Paul Blackburn & Me: It’s Complicated

My Ph.D. dissertation and the two books that emerged from it, the Collected and Selected Poems of Paul Blackbur

It’s been thirty years since I finished editing the Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn. I still can’t quit him.

Paul Blackburn died on September 13, 1971—exactly forty-five years ago today. He was forty-four. I never met him, but I spent more than half a decade with him, writing my dissertation and editing his collected and selected poems. When I started this three-pronged project, it seemed to me that Blackburn had lived a reasonably long life. By the time I finished, I thought he’d died tragically young.

As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. Bear with me here. I never wrote down this story before, so I’m relishing the details.

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I first encountered Blackburn in the late 1970s through M.L. Rosenthal, whose Yeats seminar I had taken as a grad student at NYU. I’d been contemplating writing a thesis about one of the confessional poets, Rosenthal’s specialty, but when I went in to talk to him about possible dissertation subjects, Rosenthal said, “What do you think about Paul Blackburn?”

I hadn’t thought about him at all. Indeed, I’d never heard of him. Rosenthal explained, “Blackburn’s widow asked me to edit his collected poems. I don’t have the time but I told her I would pass the job along to a qualified graduate student.” He added, “If you do the scholarly edition for your dissertation, you’ll end up with a published book when you get your Ph.D.”

I got hold of The Cities, the book Rosenthal had recommended as quintessential Blackburn. Many of the poems were about the BMT subway line, which I’d grown up riding in Brooklyn. I admired Blackburn’s technical skill, his musical score-like notations of the works, his ability to make the writing look easy. I shoved down my doubts about his attitudes towards women. A published book…Now there was a shiny object for an aspiring academic.

For the rest of the story, published on an actual poetry blog, see Paul Blackburn and Me.

Tags: academia, Paul Blackburn, poetry