Poeta Doctus

I’ve resisted writing the following, but a small flurry of persistent synchronicities insists otherwise.

It began with a Facebook discussion thread, prompted by a Canadian anglophone poet of my acquaintance. “Saw the list of this year’s Griffin judges. If we have a Canadian nominee other than Michael Ondaatje’s poetry collection A Year of Last Things I will be surprised.”

Around the same time, I happened on a remaindered copy of Hans Blumenbergs’s Work on Myth, and two poetry collections by Daniel Borzutzky (The Ecstasy of Capitulation and The Performance of Becoming Human) arrived, along with Jerome McGann’s The Point Is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present.

In the opening pages of McGann’s book “The Argument,” McGann observes “[Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein] both approach the history of poetry as an emergency of the present rather than as a legacy of past. The emergency appears as a poetic deficit in contemporary culture, where values of politics and morality are judged prima facie more important than aesthetic values.” Regardless of one’s knowledge or opinion of Benjamin or Stein, McGann’s invocation of “emergency” is provocative, to thought and otherwise.

Then, today, Norman Finkelstein’s Restless Messengers posted a three-part piece on Michael Boughn, a brief introduction by Miriam Nichols along with a review of his latest poetry book and a book of essays (by Finkelstein, required reading). Reviewing that poetry collection, The Book of Uncertain A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual (Book One), the reviewer, John Tritica, remarks “Michael Boughn does not write what Jack Spicer called one night stand poems, those shiny, reader-friendly, award-winning, readily consumable poems so prized by mainstream anthologies and awards institutions.”

Readers with an ideogrammic/metonymic sense will surmise what I’m on about here. I’ll let this juxtaposition speak for itself…