On Friday, with the power still out – it came on for five minutes around 9 AM, just long enough for me to get a cup of tea & Krishna a cup of coffee, then didn’t show up again until 1 PM when we were, in fact, heating up chicken cacciatore leftovers on the barbee – there was little I could do in the way of work. Jesse & I took a dawn walk around the neighborhood, to check out downed limbs, fallen trees & see if we would, in fact, be able to leave the neighborhood if we needed to. One oak tree came down a block away just barely missing a house & some limbs had made another street temporarily impassable, but that was about it.

 

So I sat on my front porch & read for awhile & came upon, I swear, the closest thing to a “lunch poem” by Paul Blackburn I can recall ever seeing.

 

RITUAL XVII.   it takes an hour

 

 

Money seems to avoid me in

some mysterious way

 

                                                so

              what else should I do, waiting

              for my check to be cashed but

use a large Hispano-Olivetti and its outsized carriage

sitting in the middle of the floor

 

First, tho, they

recognized me from similar occasions, the

check had some kind of stamp across its face, and they

said I had to open an account   .

                                                     OKay,

so I agreed I would open an account, if I had to, why not?

Then draw out most of the money, right?

 

I had the account almost open, all those

questions & answers & signatures, I was even

enjoying it, the

chica filling out the forms filled out a

pretty tight sweater herself, good

legs and lovely breasts resting lightly

         on the desk as she bent

             her forms

                          to those forms   .   Then,

this damned vicepresident  comes back to tell me he’d

got permission to pay me cash, I tried to look grateful  .

 

So she tore up all that paper and I had to

settle for a nice smile and the bust measurement instead of a good,

solid banking relationship .

But they weren’t thru with me yet :

 

Had to sign it twice myself (por

motivo de turismo, that horror), then

the vicepresident, then a clerk, then

another official of some sort, the whole

damned check is covered with signatures, passport No.

addresses, verifications

                          : then I wait

                                  some more  .

 

The authorization arrives back   .   even then, the

window of various pagos takes   3   people ahead of me  .

So I sit and write the first poem I’ve ever written in a bank  .

 

It   IS   a lovely typewriter, and a handsome type    .    perhaps

I should come here to write

                                 all my poems  .

 

The poem comes from The Journals, edited posthumously by Robert Kelly after Blackburn’s tragically early death to cancer. I’ve been rereading The Journals, in good part because I later felt that a slighting comment I made about them had been unfair.

 

Written in June of 1968, it’s impossible to imagine that Blackburn hasn’t already read O’Hara’s 1964 Lunch Poems some of which were written on “floor sample” typewriters in department stores. He’s both recounting a narrative about a simple enough event, cashing a check in an Italian bank, and having fun with a genre that is not precisely his own. Indeed, I see two primary differences here between what Blackburn does and O’Hara. The most obvious one perhaps is the un-self-reflective sexism. Blackburn is very much a creature of his generation in this regard – there is nothing in the poem to distance the speaker from these reductive observations. Comments like the ones here can be found throughout Blackburn’s work & give it an instantly retro air – his work “dates” in a way that few of the other New Americans seem to.*

 

More important, though, at least to my eye, is Blackburn’s ability to capture specifics & the enormous complexity of his line: so I agreed I would open an account, if I had to, why not? Even more supple than the metrics of this nine-foot line are its four assertions –

 

·         so I agreed

·         I would open an account

·         if I had to

·         why not?

– each of which carries the reading in a perceptibly different direction. There are exceptionally few poets who can do a thing of this sort well, Olson being the most obvious, though Eleni Sikelianos among more recent poets comes immediately to mind. 

 

The line is, I think, integral to the degree of information that the poet can convey. Blackburn’s line in general, with its open-endedness, its enjambments & even his use of variable spacing, is among the most complex ever achieved by a poet. I’ve sometimes thought that, as Projectivism receded in its influence after the deaths of Olson & Blackburn within a matter of months at the start of the 1970s, what was lost, more than anything else, was a sense of the inifinite possibility of the line. Creeley’s line, even at its most enjambed, is fundamentally simpler. Duncan by 1970 was in his 15-year hiatus between books.** Levertov, Dorn & Jones/Baraka had all turned elsewhere.

 

So Blackburn’s lovely poem here, at least half a joking homage to O’Hara, made me feel a profound sense of loss. Who, I thought, can write today with such specificity?

 

 

 

 

* It would be interesting to contrast Blackburn with discussions of physicality one can find in more recent gay literature, especially in some New Narrative writing, in the work of Kathy Acker, or even in the female-on-male commentary one gets on TV in HBO’s Sex in the City. I’m not convinced that Blackburn is any different save for the male-on-female perspective, even if I want to acknowledge that this is the perspective that has uniquely been aligned with power.

 

** And Duncan’s return would be sabotaged by his own insistence on a Courier typeface. By 1970, his role as a major influence on American writing was functionally over, a reality he found increasingly frustrating, perhaps especially since it seems to have been his own doing.