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.
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.
Robert Edward Duncan was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
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.
Joseph Ceravolo was an American poet associated with the second generation of the New York School. For years Ceravolo’s work was out of print, but the 2013 publication of his Collected Poems has made his work accessible again. His popularity has been limited to the community of writers. As Charles North writes “[Ceravolo’s] importance to American poetry over the past 30 years is still largely a secret.”
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.
Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art since 1951.
Harold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Joe Cardarelli (1944–1994) was a poet, painter, graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and teacher of writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art for 27 years. Cardarelli pushed generations of MICA artists to incorporate writing into their creative repertoire, and regularly collaborated with his faculty colleagues on projects and performances. He is noted for establishing poetry series such as the Black Mountain poets, St. Valentine’s Day Poetry Marathon, and the Spectrum of Poetic Fire at MICA. In its 25th year, the Spectrum of Poetic Fire reading series still brings quality poets to MICA’s campus for readings during the academic year.
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.
Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.
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."
Arthur Stringer was a Canadian novelist, screenwriter, and poet who later moved to the United States.
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.
Carol Bergé (1928–2006) was an American poet, highly active in the literary, performing and visual arts renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. In the 1980s a scandal in academia and her choice to fictionalize it cost her teaching jobs as well as support from the publishing industry. From there she championed antiquing as a profession, taking an extended sabbatical from writing until the last few years of her life, when she completed two books, both published posthumously.
Mary Caroline Richards was an American poet, potter, and writer best known for her book Centering: in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she continued to teach until the end of the summer session in 1951.
Sam Hamill was an American poet and the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press along with Bill O’Daly and Tree Swenson. He also initiated the Poets Against War movement (2003) in response to the Iraq War. In 2003 Hamill he did a poetic tour in Italy, organised by writer Alessandro Agostinelli. After that tour Hamill published his first italian book A Pisan Canto - Un canto pisano.
