Welcome to Paul Blackburn's selected poems. Don't stop to prepare yourself in any way. just come right in and you'll be with him at once on some New York or Barcelona street, it may be, or in McSorley's tavern near the Bowery, or overlooking the sea in Málaga, 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:

It's 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 friend's quick summons to look at something interesting that's happening on the street. And before we know it, the huge machine with the felinely 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 Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge.") Now the musings take over: thoughts about the crane's "graceless geometry" and, contrariwise, about the meaning of "grace" and--in 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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Copyright © 1989 by M. L. Rosenthal