The Black Mountain Poets

Though the Black Mountain poets never labeled themselves or self-identified as a school of poetry, they are a group of interconnected poets, many of whom were connected together through Black Mountain College: an experimental, arts-centered university in North Carolina in operation from 1933 to 1957. Some Black Mountain poets, such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Hilda Morley, and Charles Olson, taught at the college. Others, including Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and John Wieners, were students or visitors to Black Mountain during Olson’s 1951–56 tenure on faculty and as rector. Still others, notably Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, and Larry Eigner, never visited Black Mountain College but published poetry alongside the others in the Black Mountain Review (1954–57), a literary magazine sponsored by the college and edited by Creeley. When editor Donald Allen organized his highly influential anthology The New American Poetry in 1960, he placed a group of poets, now called the Black Mountain poets, first.

In the 1950s, Black Mountain poets might have attended writing classes together, eaten communal dinners, managed the college’s scraggly farm, or found themselves listed in the same tables of contents in magazines and journals. More important, they shared commitments to poetry and poetics. Indeed poetics (how poems work or produces their effects) was a key term for Olson, whose manifesto, “Projective Verse,” written while he was at Black Mountain College, is widely regarded as the primary document of the Black Mountain school. Olson’s principles appear to various degrees in the works of other Black Mountain poets—the reliance on the breath or “syllable” as the unit of composition; “composition by field,” or use of the entire page rather than traditional formal arrangements such as stanzas; the injunction to get “rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul,” a call to reorient the poet’s stance toward reality. Olson developed his ideas in conversation and correspondence with others, including Creeley, from whom he took the dictate “form is never more than an extension of content.” The choral nature of both the manifesto and the writers and artists brought together in the Black Mountain Review highlight the importance of community to this group of poets; the idiosyncratic nature of Black Mountain College grounded those efforts in experience.

Black Mountain College was founded by John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier in 1933. During World War II, the school absorbed many European avant-garde artists, notably Josef and Anni Albers, and it continued to host artists, choreographers, composers, and poets despite low enrollments, ongoing financial troubles, and sometimes vicious social hierarchies. Although some Black Mountain poets studied there and some others never set foot on the campus, the college provided an important context for the movement. Harris Kaplan argues that “Black Mountain poetry was less a poetic revolution in its own right than a changing of hands after World War II, when the international intelligentsia among the faculty conferred its prestige on the emerging American avant-garde.” That transfer of prestige coalesced around Olson, Creeley, and Duncan—all canonical figures by the late 20th century. This decidedly male coterie has since come under some scrutiny from those interested in recovering previously marginalized female Black Mountain poets such as Morley or more peripheral figures such as Eigner, who had cerebral palsy and wrote from his wheelchair. Rather than just explore the oeuvres of single figures, scholars also now track connections Black Mountain fostered among artists working in different media.

As an experiment in communal living and making art, Black Mountain College remains a vibrant historical episode. However, the Black Mountain poets’ preoccupations are perhaps its lasting legacy to contemporary poetry: poetics and poetics statements, process and techniques such as sequences, the poem as a field in which disparate energies, systems of knowledge, and personal experience converge, engaging poets to this day. Many Black Mountain poets went on to have long and varied careers. These selections focus on their works from the 1950s and early 1960s. The end of the Black Mountain school is generally considered to be 1970, the year Charles Olson died.

The collection that follows includes poems, essays, letters, reviews, and audio recordings that introduce major voices and concerns of the Black Mountain school. You can explore more poems by Black Mountain poets here.