Strathfield

From "GIN"

I fled New York somehow,
it's all her's now . And cold...


Black roofs and red roofs . Tile.
While,
blackbirds in the shadowed backyard
hop about thru bright yellow leaves, or
flap between the lower branches .


What comes through in so much of Blackburn's poetry is "the musical structure of [the] poetry" as outlined in his "Statement". As I'm reading through "The Journals", I'm thinking more about what he has to say about music or s o n g in poetry and the way it relates to human relationships.

"the trees are full of grackles"

Paul Blackburn's poems, at least those from The Journals, seem so energised. There's a sense of movement and unpredictability in the poems' shifting imagery, their creative use of lineation and enjambment, their irregular syntax and occasional omission of the definite article, their use of conjunction as a way to propel the poem on to the next idea - and there's also a sense of movement in the form the poems take with their single line indentations and indented margins.

(Which translates as a bit of a problem here where what's posted or published isn't necessarily a reflection of what's initially composed. I don't have a clue with html so trying to work through this at the moment. If there's any good in this it's that it reminds me of the importance of these kinds of spatial concerns in the way poems are read.)

This energised quality of course suits the idea of a writer on the go. In 1967 Blackburn returned to Europe - he had lived in France and Spain between 1954 and 57 - this time on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The poem BIRDS /AMSTERDAM is dated Nov. 18-20 1967. The cleverness of the poem is that it sees or hears in the names of the different districts of Amsterdam (Prinsengracht, Herengracht? Leidseplein etc.) the same harch consonant or nasal sounds the birds make along the canals. It's great too in its humour and imagination: it begins with: "Flurry of fat sparrows hits the fence...10 notes 2 chords/ I try to sightread/the melody/ too fast, they've gone" - this one of several such moments in the poem. Finally I love the way the experience itself devolves to the page so that when it says: "it's ducks swimming along leaving/delicate wakes along the quiet canals/Well, not so quiet . QUACK", it's both the duck we can hear and the poet reading the poem aloud to himself or his readers.

Paul Blackburn - The Journals

I picked up Paul Blackburn's The Journals the other day at Cooks Hill Books and Records. The poems in this collection, Blackburn's last, span the years 1967-71. The last poem, dated July 28, 1971, was written shortly before the poet's death in September of the same year. The editor, Robert Kelly, states in his introduction that Blackurn had "tried to collect the pages together and did sense them as a continuous and ceherent whole". So far I've only read a few of the poems, though in the next weeks I'm going to keep a kind of journal of The Journals, quoting or commenting each day when/wherever something catches my eye.

How better to begin a book of poems than with these lines from

JOURNAL 5.XI.67

How is it I keep remembering

after all those/these facts,

this flack

keeps . coming?

It all drives back upon the brain .

After yesterday, two things were

plain-ly set against the mindfall

Liked this too in

CYCLE WORLD 1966

An-other/ terrible Sunday morning in the world,/ everybody juiced and coffeed

and then the opening lines of

UNCHARTED

SUN is that

rare in Paris, I

almost swim in it

The day accomplishes itself with its

small failures & annoyances

It's the little flashes of colour set amongst the quotidian that I like in these poems - Blackburn's attention to the everyday/the world.

More to come tomorrow.