Paul Blackburn scratchpad

Paul Blackburn with Lee Byrd, 1967.

[Image source: Bobby Byrd's blog (http://whitepantiesanddeadfriends.blogspot.com/2008/10/paul-blackburn-in-memphis-1967_27.html). Paul Blackburn was visiting the Byrds in Memphis.]


I've been discovering Paul Blackburn's writing, something I've been meaning to do  for about a year, after Laurie Duggan mentioned him in a comment on this blog. Blackburn's poetry is a thrill, the way it keeps bumping into reality -- a kind of unstaged naturalism. With exquisite use of the page and the typewriter, especially the punctuation keys. Of course these remarks are not original.

Here's one of his poems, borrowed from the Poetry Foundation site:

Ritual X.: The Evening Pair of Ales

EAST OF EDEN

is mountains & desert

until you cross the passes into India  .

It is 3 o’clock in the afternoon or

twenty of 8 at night, depending

                   which clock you believe  .

AND WEST IS WEST

It’s where the cups and saucers are,

the plates, the knives and forks  .

                   The turkey sandwich comes alone

                   or with onions if you like

The old newspaperman always takes his hat off

& lays it atop the cigarette machine;

the younger, so-hip journalist, leaves his on

old-style .

The old man sits down in the corner, puts

                  his hat back on. No challenge, but

                        it’s visible, the beau geste  .

                                       The cigarette

hangs from the side of the younger man’s mouth, he’s

putting himself on  .

                   East of Eden is mountains & desert & every

                   thing creeps up on you & comes in the night,

                                      unexpectedly  .

when one would least put out his hand

to offer, or to defend  .

*
East of Eden, from Genesis 4:12 (Cain's dwelling after killing Abel), title of John Steinbeck's novel and Elia Kazan's movie, whose foregrounding of intergenerational conflict resonates in Blackburn's poem.

"East is east and west is west", Poem by Rudyard Kipling.

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

Somewhere lurking between these quotations is another one. "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is a Norwegian fairy tale collected in the 19th century (Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne); Brooks Bowman borrowed the title for his 1934 jazz standard.



*

I've found some good things online that I want to read more carefully, so I'm bunging all the links into this post.

EPC page, with a decent few poems, plus other writings, interviews etc (compiled by Jack Krick).

http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/blackburn/

Poetry Foundation page, including links to another bunch of poems:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-blackburn

Ron Silliman on PB:

https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/05/paul-blackburn-by-r.html

Edith Jarolim and M.L. Blumenthal (extracted from the Selected Poems):

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/blackburn/poetry.htm

Edie Jarolim (Introduction to the Collected Poems)

https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/blackburn/blackburn_jarolim_intro_collected.html

Edie Jarolim's retrospect, 30 years on:

https://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2016/09/14.html

Clayton Eshleman:

http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/2010/11/clayton-eshleman-on-paul-blackburn.html

*

Something that bothered me in the poem "Spring Thing", which begins thus:

Tomorrow Ramas
                                              & the moon will 
                                              come to full ,
Tonite at 9:25
she had just come over the mountain    .   a few 
light clouds pass quickly over her    ...

Surely the first line is talking about Domingo de Ramos, i.e Palm Sunday ? So maybe just a mistake, then. I can't blame him. One of the many baffling features of Spanish is its habit of giving subtly different meanings to masculine and feminine forms of the same root. "Ramas" is the common word meaning  "branches". "Ramos", however, means e.g branchlets of a main branch, or cut material, or ornamental arrangements such as bouquets. The right word, apparently, for the palm-fronds that carpeted Jesus's procession.