Black Mountain poets
The
Black Mountain poets, sometimes called the Projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century
American avant-garde or
postmodern poets centered around
Black Mountain College.
Although it lasted only twenty-three years (1933-1956) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students,
Black Mountain College was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art education and practice. It launched a remarkable number of the artists who spearheaded the
avant-garde in the America of the
1960s. It boasted an extraordinary curriculum in the
visual,
literary, and
performing arts as evidenced by some of the artists and teachers listed here:
Its art teachers included
Anni &
Josef Albers,
Eric Bentley,
Ilya Bolotowsky,
Willem &
Elaine de Kooning,
Buckminster Fuller,
Lyonel Feininger,
Franz Kline,
Walter Gropius and
Robert Motherwell. Among their students were
John Chamberlain,
Kenneth Noland,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Dorothea Rockburne, and
Cy Twombly.
The performing arts teachers included
John Cage,
Merce Cunningham,
Lou Harrison,
Roger Sessions,
David Tudor, and
Stefan Wolpe. Among the literature teachers and students were
Robert Creeley,
Fielding Dawson,
Ed Dorn,
Robert Duncan,
Paul Goodman,
Francine du Plessix Gray,
Charles Olson,
M. C. Richards,
Ruth Asawa,
Arthur Penn,
Kenneth Snelson,
Stan Vanderbeek,
Jose Yglesias, and
John Wieners. Guest lecturers included
Albert Einstein,
Clement Greenberg, and
William Carlos Williams.
It was a unique educational experiment for the artists and writers who conducted it. Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed
liberal arts school that grew out of the
progressive education movement.
In
1950, Olson published his seminal essay,
Projective Verse. In this, he called for a poetry of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an improvised form that should reflect exactly the content of the poem. This form was to be based on the line, and each line was to be a unit of breath and of utterance. The content was to consist of "one perception immediately and directly (leading) to a further perception". This essay was to become a kind of
de facto manifesto for the Black Mountain poets. One of the effects of narrowing the unit of structure in the poem down to what could fit within an utterance was that the Black Mountain poets developed a distinctive style of poetic diction (e.g. "yr" for "your").
In addition to Olson, the poets most closely associated with Black Mountain include
Larry Eigner,
Robert Duncan,
Ed Dorn,
Paul Blackburn,
Hilda Morley,
John Wieners,
Joel Oppenheimer,
Denise Levertov,
Jonathan Williams and
Robert Creeley. Creeley worked as a teacher and editor of the
Black Mountain Review for two years, moving to
San Francisco in
1957. There, he acted as a link between the Black Mountain poets and the
Beats, many of whom he had published in the review.
Apart from their strong interconnections with the Beats, the Black Mountain poets influenced the course of later American poetry via their importance for the poets later identified with the
Language School. They were also important for the development of innovative
British poetry since the 1960s, as evidenced by such poets as
Tom Raworth and
J. H. Prynne.
Books
*Harris, Mary Emma.
The Arts at Black Mountain College. MIT Press, 2002. ISBN 0-262-58212-0
*Katz, Vincent (editor).
Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0-262-11279-5
*
blackmountaincollege.org *
1984 audio interview with Robert Creeley by Don Swaim of CBS Radio
