The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry
recognizes and celebrates the historical importance of BMR [The Black
Mountain Review] and NAP [The New American Poetry: 1945-1960]
but, at the same time, aims to transcend their respective limits, providing a
far more inclusive sense of the BMC experience. It does include [Paul] Goodman,
[Edward] Dahlberg, and [Michael] Rumaker, as well as [Gael] Turnbull and [Irving]
Layton. In addition, the anthology emphasizes the “people who were there,” to
borrow from Fielding Dawson. For nearly twenty-five years, faculty, students,
families, and visitors lived and learned together at Lee Hall or Lake Eden,
though not necessarily in perfect harmony and not always under the easiest conditions.
They hiked into the Smoky Mountains, seeking inspiration in nature’s forms;
they fertilized the soil, and they milked cows; they debated poems, plays, and
novels; they enjoyed dancing on Saturday evenings, as well as the occasional romantic
intrigue; they played football and softball (by all accounts, Fielding Dawson
was an exceptional starting pitcher); they snuck out to Ma Peek’s Tavern for
drinks; and they played poker after dark, listening to the latest bebop
records. Somewhere along the way, the faculty and students also found time to
produce some of the most exhilarating poetry of the twentieth century. (Alessandro
Porco, “INTRODUCTION”)
With nearly sixty poets represented within its pages, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry is structured as an expansive portrait, one larger than what had previously been presented around the poetries, poetics, people and publications around Black Mountain College, a private liberal arts college originally founded in 1933 that hosted a slew of faculty and students that would become highly influential across numerous arts, not purely poetry, before closing in 1957. When one thinks of Black Mountain, one immediately thinks of Charles Olson (1910-1970), Robert Creeley (1926-2005), Denise Levertov (1923-1997), Robert Duncan (1919-1988) and Joel Oppenheimer (1930-1988), of course, but there is also May Sarton (1912-1995), John Cage (1912-1992), R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (1895-1983), Jane Mayhall (1918-2009), Galway Kinnell (1927-2014), Ed Dorn (1929-1999), John Wieners (1934-2002), Paul Blackburn (1926-1971), William Bronk (1918-1999) and Larry Eigner (1927-1996) and numerous others that the editors have included within this volume, even including two poets from this side of the border: Gael Turnbull (1928-2004) and Irving Layton (1912-2006). The wealth of activity represented here is vast, and essays included by all three editors offer different perspectives upon a context for the space, the period and the participants, and the collection as a whole deliberately works to widen what prior portraits have historically depicted. As editor Joseph Bathanti writes, to close his “AFTERWORD” to the collection:
It is gratifying, but also a tad jarring, to see the municipality of Black Mountain listed in Allen’s preface along with Berkely, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City as hot spots for the emerging avant-garde of the period—especially when one conceptualizes Black Mountain in the 1950s, not to mention in 1933 when the first pioneering students and faculty of the newly founded BMC arrived by train in the tiny village. But in truth, what did provincial, very rural Black Mountain—the place, the locus, its geography, its ether and ethos, immured gloriously yet invisibly in the heart of Appalachia—have in common with its obviously more sophisticated cosmopolitan counterparts in Berkeley, San Francisco, Boston, and New York?
Gauging place as inspiration, as shaping oeuvre, as the Muse incarnate, requires what in fiction we call “the willing suspension of disbelief.” But nothing less than a kind of willed predestined magic, true intuitive mysticism, the Muse in spades, was at play at Black Mountain during those [Charles] Olson years that produced a cadre of writers, unapologetically experimental, derivative of no one except perhaps one another, that would profoundly influence not only its own generation but generations to come. The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry champions, restores, rediscovers, uncovers, and introduces an exponentially more diverse roster than Donald Allen, clairvoyant though he was, dished up in 1960. Including more names and titles than Allen did sixty-four years ago, this anthology expresses the ongoing, fertile yield of BMC in these ensuing years.
As Blake Hobby offers in his preface, it was Donald Allen who first brought the poets of Black Mountain College to national attention through his 1960 anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. “To his credit,” Hobby writes, “Allen recognized BMC as a locus of creativity and invention in the poetic arts. He demonstrated the influence those associated with the college had. He also showed how the writing and thinking departed from other collections of poetry. […] While Allen carefully selected ten figures to represent BMC, I knew from researching and from reading poems by BMC faculty, visiting faculty, students, and affiliates during my visits to BMCM + AC [Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center] in Asheville and to the BMC holdings in the North Carolina Western Regional Archives in Oteen, just outside of Asheville, that the diversity of the BMC experience transcended Allen’s group. Following the inspiring example set by Mary Emma Harris in her highly influential book The Arts and Black Mountain College, which aimed to be faithful to the historical record and to be inclusive, I vowed to show how BMC’s lived creed of ‘democracy as a way of life’ was reflected in the poetry of the college’s faculty, visiting faculty, students and affiliates.”
What intrigues about this anthology, paired with its openness, is the way the book is structured, offering a section of “FACULTY : in order of appearance,” “VISITING FACULTY: in order of appointment,” “STUDENTS: in order of enrollment” and “AFFILIATES: who visited Black Mountain College or published in the Black Mountain Review by year,” as well as an appendix, listing names and biographies of three poets they were unable to secure the rights to include in the book itself—George Zabriskie (1918-1989), Max Finstein (1924-1982) and Edward Marshall (1932-2005)—alongside a list of selected works, so any interested readers might attempt on their own to garner their own completion on this project.
There’s a Frank O’Hara quote I half-recall and can’t source, of how schools are important, as they provide the possibility of remembering activity at all, with the added caveat that such depictions are often woefully incomplete, recalling a core group over any larger kind of activity. Comparable “schools” would certainly include The New York School, TISH, the Vehicule Poets, the Beats, the Berkeley Renaissance and the San Francisco Renaissance, the groupings of most of these that offer their own fluidities, and argued-upon members. The broadening present within this anthology is reminiscent, somewhat, of a more expansive TISH anniversary event circa 2004 at the Vancouver Writers Festival (including as one of their readers a poet who had only appeared in the pages of the newsletter but once), or even editor Robert McTavish’s expansive selection of A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2007) and editor/critic Cameron Anstee’s expansive selection of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015).
I’d be curious, even, to hear what Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn’s take on such a collection, as his own recent essay collection, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], was set around the central core of certain of those poets within The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, including Robert Duncan. Either way, this is an impressive, expansive and important collection, one with layers of curiosity and research, enough that one could easily get lost within.
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