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    Michael Boughn Nine Blue Moments for Robin 978-1-60964-062-0 "How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain Moving within the magical space of the number 9, Boughn writes his meditation as tribute to the magus poet Robin Blaser. This sharp and supple set of poems are energized with “scholarship and cosmos teeming/with the sense of a kiss that never/quite ends because its beginning/was impossible”. Boughn’s lines blend Eros and erudition, humor and critique. — Hoa Nguyen Michael Boughn's mind's eye moves between internal thoughts and the recognition of objects that are outside, written without remembering but residing here in these poems of honor and homage for Robin Blaser, one of Boughn's great teachers. Blaser's notion that poetry posits an arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology is everywhere present in these poems, as is the emotional intensity of losing one held so dear as Robin -- in body and words. —Kristin Prevallet " "Michael Boughn is a writer and teacher whose published works include poetry, literary essays, short stories, and young adult non-fiction. He has also taught part-time at the University of Toronto since 1993, covering courses in post-modern fiction, poetry, children’s literature, American literature, detective fiction and science fiction, among others. Born in Riverside, California (home of the Parent Navel Orange Tree and Easter Sunrise Services) in 1946, he was a third-generation Californian, leaving in 1966 because of his opposition to the illegal and immoral war against Viet Nam. Landing in Vancouver, he enrolled at Simon Fraser University--after planting trees in the bush for a year--where he studied with Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Ezra Pound, H.D. William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and others. It was the defining moment of his life. From 1970 to 1979, Boughn worked on the lakefront in Toronto loading and unloading boxcars and trailers at Smith Transport, while organizing against the Viet Nam war and supporting anti-racist politics within the south Asian community in Toronto. In 1978 he returned to California where he ran a high speed press in a metal stamping factory in Silicon Valley while finishing his BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He continued to develop his poetry during these years, though never publishing. In 1978, he moved to Buffalo, N.Y. where he joined the graduate program at SUNY Buffalo. From 1980-1985 he worked as Robert Creeley’s graduate assistant and a cataloger in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection. His dissertation was a descriptive bibliography ofH.D., published in 1993 by the University of Virginia. Graduating with a PhD. in 1986, he remained in Buffalo, working with another of his teachers, the poet John Clarke, to produce the magazine “intent: a newsletter of talk, thinking and document.” At this time he started a micro press, shuffaloff, which over the years has irregularly published work by Robert Creeley, John Clarke, Robin Blaser, and a number of younger poets including Elizabeth Willis, Jorge Guitart, and Lisa Jarnot."

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    Michael Boughn Nine Blue Moments for Robin 978-1-60964-062-0 "How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain Moving within the magical space of the number 9, Boughn writes his meditation as tribute to the magus poet Robin Blaser. This sharp and supple set of poems are energized with “scholarship and cosmos teeming/with the sense of a kiss that never/quite ends because its beginning/was impossible”. Boughn’s lines blend Eros and erudition, humor and critique. — Hoa Nguyen Michael Boughn's mind's eye moves between internal thoughts and the recognition of objects that are outside, written without remembering but residing here in these poems of honor and homage for Robin Blaser, one of Boughn's great teachers. Blaser's notion that poetry posits an arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology is everywhere present in these poems, as is the emotional intensity of losing one held so dear as Robin -- in body and words. —Kristin Prevallet " "Michael Boughn is a writer and teacher whose published works include poetry, literary essays, short stories, and young adult non-fiction. He has also taught part-time at the University of Toronto since 1993, covering courses in post-modern fiction, poetry, children’s literature, American literature, detective fiction and science fiction, among others. Born in Riverside, California (home of the Parent Navel Orange Tree and Easter Sunrise Services) in 1946, he was a third-generation Californian, leaving in 1966 because of his opposition to the illegal and immoral war against Viet Nam. Landing in Vancouver, he enrolled at Simon Fraser University--after planting trees in the bush for a year--where he studied with Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Ezra Pound, H.D. William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and others. It was the defining moment of his life. From 1970 to 1979, Boughn worked on the lakefront in Toronto loading and unloading boxcars and trailers at Smith Transport, while organizing against the Viet Nam war and supporting anti-racist politics within the south Asian community in Toronto. In 1978 he returned to California where he ran a high speed press in a metal stamping factory in Silicon Valley while finishing his BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He continued to develop his poetry during these years, though never publishing. In 1978, he moved to Buffalo, N.Y. where he joined the graduate program at SUNY Buffalo. From 1980-1985 he worked as Robert Creeley’s graduate assistant and a cataloger in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection. His dissertation was a descriptive bibliography ofH.D., published in 1993 by the University of Virginia. Graduating with a PhD. in 1986, he remained in Buffalo, working with another of his teachers, the poet John Clarke, to produce the magazine “intent: a newsletter of talk, thinking and document.” At this time he started a micro press, shuffaloff, which over the years has irregularly published work by Robert Creeley, John Clarke, Robin Blaser, and a number of younger poets including Elizabeth Willis, Jorge Guitart, and Lisa Jarnot."

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    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    118 views12 pages

    Nine Blue Moments For Robin by Michael Boughn Book Preview

    Uploaded by

    BlazeVOX [books]
    Michael Boughn Nine Blue Moments for Robin 978-1-60964-062-0 "How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain Moving within the magical space of the number 9, Boughn writes his meditation as tribute to the magus poet Robin Blaser. This sharp and supple set of poems are energized with “scholarship and cosmos teeming/with the sense of a kiss that never/quite ends because its beginning/was impossible”. Boughn’s lines blend Eros and erudition, humor and critique. — Hoa Nguyen Michael Boughn's mind's eye moves between internal thoughts and the recognition of objects that are outside, written without remembering but residing here in these poems of honor and homage for Robin Blaser, one of Boughn's great teachers. Blaser's notion that poetry posits an arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology is everywhere present in these poems, as is the emotional intensity of losing one held so dear as Robin -- in body and words. —Kristin Prevallet " "Michael Boughn is a writer and teacher whose published works include poetry, literary essays, short stories, and young adult non-fiction. He has also taught part-time at the University of Toronto since 1993, covering courses in post-modern fiction, poetry, children’s literature, American literature, detective fiction and science fiction, among others. Born in Riverside, California (home of the Parent Navel Orange Tree and Easter Sunrise Services) in 1946, he was a third-generation Californian, leaving in 1966 because of his opposition to the illegal and immoral war against Viet Nam. Landing in Vancouver, he enrolled at Simon Fraser University--after planting trees in the bush for a year--where he studied with Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Ezra Pound, H.D. William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and others. It was the defining moment of his life. From 1970 to 1979, Boughn worked on the lakefront in Toronto loading and unloading boxcars and trailers at Smith Transport, while organizing against the Viet Nam war and supporting anti-racist politics within the south Asian community in Toronto. In 1978 he returned to California where he ran a high speed press in a metal stamping factory in Silicon Valley while finishing his BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He continued to develop his poetry during these years, though never publishing. In 1978, he moved to Buffalo, N.Y. where he joined the graduate program at SUNY Buffalo. From 1980-1985 he worked as Robert Creeley’s graduate assistant and a cataloger in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection. His dissertation was a descriptive bibliography ofH.D., published in 1993 by the University of Virginia. Graduating with a PhD. in 1986, he remained in Buffalo, working with another of his teachers, the poet John Clarke, to produce the magazine “intent: a newsletter of talk, thinking and document.” At this time he started a micro press, shuffaloff, which over the years has irregularly published work by Robert Creeley, John Clarke, Robin Blaser, and a number of younger poets including Elizabeth Willis, Jorge Guitart, and Lisa Jarnot."

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    of 12

    Nine Blue Moments for Robin

    Michael Boughn

    BlazeVOX [books] Buffalo, NY

    Nine blue moments for Robin by Michael Boughn Copyright 2011 Published by BlazeVOX [books] ISBN: 978-1-60964-062-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011905691 BlazeVOX [books] 76 Inwood Ave Buffalo, NY 14209 Editor@blazevox.org

    1.
    The light foot hears you at the edge of white whales breeding in the company of Amor leads to corridors of unforeseen electric blue lobelia dangling down sentences bursting tips of its announcement. Where there was no world, abrupt lumber along its beaches erupts into tangled syntax predicating further shades of sapphire. Stepping into the river deepens intimations of other substances just past current formulations of resistance. A singular chance begins to write it, but first comes the step. And wanting to know it. Rolling bones in the bowl

    of night fall there and count it out. Seven come eleven it whispers while high in unsuspected mountains just over the edge of the world clarities gather and rush toward some new articulation of water. Amor smiles as the bones tumble toward a kiss resembling a fast moving river. A piece of it breaks off, not exactly blue, but with enough depth to sustain a sky.

    2.
    Thickened light and liquid earth ring with modulations of worlds unstable expositions of holy spirit quests. If the lamp is lit present company may include an occluded sun. Included and occluded then constitute terms of immediate access. When the light thickens another world is trying to speak of lost densities. Then the lamp is lit and narrow streets open into bleeding hearts. That old image of St. Theresa on her knees, Raphael over her, her heart on his stick. It seemed like a good idea at the time. As such,

    immediate concentrations of virgin births are always around the corner. Some guy playing a trumpet, the insatiable flowers. Indigo skies give way to liquid earth from another story, but the visitor still renders news into the same liminal night. Strong tongues push past stunned lips breeding worlds of unsurpassed fluidity and comic postures suggesting further arrangements of indecision may lead to encounters with angels reeling from the fruit of moon driven dementia.

    3.
    Grail quests in times of plague are unlikely to resolve splayed demands for more certain outcomes in the guise of just determinations of impossible dispensations of estate. Still you cant just ignore it. The healing never ends any more than the pain, but the mind can mistake anguish for a puzzle. Partiality remains the stuff of dreams haunted by questions with no answers. Then rage exacts a price, withering time into packages of discrete hungers. The plague always looks recent and the absence of stories leaves it on extended wings. Whats been wasted spreads out in landscapes of tremulous beckoning, receding

    slowly into stylized tableaus of ineluctable justice fixations determined to divert Jerusalem into equations susceptible to diddling. Beauty is not the answer though it helps. Music everywhere is also an alternative when cosmogonic corners are given over to lilac time. Bleeding hearts once again dangle. Fixing it leaks into cerulean skies imperfect resolutions of dawn into just another dazed encounter bleeding erratically unable to recall its name.

    4.
    Instabilities of interminable perfections waver in and out of lobelias refrain. The world I think flies up and smacks the face of its harmonious intercession, raked through the coals of a coming incandescence. Which are mine when the blades fall, glinting in the sun, flashes of light comingling with memories of a blood moon? Images of Ishmael dancing across the screen of its attention announce skeptical necessities in the face of spurious compositions disguised as historys abrogation of imaginations perennial thrust. Who could have thought the collapse of light into midnights contraction rises from the wreck

    of day singing. Such permissions as survive indicate Amor clinging to shadows, may offer lists of further reading opening into exigencies of cobalt aftershocks. Laughter that seemed trivial leaks into rivers thinking, raising the stakes of broken hearts. No calculation can add up remainders it leaves circulating in the pools of its apparencies. The thing about beauty does not abandon darkness but what is justice without the sudden deadly swoop of its hunger?

    5.
    Fiery inclinations toward obscure and nebulous stars of blue incandescence reel through unrenovated streets of originary accidents. Flashes of breeching white in dark corners constitute bastions of first things whistling around camp fires. They move through shadow at the edge, midnight blue leeching into black. Its the movement that heralds the dosey-dos of an attention playing out in unexpected embraces. Haunted hearts come to mind. The haunting exudes memories of distant rivers seduction where confusions of water and light suggested possible cities amid fluorescence

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