"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.