MEASURE'S MEASURES: POETRY & KNOWLEDGE by MICHAEL BOUGHN
Reading by Eileen Tabios Measures' Measures: Poetry & Knowledge by Michael Boughn (Station Hill Press, 2024) It’s inevitable that I’ve read as well as read about Charles Olson—that’s partly what it means to be a poet in my (though not necessarily your) lifetime. But I haven’t paid attention to him in a long while until reading Michael Boughn’s new—and probably *needed*—book, MEASURE'S MEASURES: POETRY & KNOWLEDGE . Much has been said on the topics he covers—I replicate its Table of Contents below. But I want to share that as a Filipino poet practicing “Kapwa” as a poetics, I have always had an affinity for Olson’s world view (that “plural I” versus the “We”) even as I don’t see it as a contradiction to other ways of looking at poetry. The one immediate (pun intended, as you will see,) take-away from the book is the idea of speed as a means to transcend the banal or usual or boringly normative or, as Boughn articulates it better, “speed as a way of escaping the gravi