Precipitating Otherness

By Chris D’Iorio

“Next for Liz” (68) gave me my way in and I was glad for it: apparently unvarying in form, each of the fourteen poems begins with the line from its predecessor that matches its position in the sequence (recalling the fourteen Bravais lattices that describe all known crystals). Hold the page up to the light and you can see the crystalline intersection until you get to number twelve, which breaks this patterning with a quotation from Asa Benveniste: “I did not own/even the gesture my hand was/made of.” (79)

Didn’t I hear Boughn disclaim ownership as well, claim only a positioning, a relationship to his work—author as precipitate? Maybe, maybe not—I didn’t take notes, and he claimed/declaimed a lot of things. But I know he said that what mattered, in poetics, was a relationship to what came before, to what one read (he gave, by way of negative example, a tale of a poetaster who did not read). And he gives much to read, to reference, and this is probably the most viable way into his work: through the others whom the poems refract, through incidents of their otherness, “not of an individual portion of æthereal or other substance, but of modifications of the structure or energy or other qualities of the æther.” (C.V. Burton, cited as the epigraph for “After Pieces Again for R.C.” 28) He refracts Robert Creeley’s æther here freely, the lineal lattice now for the first and only time in Dislocations terse and veering toward the isoverbal—a prosody based on counting syllables—his “zone of slip” (28) built upon Creeley’s Pieces.

“After Pieces Again” calls William James in for authority on how the lattice holds: “William James said it’s/memory and habit/hold it to/lattice emissions.” (31) James also put it another way, which recalls how form is a translation operation, with dislocations, from Creeley: “The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it ... Everyone must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one’s mind, striving to be filled out with words."¹ This “dark brush/of its other name” (31)—Creeley’s Pieces—is both the lattice upon which Boughn forms his piece and a blank “attractor” (30), “recall[ing] a certain precipitating density” (“Off in Wittgenstein’s Kitchen” 19), itself striving to “be filled out with words.”