requirement of a personal clash. What does it matter that one person writes a poem in a different way? There is work I am interested in and work I am less interested in; people I am interested in and people I am less interested in. I think you’d be surprised how often those considerations blend into different configurations.

For the longest time, one of my absolute favourite humans was Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), her early death a devastating loss for everyone that knew her. A particular favourite spot of hers in Ottawa was Zoe’s, the bar lounge of the Chateau Laurier, where we’d always meet up when she came through town. She quite literally glowed with energy, enthusiasm and creativity, and we were able to support and encourage each other despite having little overlap, it seemed, in reading or writing interest. Most of the writers and writing she admired and was influenced by I had little to no interest in, so how much could I really appreciate her work, no matter the quality?

There are numerous writers it would be lovely to be able to sit down and have a beer with, and conversation; but somehow, for some, aesthetics prevents us. There is so much that can be learned from alternate perspectives on writing and thinking, and it becomes far too easy to fall into our bubbles. Is the goal not to expand our thinking? Is our goal not to improve, and make new? Why have a war?

*

Today is Aoife’s final day of grade two. Rose remains in Picton, for at least two more days. She is older, there.

I am moving slowly through final proofs for these short stories, and thinking about how words get shaped on the page. Simultaneously, I am going through a recent reminiscence by Canadian writer Audrey Thomas on the late Alice Munro, sent out by email newsletter to members of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Thomas writes of heading to do research in England in 1987, and convincing Munro, simultaneously aiming herself to Scotland for the sake of her own research, to not fly to Scotland, but to join Thomas by boat. Thomas makes the trip sound delightful enough it almost makes me consider the same. Thomas writes of their sea-faring adventure, the two of them learning a handful of daily words in Polish, until a storm at the very end of the trip, upon entering the English Channel.

“I’m sorry it turned out to have such a terrifying ending,” I said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Alice.

*

Los Angeles writer Maggie Nelson references Alice Munro as part of The Argonauts (2015). I had pulled the book from yesterday’s shelves, opened it seemingly at random, and there it was: Munro’s work providing Nelson’s teenaged-self a perspective on sexual experience, violation, lust “and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life.” The gift of clarity the greatest one can offer, after all.

I’ve been thinking of Nelson again recently, having caught inklings via social media that she might have a new title either out or forthcoming, which made me curious. Naturally I haven’t yet set down to verify this. I’ve enough other reading in-progress I should probably attend to, first. What of those essays on Sheila Heti and Lydia Davis? But I am curious.

This morning, reading through a recent poem by Andy Weaver. He was good enough to comment upon my work-in-progress elegy for Barry McKinnon, “I wanted to say something,” so it just seems fair for me to do the same for him. Sometimes one simply requires another eye.

“There’s a moral / here or there // isn’t,” he writes, as part of this sequence, “Cut,” “how a straight / edge creates the curved // cut that will heal / in a crescent shape.” There has always been something quietly powerful about Weaver’s work, comparable to the work of Ottawa poet Jason Christie for their stretches of lyric concreteness across lengthy meditative stretches, considerations of writing the complexities of fatherhood, the long form and their own modesty. I’ve been attempting to get these two to interview each other for some time now, to clarify, perhaps, some of their overlap, but as of yet, I have been unsuccessful.

*

In a recent substack post, American poet Maggie Smith writes:

The writing life is one with many paths. There’s no one way. I wish I’d thought more about this when I was starting out; it would have relieved a lot of pressure. And I wish I had realized how many writers—most of us!—have jobs outside of writing books. We’re teachers, editors, arts administrators, and technical writers. We’re therapists, receptionists, and childcare providers. We’re doctors, yoga teachers, and small business owners.

When I say, “I’m a writer,” I’m telling you about more than what I do for a living. I’m telling you who I am.

There’s a lot swirling around in those few sentences worth commenting upon, at least from where I’m sitting: a variety of responses of what I might think, or have thought, or might say, or have said. Smith is entirely correct, obviously: as many ways to write as there might be practitioners. As many grains of sand on the beach, say, or stars in the heavens. The first decade or so of my own foray into serious writing included having to figure out how best to approach my own writing. It isn’t enough to learn how to write, but learn how best I should be writing the things I should be writing. There are no clear paths, nor across-the-board solutions. What might work for one might be anathema to another.

I work best through routine, and by scratching out attempts to figure out shape. My first drafts can often be leagues away from where the poem, the story, the manuscript, might finally settle. Although, I say “settle” as though the process inevitable and smooth, of which it is neither; there are drafts upon drafts upon drafts, including multiple on paper and those through my own head. I used to take thirty to fifty handwritten drafts to make it to a single page, a single poem. Now the process is much more internalized, but my literary archive still grows in leaps and bounds, in pages scribbled upon and reworked. There is an endless array, even down to the copy-edit. A word, moved. A word, excised. The occasional typo.

*

Someone posts a paragraph by Vladimir Nabokov to social media, on how he attempted to discern the difference of taste between a poisonous and non-poisonous butterfly. Why did he do this? And what have we, as readers, learned through his experience?

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

Spotlight series #101 : Michael Boughn

The one hundred and first in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau and Indiana poet Nate Logan.
 
The whole series can be found online here.