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

Ongoing notes: late November 2021: Heather White + Michael Boughn,

More chapbooks! Hooray for this, yes? It is good that I’m finally seeing further appear in my mailbox (although now I have a mound of them I’ve yet to get to). Stay tuned!

Montreal QC: I’m struck by this seeming-chapbook debut by Montreal writer Heather White, her chapbook DES MONSTERAS (Vallum Chapbooks, 2021). Subtitled “a long poem,” the eighteen poems within display a playfully-structured collage, folding in quotes by and elements of and around Mary Oliver, Taylor Swift and Paul Celan, among other references. “I roam the cold city with Taylor Swift,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “singing voiceover. Her songs tell / their stories to the people in them.” The structure of the poems, as the back cover echoes, suggests poems quickly sketched via cellphone as journal notes, hastily written between thoughts as “both an insular retreat and an impulse to connect during the Montreal winter of the pandemic.” I’m curious about a number of things regarding White’s work: how far might this poem go, for example, beyond the boundaries of this debut publication?

signal bars|wi-fi|time|headphones|battery
<DES MONSTERAS           share send

I slept and woke up remembering
that demonstrate comes from the
same root as monster. Both are
about pointing out or warning,
showing, montrer. A monster is a
messenger, often mistaken for the
message. A harbinger, coming
round the mountain, montagne:
nature’s pedestal. Mont Royal,
Montréal. What did I want this man
to put on a mountain for me?
Already his gaze released my face
from me for blissful long shifts. And
God knows how aching, how weary,
I’d become as the sole watchman of
my self, the last guardian of my
features, the one clerk left still
minding the store of my whole
buzzing, godforsaken body. 

    trash|list|photo|edit|new

Toronto ON: It is good to see that Toronto poet, editor and critic Michael Boughn is still producing chapbooks, the latest of which is The Battle of Milvian Bridge (shuffaloff, 2021), a playful and gymnastic eleven-part open-ended sequence around the Green Knight, a character from Arthurian lore that has lately fallen back into cultural awareness, thanks to the recent feature film, as well as Helen Hajnoczky’s recent Frost & Pollen (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2021) [see my review of such here]. “Where’s the Green Knight,” the poem begins, “when you need him & his axe / to smarten up the Zeitgeist, when / the zeit’s geist is all / wham bam thank you ma’m, grab ‘em / by the— / well, Morgan Le Fay / might have a thing or two to say / about that […]” Boughn utilizes the legend of the Green Knight as a framework through which to mark and remark upon current affairs and cultural currency, language incursions, religious fervors and twisted meanings. As the sixth section ends: “nothing adds a depth / of understanding otherwise / circumscribed by judgement’s / geometry which brings the poem / back around to the Circular Slab / at the centre of our story / and the Green Knight / bearing news of the Hot Tamale [.]”

3. In Which The Mystery Ship Reappears

The absent ship sails by again
corposants merrily aflame

& signage boldly splayed
to let the poet know he made

a slip, & the elusive ship
is without a doubt Solomon’s

built at spousal request
(ah! the marriage bed)

to bear crown & sword
into story’s bleeding future

lances, fancy cups, the whole
round table schtick the Green

Knight brought to a quick
pause, the Cup recalling Morgan’s

judgment, a sign of eldritch
ledgibility, glyph’s untranslatable

clarity, indigestible scrawl
amid communication’s rubble

Ongoing notes: mid-December 2018

[our wee one, not feeling well]

I’ve only been attempting to sketch out some further non-book fair related chapbook reviews for a few months now (why am I so behind on everything?), so here we go, finally:

Somewhere across the border: I’ve long been an admirer of the work of American poet Hailey Higdon (including producing a chapbook of hers, and even including her work in the recent above/ground press 25th anniversary broadside project), so seeing a new title of hers from dancing girl press, a press I very much admire, is simply glorious: A Wild Performance (2018). Higdon’s work, from the small handful of chapbook-length titles I’ve seen to date (Ihave yet to see a copy of her debut full-length collection) explores the extended lyric sequence through fragment and the small moment:

two women walk into a town, foundational

to the existence of the town as interesting

they thought            we need the witness

of neighbors                we don’t know

who are neighbors, who

are just friends             here is not a place for inside behavior

but outside doesn’t seem

much better

As the acknowledgments offer, “This poem was created during a residency at Wellspring House in Ashfield, Massachusetts” and could be exactly as straightforward as it suggests, opening with “Two women walk into a town.” I like the sketched-out quality of this, the quick take and the sudden turns, and the deceptive simplicities that contain such great multitudes. Higdon is easily one of my favourite (or should I say: favorite) American poets working right now, and more readers should be paying attention to her work.

everywhere I go

they are waiting           as an American I want to talk about myself

go in and out of getting prayer, suggesting light

exposure          about myself I spoiled with competition

a country so green we all wanted it

then to have that particular experience of being talked

out of the conversation

Toronto ON: Given I am so behind on everything, it should come as no surprise that I’m occasionally discovering titles on my desk I didn’t realize I had, including Michael Harman’s chapbook Brittlestars (2017) from the combined Michael Boughn/Victor Coleman publishing venture shuffaloff / Eternal Network. Given there isn’t any author biography included with the work, and Google searches (sorry, Bing, no one uses you) seem less than helpful, so one is left with but the text to determine anything (which some might argue is the only way to really approach a work). Who is Michael Harman? Does it matter? Not really, in a certain way, but I sure would like to know. Brittlestars is a playful, precise and mature work, made up of three extended sequences—“Part 1: Bathysphere,” “Part 2: Heart” and “Part 3: Houseplants”—composed very much in the vein of “language poetry,” allowing sound and rhythm to bounce around with an incredible precision, writing out an extended poem that is meant to be heard as much as read. But I ask, again: who is Michael Harman? As the poem begins:

1 (Dandayamana-dhanurasana)

designate space

to access cerebral cortex

voice a nudging marbles

down a notebook spine

remember Potter’s patronus?

a purple reddish

starfish det-

aches offshoot morphemes

with nocked legs

in taut bows,

body now distal

as arms, arrows,

tug skin seams

a world dubbed

then re-dubbed

a “knot in motion,”

ecosystem

our tutelary practice

notebook swaths/swans

circulate organs

and lungs’ breath churns

October coloured vortex

as angels entice            all        capacities

their wildest range

so you can really sit

(where Julien says

the pocket’s time-feel

is at its fattest

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Michael Boughn on shuffaloff

Michael Boughn worked in the Teamsters for nearly 10 years before earning a PhD in 1986 after studying with poets John Clarke and Robert Creeley. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including 22 Skidoo / SubTractions, Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol. 1 Illus. Ed., and City Book 1 – Singular Assumptions.  Cosmographia – a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic was short listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2011, prompting a reviewer in the Globe and Mail to describe him as “an obscure veteran poet with a history of being overlooked.” He has also published essays on film, writing, architecture, and music, and, with Victor Coleman, edited Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. City – Books 1-3 is forthcoming from Spyuten Dyuvil Press (NYC) in 2016.
 

rob, That's a whole lot of questions. Maybe if I run a brief history by you, I will hit most them. I started shuffaloff  in the late 80s when my father died. I received some insurance money and decided to use some of it to make books. I had been interested in the work of small presses for a long time. I guess it started when I stumbled into Robin Blaser's class on Charles Olson at Simon Fraser University in 1968, two years after I immigrated to Canada. He gave me some White Rabbit Press editions of Jack Spicer including Language and A Book of Magazine Verse.  They are gorgeous books, exemplary of the best kind of work that came out of the small press movement in the 60s. Through Robin I got involved with the writers around Iron magazine, another small press creation. Years later, working on my PhD at SUNY Buffalo, I got a job in the Poetry/Rare Book room where I spent a lot of time with small press publications doing preservation and cataloging. As a bibliographer (I did a descriptive bibliography of H.D.) I got quite intimate with the physical construction of books.

I knew I wanted to do something for the community of writers in Buffalo with the insurance money. I was connected to multiple writers – Buffalo has always had a thriving community of writers -- and decided to do a series called Local Habitations. It was ten books and included Robert Creeley, Jack Clarke, Norma Kassirer, Lisa Jarnot, Sherry Robbins, Jorge Guitart, Elizabeth Willis, Randy Prus, Bruce Holsapple, David Tirrell, and myself. It was a snapshot of writing in Buffalo at a specific moment. I tried the commercial route – distributors and financial books and invoices and shipping – and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the books I published were not really marketable in a way that would ever earn money and all the rigmarole involved with trying to do that just wasted valuable time . Plus, I hated all that part of it. At the same time, I laser printed a little series of chap books called “Four Folds” – they had four sheets of folded paper – and gave them away, and that was pure joy.

shuffaloff was always transitory, in motion. There was the shuffle off to Buffalo allusion, but the secret reference was Shakespeare's shuffle off this mortal coil. That was Jack Clarke. After Local Habitations, with my resources depleted, and uninterested in books as a business, I didn't do much for a while. With Cass Clarke's help, I edited, designed and published Jack Clarke's marvellous, posthumous epic, In the Analogy. But that was about it for a number of years. By ’93, I had shuffled off back to Canada and eventually Toronto where I got together with Victor Coleman, surely one of the most important figures in the history of Canadian small press publishing.

Around that time, I wrote a little serial poem called "Off in Wittgenstein's kitchen" and I wanted to show it to some people. Recalling the pleasure of the Four-Folds, instead of just sending a sheaf of paper, I decided to make a little book and send that. It was a pretty little thing, square, about 4" by 4". I think I made 10 of them and mailed them out to people who received it within a week of its composition. I really liked that. This was a way of keeping the poetry as news, rather than some old shit you wrote two or three years ago, which is what most books are. Charles Olson said that poetry is news that stays news, and in order to be true to that, The Institute of Further Studies would print his poems on postcards and mail them outso that people could read them within a week or two of having been written. I was energized by that.

I am not interested in discourses about "self-publishing." They reflect the reactionary ideology of the Literary Market as managed by the Literature Administration. The Administration reinforces its reactionary authority by guaranteeing the “Literary Excellence” of work selected for publication by “impartial” judges, panels, and committees, none of which are really impartial and whose real job is to uphold the agency of the Machine. I like to think my work is outside that economy. I do not have a career in poetry, don't want one, and don’t want the Administration's little pats on the head and prizes for being a predictable but excellent writer. There are a few things I want to do with words and I know the readers who are interested in them. So I did that with 22 Skidoo and some individual poems from Sub-tractions, like "Ongoing operations to eliminate all pockets of resistance minus one."

When I started writing Cosmographia, a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic, I knew it would be years before the whole book saw print (if ever), so as each book was finished (there are 12 in good epic tradition) I would make 10-20 little hand sewn books on my laser printer using special papers that I picked up in paper stores. They were quite lovely little things, and I would send them out to people who read my work. I'm pretty sure I know most of those people and I have no illusions about them ever becoming a crowd. I never considered the little books to be "publications" which is just another name for Commercial Poetry Product. The value of poetry is elsewhere. Poetry is one of the last forms of art that continues to resist commodification, notwithstanding the efforts of the Creative Writing Machine and the Avant-garde Machine to overcome that resistance and turn it into a saleable product to be used in negotiating academic positions or winning prizes.

So, when Victor came to me with the proposal to do a shuffaloff/Eternal Network publication we could give away, I was ready. He had found a series of sonnets that Jack Clarke had published in a little magazine in the 70s and that had never been republished. We decided to do it and thus was born "The Joints" which have now run to 11 titles. There is no program, no criteria, no nothing, just every once in a while either Victor or I will come up with proposal for a book, we'll print 99 copies on my laser printer, and distribute them to people who we think might be interested. We have done books by Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn as well as Victor and myself and some young, interesting, unpublished writers in Toronto including David Peter Clark, Emily Izsak, and Oliver Cusimano. 

It is a kind of samizdat enterprise aimed at circumventing the attempts to commercialize poetry. The publications, notwithstanding a serious effort to design and make beautiful books, are essentially ephemera. They are not meant to be commercial products. They have no price. They have no distributor. They are not available in retail outlets. They are not for sale. Sometimes they even disintegrate after a respectable period of time. Which fits right in with the shuffaloff program which has only one principle - respect the generosity of poetry. I think that shuffaloff has lived up to its name over the years, moving here and there, disappearing, reappearing in new guises, and then shuffling off again. I have no idea what the future holds for it, but whatever it is, hopefully it will stay on its toes.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;