Michael Boughn – författare

This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America's most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, "The H.D. Book" existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work - at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan's quest toward a new poetics - is at last complete and available to a wide audience.

This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now, The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now, for the first time published in its entirety, as its author intended, this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism, a reinterpretation of its key players and texts, and a record of Duncan’s quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience.

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.

Adrift in history and myth, fairy tales and TV, the tedious and the marvellous, you'll find Dislocations in Crystal. These poems move through the world opened by Prince Henry the Navigator's epoch-shifting push to open a sea route around Africa to the Spice Isles. They pick their way through the detritus of the world bequeathed by his success, looking for a land as promised, not of the given but the taken. Crossing and re-crossing untold regions disguised as a New World, these carefully crafted poems, in the tradition of Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, scatter the seeds of the yet-to-be-thought, drawing readers onward towards a dream that lies past apocalypse.