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Edith Jarolim In his later poems, Blackburn came to wear his learning lightly; in his generally short early lyrics, his erudition is still on display. (Pounds example was not likely to have discouraged him in that regard. ) The young man who wrote the lovely " Center de Not" and satirical " For Mercury, Patron of Thieves: A Laurel" had clearly done his homework in Proven? al and Greek poetics. But he was also taking lessons from such American masters as William Carlos Williams and he was a natural when it came to picking up the rhythms of New York City streets: Th holdup at the liquor-store, dja hear? a detective watch m for ten minutes He took it anyway Got away down Broadway Yeah? Yeah (" The Continuity" The way the poem had already begun to look on the page, a visual representation or " scoring" of the oral rendition of the poem, showed the influence too of another American poet, Charles Olson. On Pounds suggestion in 1951, Blackburn had written to a " chicken farmer in New Hampshire, " Robert Creeley; Creeley in turn introduced him to the ideas and poetry of Olson.
Although Blackburn always disliked putting poets into categories, and although he never set foot on the campus of Black Mountain College, he has come to be associated with Olson and the other writers who studied or taught at the experimental North Carolina school. If rather superficial, the " Black Mountain poet" label is not entirely misleading: Blackburn was New York distributor for the Black Mountain Review, the literary magazine established in 1953 to raise money for the floundering institution, and contributing editor to one of its issues. More to the point, of all those associated with the Black Mountain aesthetic, he was arguably the most skilled practitioner of the punctuation, line breaks, and text alignments that define the poetics of " composition by field, " as outlined in Olson's 1951 " Projective Verse" essay. In 1954, newly married and newly appointed Fulbright Teaching Fellow, Blackburn went off to Europe to study the language and literature of the troubadours. He never lost his interest in either, but he heartily hated Toulouse, the wet and provincial center of modern Provence (see his poem " Sirventes" against the city). During the two years he was assigned to teach in Toulouse, he escaped frequently to Spain, eventually settling there for a year.
He loved that countrys speech, which he heard on the streets and read in Lorcas poetry, the slow rhythms and living traditions of Mediterranean culture, and the nonsacredotal but anchoring rituals of everyday life: You shall not always sit in sunlight watching weeds grow out of drainpipes or burros and shadows of burros come up the street bring sand the first one of the line with a bell Always. With a bell. (" Suerte" ) He was right about the limits of his European idyll. When he came back to New York in Fall 1957, ostensibly just to recoup finances, things rapidly fell apart: his marriage broke up, he couldnt find a job, and his mother died of cancer. But hiding out in Brooklyn from his ex-wife and commuting into Manhattan, he began writing the series of subway poems for which he is probably best known, including " Brooklyn Narcissus, " " Cricket-Clack, " and " Meditation on the BMT. " And soon enough he found new loves, new rituals, and a new population for his street observations the men crowded around the radio listening to the ball game, the secretary dreaming out the window of her office. Truly an urban representative, Blackburn could deftly enlarge the pain of his own situations to encompass wider political contexts, for example, the impingement of impersonal institutions on the individuals life: After your voices frozen anger emptied the air between us, the silence of electrical connections the vacant window pale, the connection broken (" AT& T Has My Dime" By the mid- 1960 s his politics were more explicit in poems that criticized the U.
S. presence in Vietnam (" Foreign Policy Commitments" ) or looked irreverently at the space program (" News clips 2. " ). But most of Blackburn's energies were devoted to his very nonpolitical activities on the poetry scene in New York. He returned in the late 1950 s to find a burgeoning bard nouveau movement in town: poetry readings, sometimes to jazz accompaniment, were springing up in coffeehouses all over the city.
He took part in some of these early mixed media programs and was instrumental in organizing two important Lower East Side reading series, at the Deux Meets Coffeehouse and later at Le Metro Cafe. It was Blackburn's idea in 1966 to move the readings at Le Metro to St. Marks-Church-in-the-Bowery, where the Poetry Project still flourishes today. It may be at the cost of his own fame that he devoted himself to spreading the word and encouraging the work of so many poets: translator of Julio Cort? zar, Lorca, and the troubadours, among others, he also faithfully tape-recorded local poets at an astonishing number of readings, and gave countless fledgling writers aesthetic and practical advice. There are those who felt he spread himself too thin, dissipating his energies on writers unworthy of attention.
Perhaps. But these activities very movingly attest to Blackburn's remarkable commitment to the ideal of a democratic community of poets. And, for at least part of the decade anyway, Blackburn seemed to have energy to spare: he was at the height of his powers in the early to mid- 1960 s, producing, in addition to his political poems, such masterful mythic pieces as " The Watchers" and " At the Well. " By mid-decade, however, the ambivalence about love, always a presence in the poems, became stronger, and the alert observing persona seems more a lonely voyeur, often sitting with other men in a bar and talking about the futility of love, or maybe not talking at all: It is March 9 th, 3: 30 in the afternoon The loudest sound in this public room is the exhaust fan in the east window or the cat at my back asleep there in the sun bleached tabletop, golden shimmer of ale (" The Island" In September 1967, his second marriage having broken up a few months earlier, a distraught and seemingly disconsolate Blackburn boarded the S. S.
Aurelia for Europe. " The Glorious Morning, " the account of the ensuing shipboard romance with his third-wife-to-be, marked Blackburn's first foray into the more loosely constructed, freewheeling records of daily life he came to call " journals. " Although they were selective records, and his by-then ingrained sense of poetic form always kept them under aesthetic control, he distinguished them from the " poems" he continued to write during this period. He never felt entirely confident about the form, but it allowed him the space and latitude to write such long, cumulatively powerful pieces as " From the November Journals: Fire, " as well as the freedom for such quick takes as " Along the San Andreas Fault. " A new, more flexible poetic style, a settled relationship, a first child, and a teaching job at the State University at Cortland, in northern New York life seemed good in 1970, the year Blackburn learned that he had inoperable cancer of the esophagus. Up until a month before he died, on September 13, 1971, he continued to record, without self-pity and without denial, his honest reactions to the news: memories triggered of his body when he was 15 years old, of places he loved, and, characteristically, of poets and poetry and poems. Excerpted from the introduction to The Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn. New York: Person Books. M.
L. Rosenthal Forward to Selected Poems Welcome to Paul Blackburn's selected poems. Dont stop to prepare yourself in any way. just come right in and youll be with him at once on some New York or Barcelona street, it may be, or in McSorleys tavern near the Bowery, or overlooking the sea in M?
last, or in some shared or lonely bedroom, or wherever. As for what comes next, the poem will draw you further into itself: i. e. , toward whatever musings have been set ticking right there in the middle of things: Its going to rain Across the avenue a crane whose name is CIVETTA LINK-BELT dips, rises and turns in a graceless geometry But grace is slowness / as ecstasy is some kind of speed or madness / The crane moves slowly, that much is graceful / The men watch and the leaves Thus begins the poem called " The Watchers. " Natural, confiding speech conspires easily with the simple opening rhyme genially inviting, like a friends quick summons to look at something interesting thats happening on the street. And before we know it, the huge machine with the finely technical trade-name is almost personified, as if it were a dancer or a bird. (The phrasing recalls the seagull whose wings " dip and pivot him" in Hart Cranes " To Brooklyn Bridge. " ) Now the musings take over: thoughts about the cranes " graceless geometry" and, contrariwise, about the meaning of " grace" and an immensely suggestive associative leap (esthetic, psychological, sexual) of " ecstasy. " Then the poem returns to the literal scene, which has become charged with these resonances. This is how Blackburn's art works: lightly, broodingly, absorbingly. The opening couplet of " The Watchers" takes us unawares.
It is plain, casual. Its rhythm is off-center, with two stresses in the first line but three in the second; also, the second line creates a slight jolt, for it unexpectedly introduces a new sentence. These tiny imbalances quietly prepare the poem for its shifts soon afterward to more richly complex diction and rhythms. The ear at work here is remarkably attuned to both sophisticated and ordinary speech. Of all the successors to Pound and Williams, Blackburn comes closest to their ability to mix the colloquial and formal, and to their instinct for melodic patterning and for volatile improvisational immediacy: Flick of perfume, slight and faintly bitter on my wrist, where her hand had rested (" Remains of an Afternoon" But one need only open this selection at random, to find more such lines.
The pleasure and turmoil of life and awareness, depths of sun-warmed tranquility but also of depression, degrees of passion both sensual and exalted all these are the stuff of Blackburn's uninhibited expression. He was the poet of New York, city of poets, as it is today, and at the same time a student of the troubadours. His idiom ranges from gross street talk to whatever the lyric tradition can offer a writer whose mind plays joyously with styles and tonalities that have enchanted his reverie since childhood. Blackburn was that sort of poet, an American original who knew and loved what he was doing.
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Research essay sample on Quot And Quot Selected Poems
