Michael Boughn

Resist Much / Obey Little Michael Boughn

At a hefty 740 pages, the new anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance symbolically and actually enacts the oppositional imperatives embedded in its title. 50% of the proceeds from the volume are being donated to Planned Parenthood. The assembling of the anthology itself, spearheaded by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, represents a model for activism and mobility in a time of political emergency. Boughn and Johnson brought together eighteen other editors from diverse aesthetic and cultural backgrounds to solicit and to curate the work of more than 350 poets in roughly two months. As Boughn and Johnson note in their incisive introduction, "Poetry and Resistance," the book "is not intended as an offering of unique, sophisticated "creative writing." It is first and foremost, a collective, insurgent call that is part and parcel of a sovereign people's challenge to a narcissistic oligarch and his lackeys, who smirk now from their temporary perches of power. Its pages are bound in direct, literal ways, to the historic worldwide marches of January 22nd--and they stand as evidence that the vast majority of American poets (and artists and writers of all kind) revile the new reactionary dispensation."

--Dante Di Stefano, Best American Poetry