The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College in North Carolina. [1]
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College in North Carolina. [1]
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.
The literary movement traditionally described as the "Black Mountain Poets" centered around Charles Olson, who became a teacher at the college in 1948. Robert Creeley, who worked as a teacher and editor of the Black Mountain Review for two years, is considered to be another major figure. [2] Creeley moved 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. [3] Members of the Black Mountain Poets include students and teachers at Black Mountain, together with their friends and correspondents. [2]
The term was first coined by Donald Allen in his anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (which divides the poets included in its pages into various schools). He included Olson, Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Paul Blackburn, and Paul Carroll in its members. [4] Allen's definition of the Black Mountain poets proved to be crucial: it established a legacy and promoted their literary influence worldwide. [3]
However, the exact definition of the group is considered disputable. Olson described the term as "bullshit" and stated that they never considered themselves a particular "clique" or had a particular form of poetics. [2] Other principal figures often included in the Black Mountain poets include John Wieners, M. C. Richards, [5] Hilda Morley, [3] Francine du Plessix Gray, [6] Fielding Dawson, Paul Goodman, and Arthur Penn.
The Black Mountain poets were largely free of literary convention, a feature which defined contemporary American poets. [6] Their work became characterized by open form. [3] Olson's pedagogical approach to poetry emphasized the importance of personal experience and direct observation, something which greatly influenced the Black Mountain poets. [7] Many of the Black Mountain poets, including Levertov, Duncan, and Dorn, explored individual agency's potential to affect collective change through their political poetry. [8]
In 1950, Charles 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. [2] Olson felt that English poetry had become restricted by meter, syntax and rhyme instead of embracing the more natural constraints of breath and syllables which he felt would define true American poetics. [6] 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").[ citation needed ]
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. [9] They were also important for the development of the innovative British Poetry Revival of the 1960s, [10] as evidenced by such poets as Tom Raworth and J. H. Prynne. In Canada, the Vancouver-based TISH group, including George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt, were heavily influenced by the Black Mountain poets. Modern projectivist poets include Charles Potts. [11]
Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Charles Olson was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including poetry and prose.
American poetry refers to the poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by American colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the early colonists' work was similar to contemporary English models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, an American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, poets like Walt Whitman were winning an enthusiastic audience abroad and had joined the English-language avant-garde.
Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was heavily influenced by the Black Mountain poets and by the political context of the Vietnam War, which she explored in her poetry book The Freeing of the Dust. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Paul Blackburn was an American poet. He influenced contemporary literature through his poetry, translations and the encouragement and support he offered to fellow poets.
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 is a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999. As of 2024, Edward Field and Gary Snyder are the only contributors still living.
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance since the 1970s and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
Warren Tallman was an American-born poetry professor who influenced the Vancouver Tish poets.
Hilda Morley was an American poet associated with the Black Mountain movement.
Robert J. Bertholf was an author and professor at Kent State University, and the University at Buffalo. He was the Charles D. Abbott Scholar-In-Residence and former curator of The Poetry Collection at Buffalo.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Larry Eigner, also known as Laurence Joel Eigner, was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School.
Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer.
The Jargon Society is an independent press founded by the American poet Jonathan Williams. Jargon is one of the oldest and most prestigious small presses in the United States and has published seminal works of the American literary avant-garde, including books by Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Paul Metcalf, James Broughton, and Williams himself, as well as sui generis books of folk art such as White Trash Cooking.
Ronald Johnson was a poet from Ashland, Kansas, whose significant works include a number of experimental long poems such as The Book of the Green Man, RADI OS, and his magnum opus ARK. Johnson graduated from Columbia University 1960, wandered in Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died. Writer and critic Guy Davenport once referred to Johnson as America's greatest living poet, while poet Robert Creeley considered Johnson was "one of the defining peers of [his] own imagined company of poets."
Richard Denner is an American poet associated with the Berkeley Street Poets and the Poets of the Pacific Northwest. He is the founder and operator of dPress, which has published over two hundred titles, mostly of poetry and most in chapbook format.
Richard Lowell Blevins is a poet writing in the tradition of Ezra Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan, an editor of the Charles Olson-Robert Creeley correspondence, and an award-winning teacher. He was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, in 1950. His undergraduate career was halved by the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings. He was declared a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. At Kent State, he studied poetry and the imagination with Duncan and literature of the American West with Edward Dorn. But he has often said that Cleveland book dealer James Lowell was his most formative early influence. He holds degrees from Kent State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D., English literature, 1985; dissertation on the western novels of Will Henry. He has taught literature and poetry writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg since 1978, also serving as Humanities Chair for nine years. He is a winner of a Chancellor’s Award, in 1999, the university’s highest recognition for teaching. He previously taught at the University of Akron and Kent State.
Alan Perress Loney is a New Zealand writer, poet, editor, publisher and letterpress printer. His work has been published by University and private presses in New Zealand, Australia and North America. His own presses have printed and published many of New Zealand's most noted poets. He has also produced books himself, and in collaboration with artists and printmakers in New Zealand and overseas. Originally living and working in New Zealand, he now resides in Melbourne, Australia.
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