Measure's Measure: Poetry & Knowledge - Paperback

by Michael Boughn (Author), Charles Stein (Introduction by)

At the heart of Michael Boughn's Measure's Measures are fundamental questions about poetry's relation to modes of knowing the world beyond what's given. Lovingly addressed to the work of poets associated with the New American Poetry and their predecessors, these essays probe the development of what Boughn calls the somatic poetics of transformative gnosis. Boughn's method combines a wide range of scholarship with his affectionate personal knowledge of many of the poets, and a radically decentered view of the stakes poetry brings to considerations of our post-modern moment. Rethinking the history of 20th century US American poetry, these essays challenge the academic containment of poetry to literary studies, opening it into a thriving wilderness of thinking being.

Author Biography

Michael Boughn worked in the Teamsters for 10 years before returning to university to earn a PhD in 1986 after studying with poets John Clarke and Robert Creeley. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently The Book of Uncertain--A Hyperbiographical User's Manual. He published a descriptive bibliography of H.D., and co-edited Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book. From 2014-2018 he edited the online poetry disturbance known as Dispatches from the Poetry Wars with co-conspirator, Kent Johnson. Michael Boughn worked in the Teamsters for 10 years before returning to university to earn a PhD in 1986 after studying with poets John Clarke and Robert Creeley. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Iterations of the Diagonal, Dislocations in Crystal, 22 Skidoo, SubTractions, Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol. 1 Illus. Ed. and Hermetic Divagations--after H.D. Cosmographia - a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic was short listed for the Canadian Governor General's Award for Poetry in 2011, prompting a reviewer in Toronto's Globe and Mail to describe him as "an obscure veteran poet with a history of being overlooked." He published a descriptive bibliography of H.D., and co-edited Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book. His most recent book of poetry is The Book of Uncertain--A Hyperbiographical User's Manual. From 2014-2018 he edited the online poetry disturbance known as Dispatches from the Poetry Wars with co-conspirator, Kent Johnson.