In the late 1960s he lived in London and taught philosophy and literature at Chelsea School of Art, where he met the American poet Martha Kapos and the painters Ken Kiff and John McLean, who became lifelong friends.
After the unexpected death in 1980 of WPF's founder, William Kyle, Black chaired the executive committee for a year until the appointment of the new Director, Derek Blows.
The last of these early collections,Gravitations, consisted largely of three long narrative poems, two of them written in a hendecasyllabic metre derived from Swinburne.
During this period Black's work also appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 11 (1968) and Edward Lucie-Smith's Penguin anthology, British Poetry since 1945, and in many other places, and was widely commented on in Scottish contexts, for example in Robin Fulton's Contemporary Scottish Poetry (1974) and in reviews by Anne Stevenson (Lines Review 69, 1979) and Andrew Grieg (Akros 16:46, 1981).
He has written uncollected articles on many Scottish poets, Robert Garioch, George MacBeth, Hugh MacDiarmid, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan.