**On Three-Day Weekend by Christopher Blackman**

by Tyler Truman Julian

In a Whitmanesque style, Christopher Blackman’s Three-Day Weekend catalogues vivid East Coast cityscapes and populates them with nostalgia, loneliness, and the beauty of little joys. In this way, he explores hope and human connection with humor and attention to detail that makes his poetry particularly strong.

From its opening poem, Three-Day Weekend asserts itself as a collection of highly contemporary and universally relatable poetry. The age-old question, who am I, moves between the lines as the speaker establishes himself, and the reader is expected to wrestle with it alongside the speaker. The speaker invites us into his urban Americana, reporting through Blackman’s signature descriptive poetics,

            We stood in a crowd beneath strings of lights,
            each of us moved by possibility, joined
            in vague conspiracy, giving the night
            the feeling that cranes could carry a camera above us,
            were it all a film, to denote our scale, to denote the rush
            of being in the right place at the right time—

(“Feast of St. Michael and All Angels”)

This euphoria is swiftly tempered by Blackman’s speaker and the urban setting—reminiscent of Whitman’s crowded Manhattan—when he announces later in the same poem: “All the best things happen in parking lots—” Yet, this is the first hint of the small joys that Blackman and his speaker are pointing the reader to. It also represents Blackman’s shrewd use of the volta in his poetry, moments in which his poems turn and grow in both meaning and strength. These moments coupled with thoughtful enjambment in his less structured poems show Blackman’s skill as a poet. Three-Day Weekend is never dry; it perpetually draws the reader toward some deeper revelation.

Blackman’s emphasis on little joys and their role in self-making builds across the collection. His speaker embraces the ebb and flow of urban life, craving connection and freedom to be himself. The imagery of parking lots, introduced earlier in the collection, is fully elaborated as the speaker reveals,

           But we still have green
           in its many forms—
           on lawns and boulevards,
           under the noontime sun.
           How I love lunch in the summer—
           how good it feels to be allowed,
           by law, to experience opulence:
           sitting back in your car
           in the Burger King parking lot,
           food laid on your dashboard

(“Lunch in Summer”)

The urban landscape isn’t stifling for Blackman’s speaker. Rather he uses its busyness, its sheer volume of noise and people, as a crutch—a reality of which he is painfully self-aware. “I’m sensitive to the unique loneliness / of the state fairground forty-nine weeks of the year,” he laments in “Two Tickets to Paradise,” adding,
            and the mall Santa in June,
            and anything, really, that is an eyesore
            out of its single context, returning me always
            to the question “Is it better to be versatile
            or to specialize?” Now I have everything
            I want and still there is more to want—

These moments of painful self-reflection that Blackman presents are not only relatable and poignant, but also often laced with humor. In “Stooges,” the speaker delves deeper into this juxtaposition more deeply:
            The saying goes “if you don’t laugh
            you’ll cry” and though I do a good bit
            of both I learned quickly
            a person wears a joke the way
            a man training dogs wears a bite suit—
            both as armor and as a tool to train animals
            the best ways to draw blood. My sister says
            I look like John Hinkley Jr.,
            Reagan’s almost-assassin, and so I laugh.

This humor poses a challenge to the reader by prompting them to reflect on humor’s role as escapism and connection-building, and often these profound moments take on a more structured form. Blackman showcases this in “Terminal,” employing tercets to give the reader a pattern to help absorb the poem’s significance:
            I take inventory of my sins. My life
            has been a sequence of desperate acts
            in the service of being wanted. I lie awake

            and draft unimpeachable defenses
            for my personality, knowing that one day
            I will have to answer for myself.

Three-Day Weekend repeatedly invites readers to empathize with Blackman’s speaker throughout and, ultimately, grasp the poignant loneliness that echoes through its pages, reminiscent of Whitman’s call for a new “hand ever day!”

Three-Day Weekend captures the subtle and authentic moments of a real life and should appeal to all readers, urban, rural, old, and young. Blackman’s attempt to draw readers into the narrative with descriptive and humorous situations turned profound effectively crafts deep connection throughout the collection. While the speaker is left yearning for his own personal connections and exists in much the same mental space at the end of the collection as at the beginning, the reader recognizes their own life—or at least a life wrestling with universal questions of acceptance and identity—in this collection. Three-Day Weekend is a collection for the nostalgic and the introspective, a testament to the human experience in all of its searching for—and making of—meaning. It is a collection for us all.

In case you missed it—here is Christopher Blackman’s poem from The Shore:

Meditation at Colonial Williamsburg