venuti

Margin 263The wind blowthsnow fallthbranches whip in the winddown, rise, forth and backdrifts groweth summatIt’s going to take us two days at least toshovel out of this one, off to Buf-fa-lo, oMarch, after all, Springcometh.(ibid.:613)The Journals is essentially an individualistic project, a verse diaryof Blackburn’s last years, travelling in Europe and the United Stateswith his wife Joan and son Carlos, suffering through the finalstages of his illness with cancer. Yet Blackburn’s prosodicexperiments give all this an anti-individualistic edge by pushingthe verse toward greater heterogeneity, using rhythm, punctuation,typography to foreground the textuality and erode the coherenceof the speaking voice, now a site of diverse lexicons, cultural codes,social affiliations, whose very juxtaposition invites a mutualquestioning.The Provençal project was also a source of personae and themes forBlackburn’s poems, some of which carry on the social criticism heoccasionally worked into the lexicon of the translations. His version ofGuillem de Poitou’s Ab lo dolchor del temps novel—In the new seasonwhen the woods burgeonand birdssing out the first stave of new song,time then that a man take the softest joy of herwho is most to his liking.(Blackburn 1958:13)—gets quoted in a poem contemporary to the 1958 manuscript,“Meditation on the BMT”:Here, at the beginning of the new seasonbefore the new leaves burgeon, oneither side of the Eastern Parkway stationnear the Botanical Gardens