Black Mountain poets scaled poetry’s unknown peaks
Black Mountain College was a grand experiment. Founded in 1933 by former faculty members of Florida’s Rollins College, the institution was named for its locationBlack Mountain, North Carolina. The purpose of the school was to apply John Dewey’s principles of education to real life and to situate art as the centerpiece and foundation of a liberal arts education. Architect Buckminster Fuller taught at the college, as did dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Poetry also owes a heavy debt to the college, thanks to the efforts of a group known appropriately as the Black Mountain poets.Poet Charles Olson, who coined the idea “postmodern” in 1949, was an important leader of the group, thanks to the publication of his 1950 essay Projective Verse. This piece called for a new type of poetry that replaced classic forms with an improvised structure that reflected the content of the poem. Each line should exist of “a unit of breath and of utterance.” The other Black Mountain poets took this essay as their manifesto. Among their number were Larry Eigner, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, Denise Levertov, Joel Oppenheimer, Robert Creeley, and Jonathan Williams.Creeley was the editor of the Black Mountain Review for two years, which published many pieces by both the Black Mountain poets and the Beats. Unfortunately, Black Mountain College was just a little too avant-garde to sustain itself, and closed down in 1956. However, the poets continued to function as a “school,” which was solidified in the anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen.Today, the Black Mountain poets are generally regarded as a dream of what could be (a new type of language in which form and content are synonymous) and as an important foundation for the LANGUAGE school of poets, who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many of the Black Mountain poets’ works are still in print in collected or reprinted editions. Take a chance to explore them and see an early example of the poetry underground, buoyed by the same spirit that Junction Books carries on today.