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 of H.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.
In 1991, Boughn married Elizabeth Brown, and the following year returned to Canada. He has lived there since, becoming a Canadian citizen in September, 2001. He and his wife currently live in Toronto with their two children, Amelia and Sam. His older daughter, Kate, who just had her first child, is a jewelry designer in Charleston, S.C. (http://www.katedavisjewelry.com/). He recently finished a “post-Lucretian faux micro-epic” called Cosmographia. and is now trying to figure out what to do witht he rest of his life.
Random information of possible interest:
From the Fugs' first album--for Robin (and for me): Carpe Diem
Jack Kerouac singing "Ain't We Got Fun"
A link to some stuff on Allen Ginsberg (including a story by Patti Smith).
Eat your heart out, Julie Andrews! ("My Favorite Things" by Aki Takase and Maria João)
Selected publications:
For a recent review of Henry Ferrini's film on Charles Olson, Polis Is This, go to: http://olsonnow.blogspot.com/
- For a version of "Emerson, Eros and convention in Sinatra's vocal stylings," a paper read recently to a conference on American popular song, look here.
Books:
The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Forthcoming from University of California Press in 2010.
22 Skidoo / SubTractions (poems). Book Thug, 2009. Reviewed in Jacket 38.
Into the World of the Dead, Annick Press, 2006. (An Ontario Library Association Red Maple Prize finalist. Included on the New York Public Library Books for Teens 2007 list.)
Dislocations in Crystal. Coach House Books, 2003 (Poems)
In the Branches of the Upper World: Selections from the Journals of Harvey Brown. Edited by Michael Boughn. Austin, TX: Skanky Possum, 2002.
ONE's own Mind. Glover Publishing, 1999 (Poem) (Volume 4 in A Curriculum of the Soul)
Iterations of the Diagonal. Shuffaloff, 1995 (Poems)
H.D.: A Descriptive Bibliography 1905-1993. University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Selected Essays:
A review essay of André Spears Fragments from Mu.
“Representations of Post-modern spaces in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down,” West Coast Line (Vancouver), Fall 2005.
“Revisiting the Sacred,” First Intensity, Summer 2003.
“Olson's Buffalo,” in The World in Time and Space, ed. Edward Foster. Talisman House, 2003.
“Reanimated numbers and sounding’s modulations in two poems by William Carlos Williams.” In William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry. Ed. Burton Hatlen and Demetres Tryphonopoulos. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2002.
“Checklist of the publications of Frontier Press, 1965-1972,” Talisman, a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics 23-24 (Fall 2002): 695-707.
“Domestic Apocalypse and the Thought of America in On the Road,” The Kerouac Quarterly 1.2 (Fall 1997): 2-6.
“Rethinking Mark Twain’s Skepticism: Ways of Knowing and Forms of Freedom in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Arizona Quarterly 52:4 (Winter 1996): 31-48.
“Introduction,” Two Children’s Stories by H.D. H.D. Home Page ( http://www.imagists.org/hd/stor.html ).
“Introduction,” Two Book Reviews by H.D. H.D. Home Page ( http://www.imagists.org/hd/revi.html ).
“Introduction,” Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Hertfortdshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions), 1996. [v]-vii.
“Exody and Some Mechanics of Splendor in Emerson and Blaser,” Talisman 15 (Winter 1995/96): 158 61. Reprinted in The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser. Ed. Charles Watts and Edward Byrne. Talon Books: Vancouver, 1999. 356-360.
“Introduction,” The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions), 1995. [v]-vii.
“Measure’s Measures,” West Coast Line 28:3 (Winter 1994/95): 93-105.
Some unpublished stuff: