Black Mountain Poems

An essential selection of one of the most important twentieth-century creative movements Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets. This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.

An experimental school of poetry & its leading proponents.

A selection of poems written by future sculptor John Chamberlain while he was at Black Mountain College in 1955.

Founded in 1933 near Asheville, North Carolina, Black Mountain College fostered experimentation and interdisciplinary learning, placing the arts, including poetry, at the heart of its curriculum. As such, the college was home to and served as inspiration for many modern and postmodern American poets. Some of them, including Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Edward Dorn, appeared in Donald Allen's groundbreaking New American Poetry anthology published in 1960, later becoming part of the American poetry canon. However, many from the Black Mountain College school of writers have been overlooked. The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry features over fifty poets selected with an expansive critical lens, including writers not typically seen as poets, such as composer John Cage, architect Buckminster Fuller, and visual artist Josef Albers. Many years in the making, this book paints the clearest picture of the poetry and poets of Black Mountain College yet.

Beyond Maximus shows how field poetics influenced the construction of the public voices of five Black Mountain poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn) in order to explain their association in the 1950s and 60s as well as their break-up as a result of the political and poetic crises of the Vietnam War era.

Charles Olson's influential manifesto, "Projective Verse", was first published as a pamphlet. Olson's essay introduces his ides of "composition by field" through open or projective verse. Composition by field challenges the traditional method of poetic writing.

Poetry. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Alessandro Porco. In the spring and summer of 1949, Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro--two teenage pranksters with the right mix of bad attitude and artistic ingenuity--composed, circulated, and performed a collection of poems on the campus of Black Mountain College, an experimental school located just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Now, BookThug brings this previously unpublished work to light for the first time in POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO, edited with annotations by noted Canadian poet and scholar Alessandro Porco. Porco's insightful work (including a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and rare photographs sourced from archival documents and historical materials) offers an enlightening exploration of a side of the Black Mountain College canon that's rarely seen. Rich with aleatory compositional methods and found materials, and replete with scatological puns, doggerel rhymes, and surreal imagery, POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO was meant to be a critique of the 'obscurity' of modernist poetry from two disaffected teens in post-war America who were desperate to fight back against aesthetic and moral codes of maturity, propriety, and sophistication. "Beautiful Gerard Legro is alive. At Black Mountain College two students rebelled against their teachers, Josef Albers and Charles Olson, to create a mythic figure-part hoax, part avatar of disenchanted youth-who is entirely their own... These poems are a vital addition to the history of the extraordinary educational experiment that was Black Mountain."--Kaplan Harris "The literary history of Black Mountain College has received a useful amplification and illumination in the form of POEMS BY GERARD LEGRO... Through his detailed and insightful introduction, and in his careful annotation of both the poems and the circumstances of their composition and (non-)dissemination, Alessandro Porco equips the contemporary reader not just to get the joke(s), but also to appreciate the significance of a fascinating project, equal parts homage and satire, that has too long languished in archival storage. A valuable recovery."--Steve Evans "Alessandro Porco has rescued a collaborative work of poetry that is emblematic of the efficacy of the teaching methods at Black Mountain College. For it was at Black Mountain in 1949 that Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro, two undergrads, in the best transgressive prankster tradition, combined to become Gerard Legro. Despite their worst intentions, they created real poetry--'Or in Summer's subways lifting / The subtle subterfuge of ladies skirts'--if only they'd been able to follow it. Their Albers poem is actually beautiful in its limitation. Porco's impeccable scholarship allows readers finally to appreciate Legro's steps and missteps."--Vincent Katz