Abstract
When Paul Blackburn died in 1971 at age forty-four, his few books of poetry were out of print; some of them were exceedingly rare. Friends of the poet, seeking to rectify this and make his work better known, posthumously edited and published numerous additional books of Blackburn's poetry and translations, culminating in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn (Persea 1985). Blackburn made his life the subject of his poetry, and the chronologically arranged Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn is a running narrative of his life. After Blackburn's mother abandoned her family to pursue a career as a poet, Blackburn's need to recapture her love led him to take up her career. In addition, Blackburn developed an unconsciously maternal devotion to the poetry reading scene and to fellow poets. Blackburn's deep-seated and contradictory feelings of mistrust and desire toward women found affinity in the courtly love tradition of the twelfth-century Provencal troubadours, whose philosophy he embraced and whose poetry he translated throughout his career. Further, his active role in the poetry reading scene in coffee houses and bars in Greenwich Village and throughout the Lower East Side of Manhattan was influenced by his love of the troubadours. Blackburn quietly and diligently perfected his craft during the 1950s and 1960s amid the turmoil in his own life--three marriages and numerous affairs--and in the burgeoning underground poetry scene around him. Better and more fully than any postmodern poet, Blackburn absorbed and assimilated the poetic tenets of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. With skills strengthened by his role as a translator, Blackburn enriched the techniques invented at midcentury and became a maestro at typographically orchestrating a poem to guide the reader in voicing the poem as the poet himself would. Blackburn wrote some of the finest postmodern poetry and is, perhaps, the definitive postmodern poet. He is a vital and important figure for illuminating and further defining the postmodern movement in America at midcentury.
Simmons, Joseph Edgar (1987). Paul Blackburn : quiet postmodern revolutionary. Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. Libraries. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /DISSERTATIONS -755359.