The Selected Poems

by Paul Blackburn, Edith Jarolim (Editor)

Collects poems by a leading member of the Black Mountain movement, written between 1949 and 1971

Genres: Poetry

265 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1989

Reviews

[Ted Burke]

Paul Blackburn is one of those nearly forgotten in the rush of critics and readers to canonize the Beats and the New York School, and one wonders after reading his amazing poems why his books aren't in print. The Electronic Poetry Center at Suny Buffalo has just added a Paul Blackburn page, with links to a few of his poems and terrific commentary from Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly and Michael Davidson, among others. He was an amazing poet who could parse the spoken idiom and make it sing with a unique tone and personality better than any poet since W.C.Williams, and he could insert the most subtle of philosophical paradox and shifting viewpoints with writing that seemed off hand,an effortless expression.The seeming ease of line indicates the attuned ear, the steady pen, the economy of a master who could arrange his blocks of language, position the line breaks, compose the length of the line to a rhythmic sense that doesn't escape you as you read his work. If there was anyone who understood and achieved great effects of Williams' theory of the variable foot, Blackburn was that poet. There was always an electric current in his best poems, the thrill of the mind racing while the body is charged with energy, excitement.

Definition



Long ago and far away


and the swimmer
heading out into the bay
arm lift, plunge down, the head turning;
my heart you may swim forever
out. Look,


there is the horizon
Sea and sky meet, change; why
are we not this real intensity forever?
surrounded and known.
The world else is brown and calculated.


There on the beach, the
woman watches.
Between her legs the dog sits,
wiggling, wanting to go
too. It is a kind of death watching him swim out,
away from her, his head getting smaller and smaller, flash
of arm in sun, down,
distant churn of water between the small waves. She
holds the dog's two haunches in her hands.


He is hardly to be restrained, and love
is manifest, is felt from the two of them
differently.


The swimmer is himself.




There was a large world his eyes beheld, and he had the skill to get his perceptions in tuned with a personality framed the ironies and contradictory impulses in that odd space our language skills that allows us to hover over our own views, ambivalence and ambiguity. Not that Blackburn himself was distanced from his subjects; rather, his poems, his finest work, integrated his ideas with the terrains and the personalities within them.

[Matthew M.]

It would be unfair to say exactly when I have actually read this much occluded poet's collected poems. I dabble at them when I please. They make evident a mind participating in the New American Poetry, whose resources are beyond what I could declare to be this or that. I'll not attempt further explication. Needless to say, Paul's work is largely our of print. He needs to be rediscovered by a new generation of younger poets.

[Michael]

There are some incredible gems in here. But the collection itself is uneven. Some it looks like are scraps found around where he lived and pasted in. But his images are evocative and powerful and his command of the language is true. I really liked a whole lot of these poems.

[Jamil]

"For Mercury, Patron of Thieves, A Laurel"

[Andrew]

Found him through a review he wrote in an old Big Table mag...very eye opening.

[GreenApple Alice]

I want to find this book! For some reason, I have never been able to find any Paul Blackburn in bookstores. Which is a shame because he is brilliant. I am stepping up the search...