{"id":141097,"date":"2019-11-26T11:19:42","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T16:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141097"},"modified":"2019-11-26T12:48:13","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T17:48:13","slug":"redefining-the-black-mountain-poets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/26\/redefining-the-black-mountain-poets\/","title":{"rendered":"Redefining the Black Mountain Poets"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Drawing of project for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Architectural design by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. Photo of original work taken in Harvard Art Museums. Via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Grouping writers into \u201cschools\u201d has always been problematic. The so-called Black Mountain poets never identified themselves as such, but the facts of their union spring from a remarkable instance of artistic community: Black Mountain College and the web of interactions the place occasioned. Founded in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1933 and closed by 1956, the college was one of the most significant experiments in arts and education of the twentieth century. In recent years, a number of international exhibitions and publications have showcased the range of artwork produced at the college\u2019s two campuses, the first situated in the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, and the second at Lake Eden in the Swannanoa Valley. The list of famous names associated with Black Mountain is as impressive as it is unlikely, given that the college never housed more than a hundred students and faculty at a time, often far fewer.<\/p>\n

Difficult questions persist in attempting to define a \u201cBlack Mountain\u201d school of poets. Do we look to the physical and historical circumstances of Black Mountain College, or the complex pattern of friendships, influence, correspondence, publication, and collaboration that constitute the broader notion of this artistic coterie? <\/p>\n

Charles Olson, the nucleus of what we have generally considered Black Mountain poetry, began teaching at the college in 1948 and became its final rector in 1953. In 1954, he brought Robert Creeley\u2014Olson\u2019s \u201cFigure of Outward\u201d\u2014to Black Mountain. By that time there were fewer than twenty students in residence. However, through a network of relationships and correspondence emanating from Olson\u2019s \u201clittle hot-box of education,\u201d the instigations of Black Mountain College made an impact on artistic circles in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. The \u201copen field\u201d poetics of Olson, Creeley, and Robert Duncan in particular have influenced generations of poets. Still, the supposed Black Mountain school of poetry is difficult, if not impossible, to define. Olson said himself,<\/p>\n

I think that whole \u201cBlack Mountain Poet\u201d thing is a lot of bullshit. I mean, actually, it was created by the editor, the famous editor of that anthology, Mr. Allen \u2026 There are people, for example, poets, who just can\u2019t get us straight, because they think we form some sort of a what? A clique or a gang or something. And that there was a poetics? Boy, there was no poetics. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Donald Allen\u2019s anthology The New American Poetry 1945\u20131960<\/em> includes Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Joel Oppenheimer under the Black Mountain banner. Allen makes this selection based on these poets\u2019 publication in two important little magazines of the fifties, Origin<\/em> (edited by Cid Corman) and The Black Mountain Review <\/em>(edited by Creeley from 1954 to 1957). Two small presses\u2014Creeley\u2019s Divers Press in Mallorca and Williams\u2019s Jargon Press, founded in 1951 just before he arrived at Black Mountain\u2014published early works by many of these writers.<\/p>\n

Critics and editors have also argued that the Black Mountain poets can be understood in relation to Olson\u2019s \u201cprojective verse\u201d essay from 1950, in which he argues for a breath-metered poetry that breaks free from \u201cthat verse which print bred.\u201d Yet, just as he rejected the idea of Black Mountain poetry, Olson diminished the importance of his 1950 essay. Much of his work is concerned with the visual elements of poetry on the page as well as with sound projected on the breath. Susan Howe, one of Olson\u2019s poetic inheritors, argues that the \u201cfeeling for seeing in a poem, is Olson\u2019s innovation,\u201d and that this vision separates Olson\u2019s epic, The Maximus Poems<\/em>, from his predecessors Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and their verse epics, The Cantos<\/em> and Paterson<\/em>. Poems can be performative but also plastic and pictorial.<\/p>\n

In reference to Black Mountain, Olson once told Creeley, \u201cI need a college to think with.\u201d The intense artistic community shaped Olson\u2019s work and marked him as a distinctly pedagogical poet. Creeley once remarked that his voluminous correspondence with Olson leading up to their first meeting at Black Mountain was \u201cof such energy and calculation that it constituted a practical \u2018college\u2019 of stimulus and information.\u201d The profound creative and personal relationship between Olson and Creeley, both teachers at the college, is one window into the poetry and poetics associated with Black Mountain. Yet the story goes much deeper. As Olson says, it was \u201cCharlie Parker\u201d; it was improvised, open-ended, subject to chance and change.<\/p>\n

What is all too obvious is that Allen\u2019s grouping of Black Mountain poets leaves out a number of writers who have more to do with Black Mountain than some of those who appear in The New American Poetry<\/em>. Olson, Creeley, and Duncan taught at Black Mountain, and Dorn, Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams were students there. Levertov and Blackburn never set foot in Black Mountain, while students like John Wieners and poet-teachers like Mary Caroline Richards and Hilda Morley are left out of Allen\u2019s book and many other important anthologies of U.S. poetry. Olson rejected the idea of a common Black Mountain poetics, but if we look to the actual facts of the college\u2014the teaching, learning, and experimentation that went on there, and the extraordinary artists on its grounds and in its orbit\u2014we find certain elements of process, form, and content that reveal shared aims in their work.<\/p>\n

The college\u2019s founder John Andrew Rice envisioned an institution that would take the \u201cprogressive\u201d model as professed by John Dewey and push it further toward a new vision of education within democracy. It was not an art school. Rather, in line with Dewey\u2019s thinking, the college\u2019s goal was to provide a well-rounded curriculum that placed the arts at its center. Rice is quoted in a 1936 article on Black Mountain, published in Harper\u2019s Monthly<\/em>,<\/p>\n

Here our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content, to emphasize process, not results; to invite the student to the realization that the way of handling facts and him amid the facts is more important than the facts themselves \u2026<\/p>\n

There is a technic [sic<\/em>] to be learned, a grammar of the art of living and working in the world. Logic, as severe as it can be, must be learned; if for no other reason, to know its limitations. Dialectic must be learned: and no feelings spared, for you can\u2019t be nice when truth is at stake \u2026 Man\u2019s responses to ideas and things in the past must be learned. We must realize that the world as it is isn\u2019t worth saving; it must be made over. These are the pencil, the brush, the chisel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though the founding principles laid out by Rice in the thirties rarely come into discussion of the Black Mountain Poets, I can think of no better statement to unify the group of writers later associated with the college. Another founder, Theodore \u201cTed\u201d Dreier, writes, \u201cBlack Mountain has stood for a non-political radicalism in higher education which, like all true radicalism, sought to find modern means for getting back to fundamentals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black Mountain was not, however, isolated from the political realities of its time. From the beginning, the college\u2019s progressive experiment was shaped by a group of European \u00e9migr\u00e9s fleeing authoritarian regimes. Principal among these figures were Josef Albers, the German painter and former master in the Bauhaus, and his wife, Anni Albers, the weaver and teacher. Anni was Josef\u2019s student in the Bauhaus, and they came to America together after the Nazis forced closure of the German art school.<\/p>\n

Beginning in 1933, over sixteen years Josef and Anni were central to life at Black Mountain. Josef Albers\u2019s modified Bauhaus curriculum became the high standard for teaching at the college. His goal as a teacher, he said, was \u201cto open eyes.\u201d This was the focus of education at Black Mountain: finding new perspectives, new ways of seeing and thinking about the world. These means were aesthetic, pedagogical, and\u2014yes\u2014political.<\/p>\n

Josef Albers\u2019s teaching later influenced poets at Black Mountain. As Duncan says of his own classes at the college,<\/p>\n

I just had what would be anybody\u2019s idea of what Albers must have been doing. You knew that [Albers\u2019s students] had color theory, and that they did a workshop sort of approach, and that they didn\u2019t aim at a finished painting \u2026 I thought \u201cWell, that\u2019s absolutely right\u201d \u2026 I think we had five weeks of vowels \u2026 and syllables \u2026 Numbers enter into poetry as they do in all time things, measurements. But \u2026 [with] Albers \u2026 it\u2019s not only the color, but it\u2019s the interrelationships of space and numbers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interactions and relationships were part of the shared artistic concerns at Black Mountain, but they were also simple facts of life in the community. Beside the Black Mountain poets, one thinks of the incredible list of artists who spent time living, teaching, and studying at the college: Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Ruth Asawa, Cy Twombly, Dorothea Rockburne, Elizabeth Jennerjahn, Pete Jennerjahn, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Ray Johnson, Arthur Penn, Hazel Larsen Archer, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Merce Cunningham, Katherine Litz, John Cage, David Tudor, Lou Harrison, Stefan Wolpe\u2014the list goes on.<\/p>\n

On the grounds of Black Mountain College, relationships between these artists created new works. For instance, Creeley collaborated with painter Dan Rice on the book All That Is Lovely in Men<\/em>, which includes some of Creeley\u2019s finest early work. Creeley and Rice lived together at the college and shared a deep love of jazz, an interest that shaped the rhythms and stuttering syntax characteristic of Creeley\u2019s lyric poems.<\/p>\n

Olson participated in a \u201cglyph exchange\u201d with artist Ben Shahn and dancer-choreographer Katherine Litz, and he even attended some of Merce Cunningham\u2019s dance classes. William Carlos Williams, Albert Einstein, and John Dewey were all included in a list of the college\u2019s advisers. This gives a sense of how vibrant the artistic, intellectual, and social interactions at Black Mountain really were. It inspired focused attention and groundbreaking work, while\u2014like any small, tightly knit community\u2014it bred resentments and schisms that ultimately led to its end.<\/p>\n

Many of the well-known figures at Black Mountain wrote poems, and when we look at the life of the college from 1933 to 1956, we see a much wider view of what might be considered Black Mountain poetry. Josef Albers is the heart of Black Mountain pedagogy, and he served as a link between the Bauhaus and Black Mountain, extending those schools\u2019 influence in U.S. higher education through his later connections to Harvard and Yale. Like most of his artworks, Albers\u2019s poems are simple, direct, and economical.<\/p>\n

John Cage taught at the college for short periods in the spring and summer of 1948 and summers of 1952 and 1953, and he made a profound impact on the community alongside his collaborator Merce Cunningham. Cage\u2019s Theater Piece No. 1<\/em> (known as the first \u201chappening\u201d) is one of the most famous events in Black Mountain\u2019s history and mythology. The improvised event included Olson and Richards reading poems, with contributions from Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and Tudor, among others. Cage\u2019s largely chance-derived writing, much of which he wrote to be performed as lecture-poetry, expands the space-time experiments of his musical compositions.<\/p>\n

Paul Goodman also taught briefly at Black Mountain. A fine poet, he authored seminal prose works of the era, including Growing Up Absurd<\/em>, Communitas<\/em>, and Gestalt Therapy<\/em>. Goodman\u2019s work gives us a view into the profound shifts in society taking place in the United States in the forties and fifties. Black Mountain played a part in this shifting cultural landscape, and its instigations\u2014like Goodman\u2019s writing\u2014paved the way for counterculture movements of the sixties.<\/p>\n

Both M.\u2009C. Richards and Hilda Morley have been neglected for far too long. Richards was one of the most beloved teachers at Black Mountain. In 1948, she founded the Black Mountain Press and she published the first edition of The Black Mountain Review<\/em> (though it is possible that Olson and Creeley knew nothing of this earlier venture when they published their magazine in 1954). The Black Mountain student Fielding Dawson writes, \u201cWe must rid our minds of the famous names that have come to identify the school. A fresh approach to comprehend and define Black Mountain, would be to place M.\u2009C. at narrative center, and define Black Mountain through her. She as much as anyone, far more than most, assumed its identity, absorbed it, no matter where she was.\u201d Dawson places Richards in direct contrast to Olson as a potential center of Black Mountain poetry, art, and education. After leaving Black Mountain in 1954, Richards joined Cage, Cunningham, and Tudor in Paul Williams\u2019s Stony Point community in Rockland County, New York. Olson later referred to Stony Point as a \u201ccontinuing limb\u201d of Black Mountain College.<\/p>\n

Morley taught poetry at BMC, with a special interest in the Metaphysical poets. In 1952, she married Stefan Wolpe, the German composer who taught music at Black Mountain, and whom Olson refers to in the opening lines of \u201cThe Death of Europe.\u201d Wolpe suffered from Parkinson\u2019s disease for almost a decade before his death in 1972, and Morley wrote a beautiful book of elegies for him, What Are Winds & What Are Waters<\/em>. Morley\u2019s work shows a deep and abiding interest in contemporary painters, as we see in her poem \u201cThe Eye Opened.\u201d In \u201cFor Creeley,\u201d she gives an indelible portrait of the young poet upon his arrival at Black Mountain. Creeley himself contrasts Morley\u2019s work with \u201cthe characteristic male proscriptions one had thought to learn and attend.\u201d He continues in a foreword to her selected poems, The Turning<\/em>, \u201cI wonder at the way you taught yourself then to move with such lightness and particularity, touching each term and thing, each feeling, always making them actual\u2014like Denise saying (quoting Jung), \u2018Everything that acts is actual.\u2019 You made remarkable sense of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the term \u201cBlack Mountain\u201d stands for anything, it is a relentless searching\u2014constant experimentation with form and process to find what is at the root. As Olson writes in \u201cMaximus, to Himself\u201d: \u201cI have had to learn the simplest thing\u2009\/\u2009last.\u201d In different ways, the work of the Black Mountain poets seeks modern means for getting back to fundamentals. The power of their poems exists in a ceaseless inward searching and outward projection of simple human truths through the activity of poetry\u2014poems as the measure of a life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jonathan C. Creasy is an author, musician, editor, publisher, and educator based in Dublin, Ireland.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology<\/a>, edited by Jonathan C. Creasy. \u00a9 New Directions.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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