Jules Boykoff is a D.C. poet, co-editor of Tangent, who I got to hear read at the Social Mark conference last February. Because he’s a D.C. poet, you can find Boykoff’s work sprinkled around the D.C. Poetry anthology – check out the years 2001 & 2003. At the time, I wrote about Boykoff’s reading at some length (tho I misspelled his name pretty consistently – Sorry!), so I was pleased come across his work in the fourth issue of Antennae.  

 

It was my impression in February that many of the contributors to Social Mark had been picked by the Calgary poet, Louis Cabri, whose own work I’d once compared in this blog to that of Ted Berrigan’s, as if it were (I think these were my words) “Berrigan + politics.” That image popped back up into my head, tho, as I read “Essay #5,” Boykoff’s poem in Antennae, for it’s a work that looks a great deal like a form that Ted promoted, perhaps most famously in the poem “Tambourine Life” – even if Ted got it from John Ashbery’s “Europe*”: linked verse, the poem of many small units. Here is the fourth of the poem’s nine pages:

 

“I should have worn my yarmulke”

“I thought that was a yarmulke”

 

•

 

pursuing authorization
in the spliced space
where Frida Kahlo
hung her dress

 

 

•

 

free-lanced justice cobble met three-piece machete diction in the dark alley behind the mini-mart in the place where here meant now & now meant the fair tale that every scientific group rehearses by the evening fire

 

•

 

this is not a pipe [bomb]

                           [them]

                           [more]

                           [now]

 

•

 

sonuva sonuva being more to the point [now]

 

petroleum Cadillac karaoke roadkill

 

“I am an unabashed fan of Equatorial Guinea” [now]

 

•

 

the parameter is defined by

 

“then there’s the heritage thing”

 

because if that were the case
we’d all be uptrodden by now

 

•

 

headlight frippery glut

 

statistically significant bard throttle

 

More noise please!

 

There is a great deal to like here – a fine ear & excellent sense of wit – and even if you don’t, there’s not much waiting before the next completely different event. Tonally, it has the quality of surfing the radio dial, searching for that right song (might be Mingus, might be Eminem – you won’t know till you find it). But it can also have that other quality that we experience whenever somebody else has their hand on the dial or the remote – gee, I wonder where that might be going. I feel that way to some degree about the second section above, a lovely, almost perfect image, full of mystery (authorization for what? what spliced space?), that could easily have been the first stanza of a fabulous longer piece we may never read.

 

Like Cabri, Boykoff has a very social imagination – it’s no accident, I suppose, that the subtitle of Boykoff’s weekly D.C. radio program Roots & Culture is Making the World Unsafe for Plutocracy. But Boykoff likes to play with knives pointed in all directions at once:

 

bowdlerized & Vendlerized &
come we go easy now

“as in NAFTA, buddy”

 

That section is worth the price of admission to Antennae ($6) alone & what really makes these three disparate lines work so well together is how the ear plays in the second one. That it enables Boykoff to equate Helen Vendler’s campaign for illiteracy first with bowdlerization & then with NAFTA is a stroke of genius. I wish I’d written it.

 

 

 

 

* Berrigan & Ashbery were hardly the only poets using linked verse in the 1960s. Phil Whalen did likewise, and even a non-New American like Eliot Coleman, the Baltimore poet who founded the writing program at Johns Hopkins, made some interesting forays into surrealism with the form. It was Berrigan’s evangelical nature, tho, that caused this form to be associated most closely with him. I’ve even heard poets refer to the form as Bean Spasms, tho Berrigan’s poem by that name doesn’t use linked verse.