Black Mountain Poets

What do you do when your ideas and style simply don't fit in with the mainstream? How do you express yourself without having to conform? For some poets, the answer is to create a unique outlet and group of like-minded creatives to express their ideas in a safe environment where there is acceptance. The Black Mountain Poets were a group of progressive writers associated with Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Although the period the Black Mountain Poets were together is brief, their influence is far-reaching.

Fig. 1 - Black Mountain College was located in scenic Black Mountain North Carolina.

Black Mountain Poets in American Literature

The Black Mountain Poets in American literature maintained an impact on the American poetic scene for a little over twenty years, from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. Although the poetry birthed from this group during the movement seems diverse in style and topic, one central characteristic seems to unite them in the realm of American literature. The poets used what is known as projective verse.

Identified by Charles Olsen (1910-1970) as open field writing, this is a difficult form to master. The style replaces poems' traditional meter and structure with a more dynamic and reactionary form. As it is written, the poem takes the shape it needs as dictated by the subject matter. Each line of the poem enhances the overall meaning and contains the idea of utterance. Each line of the poem only contains enough information in what can be spoken in one breath of speech. This forces the poet to carefully consider the diction used and manipulate the poetic form to adhere to this guideline.

Black Mountain Poets Timeline

The Black Mountain Poets found a central location at Black Mountain College, which used its progressive curriculum and instruction design to educate the whole person by focusing on the arts and artistic expression as central to an understanding of the self and the world. Black Mountain College began in 1933. It was run by a collection of academics who had been unhappy with their current institution and felt the curriculum stifling. They welcomed a renewed form of education that put the student, and their creativity, at the center of knowledge and exploration. It focused on collaborative education, experiential learning, and the idea that education should be for the betterment of society and democracy. While open, it welcomed many influential writers, artists, and musicians. Notable visitors included Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Anni Albers (1899-1994), and Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960).

In 1950, Charles Olson became a rector of Black Mountain College. Unhappy with the current journals, such as Origins, and their lack of crucial pieces, in 1954, Olson founded the Black Mountain Review. Along with his colleague Creely, Olson began the Black Mountain poets or progressive poets. To help their unique form and desire to keep each line a complete idea and full utterance, the group developed their own form of diction, often connected with the later Beat Generation of poets. Black Mountain College closed in 1956 due to a lack of funding, marking the end of the Black Mountain poets.

Black Mountain Poets' Characteristics

The Black Mountain Poets group formed in response to the poetic traditions followed by poets like T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). They favored a more freestyle form and were more aligned with modernist poets and writers like William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). Olson's essay "Projective Verse" (1950) expressed his view on the creative process and shared how the poem was a transfer of energy from the poet to the reader. This became their platform. While the group had a substantial amount of their early work published in the journal Origin (1951-1956), its life was short. They were unhappy with the journal's lack of critical material, and so formed the Black Mountain Review (1954-1957). Their poetry was noted for its reliance on colloquial language. Other characteristics of the Black Mountain poets include, but are not limited to:

• A value of experimentation
• An emphasis on the creative process
• Precise language and direct statements
• A use of metonymy
• Direct diction
• An improvised poetic form
• A concept called utterance
• Emphasis on nature
• Fragmented lines

Black Mountain Poets Group

The central figures often associated with the Black Mountain Poets group include:

Robert Creeley

The American poet Robert White Creeley (1926-2005) was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1926. Creeley's father died when Creeley was only about four years old, and his mother and sister raised him. Although he attended Harvard, he left to serve in the American Field Service for one year as an ambulance driver. He would eventually earn his graduate degree from the University of New Mexico. Creeley frequently communicated with William Carlos Williams, who was instrumental in helping him meet Charles Olson. Creeley was editor of the Black Mountain Review and helped Olson found it. Creeley and Olson worked closely together, developed the idea of projective verse, and both believed that a poem's form should help convey its overall message.

Fig. 2 - Robert White Creely and Charles Olsen founded the Black Mountain Review.

Robert Duncan

Robert Edward Duncan (1919-1988) was an American poet born in January 1919. He began his poetry writing as a teenager and studied for two years at the University of California in Berkeley. He moved to New York in 1938. It was there where he became enthralled in the literary and artistic movement of the time, and helped found the Experimental Review. As editor of the journal in 1940 and 1941, he published works by notable writers like Henry Miller (1891-1980) and Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990). Charles Olson invited him to teach at Black Mountain College in 1956. During this period, he developed some of his most famous works, including his collection called The Opening of the Field (1973).

Charles Olson

Charles Olson (1910-1970) was born in December of 1910. As an American essayist and poet, he was an extremely influential force in Modern American poetry and served as a connection between many other poets such as Ezra Pound (1885-1972), Paul Blackburn (1927-1971), and Denise Levertov (1923-1997). He had an extremely close and productive professional relationship with Robert Creeley, who helped him establish the Black Mountain Review and edited his volume of Selected Poems (1993).

Other notable figures of the movement are:

• Larry Eigner (1927-1996)
• Ed Dorn (1929-1999)
• Joel Oppenheimer (1930-1988)
• John Wieners (1934-2002)
• Hilda Morley (1916-1998)
• Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

Black Mountain Poetry Examples

While the Black Mountain poets covered a wide range of topics and subject matter within their poetry, they often had similar features in form and structure. Their writing became unique and individual in rejecting the standard forms of poetry seen in English poems.

The lines are fragmented, short, and contain just enough information to propel the reader forward to the next idea. Diction is direct, while the images are clean and precise.

Fig. 3 - Willows wave in the wind as time is described.

Creeley uses an experimental form to break up long ideas into short sentences and create powerful images with details and alliteration. The hard "b" sound in "body under/the bones" creates an emphasis and shows the strong contradiction between the soft flesh and hard bones.

In this excerpt, Paul Blackburn, an editor for the Black Mountain Review, experiments with spacing and uses enjambment to move the narrative forward and create tension in the poem.