Black Mountain School

Introduction

Black Mountain School describes a group of poets who emerged in the 1950’s. Poets who are included in this group typically have displayed an avant-garde, postmodern poetic style at some time and have had a direct connection with Black Mountain College, have published works in Black Mountain Review (first a Black Mountain College publication and later a journal issued from 1954 to 1957), or were associated with a publishing company of a former Black Mountain College student.

Donald Allen, editor of The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1961), was one of the first writers to employ the term “Black Mountain School.” In the anthology, Allen categorized the included poets based on their geographic location, such as the Black Mountain School, New York School, and San Francisco Renaissance Poets. Allen identified eleven poets as being original members of the Black Mountain School. Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a part of the background of each of these eleven poets. Most of them had studied or taught at Black Mountain College. A number had works in the Black Mountain Review—either the Black Mountain College publication or the journal issued from 1954 to 1957. Many of them had employed open-form verse. Several had published with a publishing company associated with a former Black Mountain College student.

Black Mountain College

Situated in Buncombe County, North Carolina, the community of Black Mountain took its name from the mountain range wherein it nestles. The Black Mountains are a part of the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Southern Appalachians, which extend into West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. Black Mountain is about fifteen miles east of Asheville.

The population of the village of Black Mountain was about 750 in 1933 when John Andrew Rice, Jr. (1888-1968), and several other dedicated individuals founded the experimental Black Mountain College. Rice served as its first rector. Rice’s father, a Methodist minister, had been the president of Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, and a founding faculty member of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Rice’s mother was Annabelle Smith, the sister of U.S. senator Ellison Durant (“Cotton Ed”) Smith. Rice took many ideas for teaching from Webb School, the college preparatory boarding school that he attended (1905-1908) in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Rice advocated classroom discussion techniques, student-centered teaching, and a minimum of formal lecture.

A graduate of Tulane University, Rice received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. At Oxford, he met Frank Aydelotte, who would later be a president of Swarthmore College, and Frank’s sister Nell Aydelotte. Rice married Nell in 1914 after his Oxford graduation; they had two children before their divorce and his remarriage.

Rice taught one year at Webb School before entering the doctoral program at the University of Chicago. The progressive educator became a controversial faculty member at the University of Nebraska (1920-1927); conflicts led to his departure. Rice’s employment at New Jersey College for Women also involved controversy and lasted only two years. After a year in England on a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rice taught at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His controversial teaching methods, his opposition to fraternities and sororities, and his objections to college policies resulted in his resignation after three years. This time, however, some colleagues and students resigned with him and began planning an experimental institution: Black Mountain College.

Rice and the other founders of Black Mountain College intended for its faculty to operate and own the school. The model for governing Black Mountain College would be democratic. There would be no outside trustees overseeing the college; instead, a council—selected by the faculty and students—would offer suggestions. Both faculty and students would participate in all aspects of the college: governance, farmwork, construction, and even kitchen detail. The founders envisioned an innovative college that would emphasize John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. Social, cultural, and experiential activities would enhance learning and teaching. Important curricular emphases were the liberal arts, the fine arts, and literature. To complete their course of study, the students would have to pass oral examinations administered by outside examiners. There would be no normal degrees or graduation ceremonies at Black Mountain College. The seclusion of the mountain environment encouraged creativity, community, democracy, individuality, and learning.

Facilities of Black Mountain College

The facilities of Black Mountain College were unlike those of most colleges and universities. From 1933 to 1941, the founders of Black Mountain College rented the Young Men’s Christian Association’s Blue Ridge Assembly buildings, just south of the village of Black Mountain; these facilities had been in use primarily as a summer conference center. A three-story building, an assembly hall, plentiful rooms, and a view of the mountains seemed an ideal environment for the new college.

At its 1933 opening, Black Mountain College had twenty-one students. Over the years, as the college received increasing national recognition, enrollment grew, reaching nearly one hundred students yearly. The campus soon needed to expand. During the late 1930’s, the faculty began consulting with Walter Gropius—the German architect who founded the Staatliches Bauhaus School in Germany—and other architects to plan a larger, modern campus for Black Mountain College. Because of the impending war, however, the time for an extensive building project was not right. Still, the college was ready for some changes.

In 1940, the faculty requested that Rice tender his resignation. That year, Black Mountain College began the process of relocating to Lake Eden, just across the valley from the Blue Ridge Assembly location. The newly purchased Lake Eden property had originally been a summer camp and resort; it included a lakeside dining hall, two lodges, and several small cottages. The college enlisted the American architect A. Lawrence Kocher to devise a simple plan for the expansion of Black Mountain College. During 1940-1941, students and faculty of Black Mountain College constructed the Studies Building, a faculty cottage for music teacher Heinrich Jalowetz and his wife, and some other buildings for the campus. The college remained in this Eden Lake location until it closed in 1957.

The impact of the times

In the 1920’s, the educator Dewey developed his principles of progressive education, which contrasted with the traditional lecture method of teaching. His progressive teaching model—which featured student-centered learning—was used by many Black Mountain instructors. Black Mountain College’s curriculum and teaching methods incorporated many of Dewey’s ideas.

When Black Mountain College opened in the 1930’s, the United States was in the Great Depression. In its establishment and operation, the college had to consider the financial situation of potential students. Having the students and faculty work together was not just advantageous to the students and the school; it was a necessity for the survival of the institution.

World affairs also affected Black Mountain College. In Germany, Adolf Hitler was rising in power. He and his Nazi regime opposed the Staatliches Bauhaus School, which combined crafts and the arts in its teachings and operated from 1919 to 1933. The Nazis supported traditional architectural designs and opposed the cosmopolitan, modernistic designs advocated by the Bauhaus group. In the early 1930’s in Berlin, the married couple of Josef Albers, a Bauhaus artist, and Anni Albers, a weaver and textile designer, endured a search and interrogation by Nazi agents. Knowing of the pressures on the Bauhaus and its staff, Black Mountain College invited the Albers family to come to North Carolina. Neither artist could speak any English, but they readily made the trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains to begin a new life and escape political pressures. Their innovative ideas positively affected the curriculum of Black Mountain College and the work of the students. When the Staatliches Bauhaus in Berlin closed under Nazi pressure, many of its teachers and students tried to flee to the United States. As the persecution of intellectuals and artists throughout the European continent continued, even more teachers and students left their homelands for the United States; some settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Although students at Black Mountain College could choose many of their courses, each enrollee had to take the drawing course taught by Josef Albers. Because of its outstanding faculty—including the Bauhaus stage designer and graphic artist Xanti Schawinsky—and its innovative approaches to instruction, curriculum, and governance, the college began to gain national and world recognition. Black Mountain College became a center for transmitting the Bauhaus philosophy, for teaching innovations, for emphasizing the importance of art to one’s education, and for stressing the liberal arts, particularly literature.

Many famous people began to visit the campus and to participate in its programs for days or weeks at a time. One such visitor was Buckminster Fuller, the creator of the geodesic dome; he built the first dome on the campus of Black Mountain College. Other noted guests of the college included educator Dewey, Albert Einstein, the artist Jackson Pollock, and the writers Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley, William Carlos Williams, and Henry Miller. The faculty and students encouraged this outside interest and the direct involvement of their guests in the instruction.

Early publications

Black Mountain College began publishing the Black Mountain Review in 1951. This journal featured the work of faculty and students of Black Mountain College. The publication, however, did not operate for long. Another journal with the same title, Black Mountain Review, was issued from 1954 to 1957. This journal’s title reflected its place of publication rather than any affiliation with the college. However, Robert Creeley—a Black Mountain poet and a former teacher at Black Mountain College—did serve as its editor for a while.

Another journal, Origin, published in 1951 by Cid Corman (1924-2004), featured the works of many of the original poets of the Black Mountain School. The contributing editor of Origin was Charles Olson, a faculty member and a rector at Black Mountain College as well as one of the original Black Mountain poets.

The original members

Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, included eleven poets in the Black Mountain poets section: Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, John Wieners, Jonathan Williams, Joel Oppenheimer, and Hilda Morley.

Charles Olson

Charles Olson (1910-1970) was a professor and rector (1951-1957) at Black Mountain College. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Olson had studied at both Harvard and Wesleyan. With a Guggenheim Fellowship, he continued studying the works of Herman Melville. Olson’s ideas about poetry were an important part of the style of the avant-garde poets of the Black Mountain School. Olson devised the theory of projective verse and wrote of it in a 1950 essay. He proclaimed that a poem is energy; the poet transfers or projects the energy from its source through the poem to the reader. The source of the energy varies from poem to poem, but the purpose of the poem is discharging the energy. Olson stressed that the length of the line is the breath of the poet. He noted that the poet could narrow the unit of structure to fit an utterance or breath; as a result of this contraction, the poetic diction might employ a distinctive style, for instance “yr” for “your.”

There is not one poetic style that is followed by all the Black Mountain poets; they do, however, seem committed to open form. Open form replaced the traditional closed poetic forms used by earlier writers. The poetry of the Black Mountain poets could no longer be evaluated using the criteria of effective use of traditional poetic rules and conventional forms. Many essayists and critics still classify contemporary poets who work in projective verse, who use open form, and who attend to utterance or breath as members of the Black Mountain School.

In addition to producing his theory of projective verse, Olson was a prolific writer. More than one hundred of his shorter poems appeared in Archaeologist of Morning: The Collected Poems Outside the Maximus Series (1970), published by Cape Goliard in London. Olson’s most sustained poetic effort, however, was The Maximus Poems (1953-1983), a sequence published in numerous volumes. In 1987, the University of California Press published The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding “The Maximus Poems.”Selected Poems (1997) was edited by Creeley, another original Black Mountain poet.

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. He lived in Asia, Europe, and Latin America before coming to teach at Black Mountain College in 1955 and serving as editor of Black Mountain Review from 1955. When Creeley left two years later when the college closed, he became the Black Mountain poets’ link to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Two collections capture most of Creeley’s poetic works: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (1982) and The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005 (2006).

Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (1919-1988) taught at Black Mountain College from 1955 through 1957. Born in Oakland, California, this Black Mountain poet later became a leader of the San Francisco Renaissance. Two collections of Duncan’s poems that include individualistic spellings (utterances) are Derivations: Selected Poems, 1950-1956 and The First Decade: Selected Poems, 1940-1950, both published by Fulcrum Press in London in 1969.

Edward Dorn

Reared in the rural poverty of Villa Grove, Illinois, during the Great Depression, Edward Dorn (1929-1999) studied at the University of Illinois and at Black Mountain College (1950-1955). Dorn, with Duncan, Creeley, and Olson, became a Black Mountain poet. Olson influenced Dorn’s concept of poetry, and Creeley was one of Dorn’s final examiners at Black Mountain College.

After traveling and settling in the Pacific Northwest, Dorn produced his first book of poetry: The Newly Fallen, published in 1961 by Totem Press. He wrote the autobiographical The Rites of Passage: A Brief History, published in 1965 by Frontier Press and revised as By the Sound in 1971. He became known for his mock Western epic, Gunslinger I (1968), Gunslinger II (1969), and Gunslinger Book III (1972). Way More West: New and Selected Poems (2007) presents a selection of Dorn’s work over his entire career.

Denise Levertov

Born in Ilford, Essex, England, Denise Levertov (1923-1997) served as a nurse during World War II. After the war, she married an American writer and moved to the United States, where she became associated with the Black Mountain poets, especially Olson and Duncan. Her poetry collections include Here and Now (1957), The Sorrow Dance (1966), and The Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999), as well as the career-spanning Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960 (1979), Poems, 1960-1967 (1983), and Poems, 1968-1972 (1987).

Larry Eigner

Larry Eigner (1927-1996) had cerebral palsy from birth. He lived in Massachussets until 1978, when he moved to Berkeley. Black Mountain Review published some of his poetry, and Creeley’s Divers Press published Eigner’s first book, From the Sustaining Air (1953). Eigner wrote more than forty volumes of poetry. In 2010, Stanford University Press published The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner.

Paul Blackburn

Paul Blackburn (1926-1971) lived in St. Albans, Vermont, from his birth until 1940, when he moved to Greenwich Village with his mother. He began writing poetry and studied at New York University. In 1945, he joined the U.S. Army, then spent his service time in Colorado. In 1947, he returned to New York University, transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and graduated in 1950. During his college studies, he began corresponding with the poet Ezra Pound and visited him several times in Washington, D.C. Through Pound, Blackburn met the Black Mountain poets Creeley, Corman, Levertov, Olson, Oppenheimer, and Williams.

Blackburn published Proensa (1953), a translation of Provençal poetry, and The Dissolving Fabric (1955), a book of original poems, with Creeley’s Divers Press. Some of Blackburn’s poems appeared in Creeley’s Black Mountain Review. Blackburn, however, did not write only open-form poetry. He experimented with other types of writing, for example, that were typical of the New York School of poets.

He published thirteen books of original poetry, including The Nets (1961) and The Cities (1967), and five major works of translation. In addition, twelve other books appeared posthumously, including The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn (1985) from Persea Books.

John Wieners

John Wieners (1934-2002) was born in Massachusetts and earned his bachelor’s degree from Boston College. After hearing Olson read in 1954, Wieners enrolled at Black Mountain College and studied with Olson and Duncan from 1955 to 1956. Although Allen classified Wieners as a Black Mountain poet, Wieners also participated (1958-1960) in the San Francisco Renaissance, another of the geographic categories that Allen used in his 1960 anthology.

After living in New York and Boston, Wieners traveled with Olson to the Spoleto Festival in Italy and to the Berkeley Poetry Conference. Wieners enrolled in the graduate program at State University of New York at Buffalo, worked as a teaching fellow with Olson, and earned an endowed chair of poetics (1965-1967). He published The Hotel Wentley Poems in 1958 and was briefly institutionalized in 1960. The Gallery Upstairs Press in Buffalo published his Pressed Wafer in 1967. In the spring of 1969, Wieners was again institutionalized. His Asylum Poems (For My Father), published in 1969, reflects that experience. His poems are collected in Selected Poems, 1955-1984 (1985).

Wieners continued to write and to publish. He was versatile and produced lyrical poetry, prose, and journals. Kidnap Notes Next, Selected Notebook Entries, 1988-1999 (2002), a collection of poems and journal entries, appeared posthumously. Bookstrap Press in Massachusetts published A Book of Prophecies (2007) after a researcher found Wieners’s unpublished manuscript in the archives at Kent State.

Jonathan Williams

Jonathan Williams (1929-2008) is another original Black Mountain poet who studied at Black Mountain College. In 1951, Williams founded the Jargon Society, which has published poetry, prose, and art for more than fifty years.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Williams was never far from Black Mountain. His press published works by three of the original Black Mountain poets: Olson, Duncan, and Creeley. The last of the original Black Mountain Poets, he died on March 16, 2008.

Joel Oppenheimer

Joel Oppenheimer (1930-1988) was a member of both the New York School and the Black Mountain School and a columnist for the Village Voice (1969-1984). Born in Yonkers, New York, Oppenheimer attended Cornell University (1948), the University of Chicago (one semester), and Black Mountain College (1950-1953). Oppenheimer studied with Dorn and with Olson; he also worked in the print shop of Black Mountain College. Oppenheimer returned to New York after 1953, worked in a print shop there, and continued to write poetry—in his own style.

In 1988, Oppenheimer published Names and Local Habitations: Selected Earlier Poems, 1951-1972 through the Jargon Society, founded by Black Mountain poet Williams. His later works are gathered in The Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer (1997). Oppenheimer published numerous volumes of poems, starting in 1956 with The Dutiful Son, as well as a volume of short stories and two works of nonfiction in his lifetime. Drawing from Life, a collection of his columns for the Village Voice, was published posthumously in 1997.

Hilda Morley

Hilda Auerbach Morley (1916-1998) was born to Russian parents in New York City. She composed poetry from an early age, and as a young woman, she corresponded with William Butler Yeats. She studied at the University of London. In 1945, she married the abstract painter Eugene Morley, who taught at Black Mountain College. Her connection with this abstract expressionist affected her poetry, as did her association with other poets at the college. The Morleys divorced in 1949. Three years later, Morley married Stefan Wolpe, a German composer and professor at Black Mountain College. Hilda’s contact with Black Mountain College through both her husbands and through her studies there enhanced her writings.

With the help of Black Mountain poet Levertov, Morely published her first volume, A Blessing Outside Us (1976), with Pourboire Press. Other volumes followed before her 1998 death from a fall in London.

In retrospect

Although Black Mountain College existed only from 1933 until 1957 and fewer than twelve hundred students were enrolled there, the college became a noted experimental institution for the arts and literature. A remarkable number of literary achievements by its students and teachers ensured its reputation.

Those considered to be Black Mountain poets typically had direct contact with this college, its faculty, its related publishers, and its curriculum. Black Mountain poets left their mark on both American and British poetry. Modern American projectivist poets include Charles Potts (born 1943), who studied with Dorn. British poets influenced by the Black Mountain school include J. H. Prynne (born 1936) and Tom Raworth (born 1938).

Bibliography

Allen, Donald. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Classifies the included poets according to geographic locations and lists eleven poets as being Black Mountain poets.

Duberman, Martin B. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. 1972. Reprint. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009. Includes commentary and interaction with the people, the community, and the history of Black Mountain College.

Harris, Mary Emma. The Arts at Black Mountain College. 1987. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Traces the history of Black Mountain College, includes a roster of faculty and students, and examines the Black Mountain poets and their styles.

Katz, Vincent, et al. Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Includes a history of Black Mountain College with comments by and interaction with the people of the college.