Just before I took off running from Hurricane Matthew as it slammed the southeastern United States in 2016, presumably courtesy of the still-raging global climate crisis, I wrote the following notes on Duncan McNaughton's contemporary poetry classic, Valparaiso (Listening Chamber publishing, 1995):
As seen through the lens of this reader's experience of his work, McNaughton is a hunter and gatherer of significant meanings, and names, obscured by time and human negligence. Both a dissector and a sculptor of forms (as well as formlessness), a skillful translator of elusive moments crammed as much with pointless absurdity as with essential insights.....
Three years later, following a very narrow miss from Hurricane Dorian, I opened a copy of his SOMEWHERE IN THE STREAM (Blue Press Books, 2019). With this latest addition to the impressive and too often overlooked corpus of McNaughton's titles--now in fact is the time for publication of a volume of his collected works--for some reason I felt a little less threatened by upheavals of physical-world conditions. Hurricanes seemingly indicative of negligent environmental stewardship, flaming tempests of political corruption, and suicidal addictions to war and hate fueling suicidal addictions to drugs and violence all took less of a toll on my personalized corner of the world. Maybe there was a reason for that.
A reader contemplating the title of this most recent volume of grace, wit, wisdom, and genius from someone often dubbed a poet's poet might suddenly ask: "Somewhere in the Stream" of what exactly? Potential answers--at least for those unfamiliar with McNaughton’s earlier works or unaware of his connections to genre-influencing poets like Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Diane di Prima--could turn out to be as ambiguous or obscure as they might precise and informative.
Since the poet is McNaughton, stream of individual consciousness gives us one good possibility. So does stream of collective memory, or of human comedies, absurdities, tragedies, antipoetic ironies, and language. It makes sense also to consider the stream of life, or existence, in general. How it manifests, flows, diverges, halts, dims, or glows to the rhythms of its own self-determining frequencies with seemingly little, if any, regard for human intentions constitutes a recurring observance, if not an actual theme, in many of the 51 poems contained in this collection.
To read this post in full and learn about the work of San Francisco's Duncan McNaughton please click here.
Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Despite your unfortunate luck with hurricanes and my good luck with them, hurricanes may or may not be the greatest threat of climate change. And, I constantly, like McNaughton apparently taught you try to tell everyone around that life for humans on this earth, gets better all the time and that hurricanes and other disasters have been around forever, killing over 6000 people in 1900 in Galveston. Destroying countless sailing ships along the Gulfstream and in the infamous Bermuda Triangle. But we have prospered through all of It, pestilence, genocide and war. Our biggest danger is our success, 7 billion people approaching 8. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, in his classic, The Population Bomb, laid it all out.
So I am optimistic about solving our problems, but a bit pessimistic about how we want to shape the world our way instead of the way that nature did, to our demise. If that happens, all of our literature will go to waste.
Ron