Sub Tractions / 22 Skidoo
by Michael Boughn
Toronto: Book Thug, 2009, ISBN 978-1-897388-34-1, 84 pp., $18 paper.

Not enamoured of the prospect of serving the US military in Vietnam, Michael Boughn fled California for the safety of Canada in 1966. For seven years he lived in Vancouver, where he studied with Robin Blaser. He returned to California in 1978 only to return to Canada fifteen years later. He has published poetry, fiction, non-fiction for young adults and children, and helped write and produce plays for Toronto's Clay & Paper Theatre.

In this volume, in effect two chapbooks masquerading as one poetry collection, Boughn demonstrates his fondness for the epigraph. As if reflecting the nature of this doubleness, Sub Tractions opens with not one but two--the first from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, wherein they discuss "the multiplicity," as "always n - 1," which gives rise to each of the poems being titled "Something Minus One"; the second derived from Emily Dickinson:

I tie my Hat-- I crease my Shawl
Life's little duties do -- precisely --

22 Skidoo also has two epigraphs, the first being Archibald MacLeish's admonition: "A poem should not mean, but be," immediately followed by an announcement by Deleuze: "Ariadne has hung herself."

Moving into Sub Traction, Boughn addresses the quotidian of soccer, hockey and other assorted sport with a sharp angularity. In "Weed Minus One," we read:

Dandelions
parade down boulevards of returned
excavations cautionary bins' unknowing
reassurance--relax, it's only a
freed signifier seeking a connection
in unchained synaptic lapse suddenly
slipped off the wall we're pinned to
by little secrets that aren't (11)

There are times when he gets himself in trouble; generally, as a result of too much alliteration, as in the following line in "Waiting Outside the School Minus One": "charts children's chance encounters" (17). This is not salvaged by allowing the last "c" to stand on its own rather than in another "ch." In "Seven AM Hockey Arena Minus One," the sound of sibilance comes close to exceeding the limit of a reader's patience:

legs and sticks recollects treasure
island's apple barrel revelations,
a question of falling or
snoozing your way out of
hoosegow destiny's claim (29)

There are times, though, when he reaches a point just before patience expires and a symphony is created. A prime example of this is "Strapping on the Goalie Pads Minus One":

     Win, lose or draw
orients otherwise straying indications
random hunger stations in stalled
commensurations tendentious pass
over, headed off past direction
exclamations pale, . . . (42)

The unexpected internal rhyme riffing on "-tion" is a delight, as is the play with "pass" and "past."

One cannot leave Sub Traction without commenting on "Penetralium," the "inner sanctum." The poem deserves comment mainly because it captures a word that appears numerous times throughout the collection, as if designated as the "word of the day."

Now it's time to flip the book around in order to read the poems in 22 Skidoo, i.e., n - 1 "23 skidoo," an American slang phrase from the age of the Flappers, the 1920s. This "chapbook" contains 22 poems, the last of which is titled "22 Skidoo."

Each poem is written in couplets and each poem is linked to the others through the commonality of words. Take the poems "Gab" (18) and "Oomph" (19). The last couplet of "Gab" reads: "utterly intractable irruption / sonorous machine gab." and the first of "Oomph": "Utter intractability / winter stunted plum."

Although it is not always the final words of one poem and the opening of the next that provide the link--in fact, adjacent poems may not be linked at all--there will always be a repetition of some part of one in the other, reminding one of constrained writing techniques such as 'pataphysics and Oulipo.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

Back to Reviews Index