Black Mountain Poets
The Black Mountain Poets were a group of avant-garde poets associated with Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the 1950s and 1960s. They emphasized experimentation, collaboration, and interdisciplinary approaches to poetry, often incorporating visual and performative elements into their work. Notable members included Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov. Their work had a significant influence on the development of modern American poetry.
3 Key excerpts on "Black Mountain Poets"
- R.P. Draper(Author)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...7 ‘Black Mountain’, and the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes PROJECTIVE VERSE In the 1940s the American poet Charles Olson (1910–1970) became the rector of Black Mountain College, a liberal institution in the western part of the state of North Carolina. The College’s aims included the development, both in theory and practice, of a free and informal (but not formless) style of poetry dubbed ‘projective verse’. In his essay on this subject Olson deplores what he sees as ‘the reaction now afoot [i.e. in 1950] to return verse to inherited forms of cadence and rime’; and, harking back to the work of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, he argues for a more ‘open verse’ which will be responsive to the ebb and flow of emergent meaning. It will not be a verse of orderly shaping and monumental solidity, but a lithe, flexible and energetic verse capable of picking up intimations of the future rather than enshrining ideas and emotions of the past. Instead of accentual metre and rhyme Olson promotes a new technique in which syllables and lines are governed purely by the sensitivity of the poet’s ear, and in which there is an instinctive appreciation of the relation between phrasing and breath comparable to that of a good actor or musical performer. (Although he makes no actual reference to the speaking of verse, Olson was a dramatist as well as a poet; and, still more to the point, he was also a trained musician.) Olson also sees projective verse as part of a necessary corrective to the arrogance of modern man whose technology has substituted machinery and mechanical repetition for the supple rhythms of nature. Thus traditional metric is associated in his mind with assertion of the ego – ‘that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature... and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation call objects’. Projective verse is to be free from this egotism...
eBook - ePubThe Experimenters
Chance and Design at Black Mountain College
- Eva Díaz(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...In 1957, when the College closed its doors, it had dwindled to less than a half a dozen paying students, with a little over a thousand students having attended since its inception. Despite its short life and modest size, Black Mountain assumes a prominent place in the genealogies of widely disparate fields of thought. It has been heralded as one of the influential points of contact for European exiles emigrating from Nazi Germany; as a standard-bearer of the legacy of intentional (or planned) communities such as Brook Farm in Massachusetts; as the bellwether campus of Southern racial integration; as an important testing ground for proponents of progressive education; and, as this book takes up, as a seminal site of postwar art practices in the United States. 3 Adding to the College’s legend, the number of famous participants—in addition to Albers, Cage, and Fuller, faculty included Albers’s wife Anni, Merce Cunningham, Clement Greenberg, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Ben Shahn; among the students were Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Kenneth Snelson, and Cy Twombly—and the breadth of their artistic diversity have garnered it an impressive reputation, if an uneven historical treatment. Among the many stories that could be told of Black Mountain College, this book follows the thread of a single concept: experimentation. It can be traced in the spirit of radical innovation at the core of the College’s educational philosophy; for example, in a 1938 campus bulletin, weaving professor Anni Albers implored her students and other artists to employ “free experimentation. ....
eBook - ePubOn the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum
Essays in Loving Strife from Soren Kierkegaard to Cornel West
- William V. Spanos(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Later that evening after the talk, a few of us adjourned to the home of Sam Moon—or was it of the Lincoln scholar, Doug Wilson?—to talk informally with Creeley over drinks. That occasion was equally memorable in that it corroborated my sense that this poet was one whose mission had to do with the role of American poetry in the United States. Although he mentioned in passing British, French, Latin American, and Soviet Union poetry, there was no question in my mind that Creeley privileged American poetry—or, more to the point, the anti-teleological—“projective”—poetry of the Black Mountain Poets and their maverick models: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Louis Zukovsky, among others, whose guiding principle was William Carlos Williams’s radically revolutionary ontological dictum: “no ideas but in things.” I vividly recall, for example, the anecdote recounted by Allen Ginsburg to Creeley after a visit with the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Soviet Union. It was a simple gesture—perhaps too simple. Ginsburg raised his right hand and drew a square in the air over his head. This could have been interpreted as a gesture that would later come to be called American exceptionalism. But that—and the Black Mountain School’s strong emphasis on the radical finiteness of its American poetry—would not name Ginsburg’s gesture and Creeley’s retelling of the exemplary anecdote to us...
