City: a poem from the end of the world

by Michael Boughn

Michael Boughn’s City is explicit in its celebration of the urban as a pumping heart with architecture. Boughn approaches the ‘common’ with an open language knowing full well that some who share the space may not ‘understand.’ His Walden is a full-canopied forest of neighbourhoods within and around which true solace is found, but only after much searching.
Victor Coleman City  mirrors the soul’s own anthems, landmarks, apparitions and traffic jams. William Blake would be at home in Michael Boughn’s tough and devilish town, apocalyptic in its ferocious litanies and bellicose arsenals, its grinding insistent engine roar ruling out nothing, in the midst of which an ironic I, both innocent and experienced, detects a gently scented boudoir, green and hilly resolutions. City hums/with a sudden inoperable thrill, and even at the end of the world, songs pour / out someone’s hidden window.
Billie Chernicoff City profiles el dorado ’s detritus, those ‘scattered shapes that suggest themselves’ in bullet-like periodicity as we try to make sense of our desire for a shining city. Mike Boughn’s method in chronicling the ‘emerging pathogens of imaginable substance’ is to riff relentlessly, measuring the multiple traffic of the cities’ words and their possibly unattainable story. The poetic narration in this series operates as a kind of cloaking device, surprising our assumptions with its anti-spatiality from ‘those mouths at the edge of the sky.’ This ‘poem from the end of the world’ is an intense and provocative call ‘to give shape to the earth.’
Fred Wah

234 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2016

About the author

Born and raised in Riverside, California Michael Boughn moved to Canada in October, 1966 to escape the U.S. military draft and to continue organizing against the Viet Nam War. He lived in Vancouver for 7 years. While there he met Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Charles Olson, H.D., Jack Spicer, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and other crucial contemporary writers.
In 1971 he left university in order to organize full time. Over the next several years he worked in various jobs, eventually becoming a Teamster in Toronto where he was a freight handler on the lakefront for 7 years. From 1982-89 he pursued graduate studies at SUNY Buffalo, where he studied with John Clarke and Robert Creeley and worked in the Poetry/Rare Book Collection. He completed his PhD, producing the first descriptive bibliography of the poet, H.D., and worked as a writer, typesetter, and publication designer, founding shuffaloff books. In 1993 he returned to Canada where he has lived since, teaching part-time at the University of Toronto, publishing non-fiction for young adults and children, and helping write and produce plays for Toronto’s Clay & Paper Theatre. In 2001 swore allegiance to the Queen and her heirs and became a Canadian citizen. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two children, Amelia and Sam.