Measure’s Measure: Poetry and Knowledge, Michael Boughn
Station Hill, 2024
From Olson Out: Michael Boughn’s Measure’s Measures
Since his death in 1970 poet Charles Olson has been alternately championed and pilloried by North American poets and critics. The worst attacks portray him as some rambling tyrannical woman-hating white cis stereotype of United States bullying hegemony. While the highest praises hold him as a standard-bearer of experimental poetry in which the words of the poem are moved freely around the page with assured sensibility based upon elements of the poet’s own breath and delivery. On one hand, he is seen to be a failed minor figure trading heavily upon Ezra Pound’s Modernism, while on the other, he is the foremost successful inheritor of the same tradition passing onward a path forward to each new generation. Whether celebrated or rebuked, Olson’s influence perseveres.
Measure’s Measures: Poetry and Knowledge gathers together some twenty years’ worth of poet editor and scholar Michael Boughn’s engagements responding in large part to various assaults from across Poetry World’s many quarters upon Olson’s work, staking out his claim on the side of valuing Olson’s enduring relevance. Boughn’s title places emphasis upon the plural, measures not measure. There is no singular course towards composition of a poem any more than there is one trajectory to follow as a poet. Poetry is an ongoing process. He asserts, “the possibility of discovery always lurks in measure” (30) and “measure is never simple or singular. It amplifies.” (18) It is “the question of how we are to be here now, which, for Olson, was the knowledge the poem bears—or can bear, if it is opened to the potential.” (35) Boughn celebrates in Olson the potential of the poem’s occasion as an active moment full of undetermined energy dispersal capable of yielding unforeseen results without predetermined expectation. No poem should fit into preconceived standards but rather represent a challenge to the very idea of such a notion being applicable to poetry.
Boughn contends that Olson’s infamous essay “Projective Verse” favors action over theory, stressing it as example of harnessing the capability to move against forces at work in Poetry World directed towards minimizing the immediacy of each poem’s unique occasion as paramount in favor of a hierarchical ordering concerned with marketplace factors. “The projective, not as idea, but as exposure, the dynamic of exposure and the refusal of the disciplinary regime that emerges to limit its opening by commodifying and institutionalizing it.” (190) He argues against what he sees as “the loss of poetry’s contact with the immediate, the revelation of language’s naked entanglement with liberty.” (190) To which Olson’s poetic practice might be seen as serving as an antidote. In the act of each poem under hand, the poet continually takes measure, not only of their own ability to respond in the moment, but also of the occasion itself—of whatever offered in the passing act may prove useful to moving forward.
Despite Olson’s ties to Black Mountain College in the 1950s and to SUNY Buffalo in the 1960s, Boughn pushes back against thoughts of Professor Olson. At the core of Boughn’s approach is recognition of Olson's communal embracing of unknowable potential over and above achievement of discernible goals assertible as evidence of any sort of academic or professional reward. Even when acting in academic settings, Olson encouraged open-ended interest in discovering fresh knowledge—though not necessarily recently produced—preferably shared among a group of closely connected fellow practitioners. In such gathering, there was no hierarchy to climb to the top of, but rather a continual asserting of the latest newly discovered material to be put to use in creating ongoing creative endeavors among the group. “Whatever else such a ‘community’ may be, in Olson’s practice it was a ‘place’ where hierarchical/non-hierarchical orderings were dissolved in a synergistic circulation of authoritative finitudes that egged each other on toward their further possibilities”. (235) Effort was directed towards increasing opportunities achievable with ongoing creative work and avoiding stalling out or circling back to a particular point of stasis, particularly in search of any official reward or recognition.
Certainly, this is not how one goes about winning awards or garnering other honors that might lend themselves to achieving benefits such as publishing contracts with the larger presses or tenured professorships. And Boughn proposes that the immediacy of such communal-oriented creative output launched towards the peripheries of any institutional-oriented goal is “confusing for those entangled in a writing culture based on individual achievement and reward, ideas of autonomy and originality, and a separate, regulated zone called Literature, in which one can accumulate prestige and power.” (143) Boughn’s Olson-centric focus is not beyond skepticism. There are poet communities well outside of Olson’s influence (although Olson-affiliated figures like John Wieners, Amiri Baraka, and Diane di Prima might factor into their poetic lineages) formed with similar orientation towards bucking the isolated path of individual career-oriented advancement, for instance factions of LGBTQ and BIPOC poets operate in a fashion just as much opposed to ideas of “autonomy and originality” with utter disregard, if not disdain, to the thought of utilizing poetry in order to “accumulate prestige and power”.
Boughn never directly addresses the work of these other groupings of poets, yet he would no doubt value their stance as being as exemplary as Olson’s and just as justified. He notes how oppositional grouping and accompanying arguments opposed to those more establishment-oriented result in the poetry wars which prove so fruitful to furthering the development of poets: “The poetry wars exist and are important. They force us to pay attention, to think of the struggle to keep alive and active the knowledge of the interstitial space of poetry’s dwelling within the poet.” (110) Where and how a poet positions themselves regarding such points of contention in Poetry World has long lasting consequential regard for how their work is looked upon in years to come.
For Boughn, a poet to hold back from embracing the potential
possibilities of the imagination lit up according to Olson’s principles is
unpardonable. There is nothing left to enliven the poetry if the poet chooses
to abide by mealy-mouth platitudes of the status quo. Better to stand against
infirmities of the imagination than dish out what is expected. Boughn’s take on
how Olson compadre Robert Creeley’s work is “political” serves as
example:
“Creeley especially has suffered from the criticism that his work never engaged with the political issues of the day, but there is nothing more political in our circumstance than to reclaim the world from the cultural banalities, political moralisms, and aesthetic idiocies that expunge experience in some universal lock-down of the imagination.” (46)
The perfected chrysalis of achievement vaunted by so many of the book awards, poetry contests, and rarefied submissions procedures of prominent magazines is not the sort of thing Boughn would have Olson's work considered as encouraging. And yet any astute reader familiar with Creeley might recall how much Creeley himself represents that perfected chrysalis of achievement with a lifetime of poetic fame, professorship and sundry awards. Boughn’s essay “Robert Creeley’s Anger” doesn’t tackle this conundrum head on yet does intimately engage the multi-faceted conflicting nature of the older poet’s response to heated debates regarding Olson’s legacy.
While Olson is Boughn’s predominant concern here, several essays cover related figures, such as Creeley. Boughn first came to Olson via encountering poet Robin Blaser’s classes as an undergraduate in Vancouver. This led him to apply for graduate study in Buffalo, where he encountered Creeley and also the Blakean scholar and poet John “Jack” Clarke, a pivotal figure in Boughn’s own poetic development. Boughn’s dissertation covered the work of the modernist H.D. who has remained a touchstone in his poetics, leading him to editing the wondrous treatise of another Olson compadre, the poet Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. All these poets are focal points of one or more individual essays. This collection represents Boughn’s paean to the back history of the poetics program in Buffalo, its founding in the late 1960s with Olson at its core on up into the controversies of the 1980s/90s surrounding that very beginning and the vast accompanying poetic history of our era.
Tracking Olson's ‘group’ activities from Buffalo out, as it were, Boughn offers no summation other than continual reinforcement of a key point. Namely, that when the poet is in the moment of the making of the poem nothing is fixed, all is happening and possible within that ongoing activity. As Goethe says, “The corpse is not the whole.” To be that very thing you are, joining Whitman, amorous, awry with news of what's freshly seen. Olson's 'istorin: to look with one's own eyes. Reporting back, that's from where the poems arise.
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Patrick James Dunagan recently edited Roots & Routes: Poetics at New College (w/ Lazzara & Whittington) and David Meltzer’s Rock Tao. City Bird and Other Poems (City Lights) is forthcoming. He reviews regularly for Rain Taxi and other venues.
