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 gravitational pull of the Given.” For many years this was how I wrote poems, a process that could have been simplistically called “first draft-last draft” (simplistic because it doesn’t address the condition precedent of first having been in the world in an “open” way). As well, and relatedly, I appreciate Boughn introducing me to Ivan Illich’s notion of the convivial as a “remedy for the industrial mind.” On a personal note, I can’t help but see that word and recall conviviality’s relevance to how he treated me during the days of his (and Kent Johnson's) “Dispatches from the Poetry Wars” project, for which I’m appreciative. Much more can be said—and by the way Charles Stein’s Introduction is convivially useful—but I can sense from the prior sentence that I’d risk glazing your eyes, or at least mine. So, in sum, let me just say that those reading this book would most likely be rewarded.

Gracias to Michael for this book: