Paul Blackburn is best known as a Black Mountain Poet because of his role as contributing editor and distributor of the Black Mountain Review: and his subsequent inclusion with the group in Donald Allen's influential New American Poetry anthology (1960). Although many of Blackburn's concerns with formal innovation were shared by such faculty members of the experimental Black Mountain College as Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, the label does not illuminate some of Blackburn's more characteristic roles. In addition to being a fine lyric poet, Blackburn was one of America's foremost translators of Provençal troubadour verse, and he was a key organizer of readings by Beats and other young poets in New York in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Blackburn was born in St. Albans, Vermont, to William Blackburn and Frances Frost, herself a poet and writer of children's books. Their parents having separated when Blackburn was...