The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry, eds. Blake Hobby, Alessandro Porco + Joseph Bathanti,

 

            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”)

I’d been quite eager to get my hands on the nearly four hundred and fifty pages of The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry, edited by Blake Hobby, Alessandro Porco and Joseph Bathanti (Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2025). I hadn’t heard of the other two editors, but Canadian poet, editor and critic Alessandro Porco, of course, has been been enormously busy over the past decade-plus down there in North Carolina, clearly focusing on archival projects, having also edited the critical edition of Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro’s Poems by Gerard Legro (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2016) and authored the afterword to Toronto poet Steve Venright’s The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2017), as well as working on projects such as Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], Gary Barwin’s For It Is a PLEASURE and a SURPRISE to Breathe: new & selected POEMS, edited with an Introduction by Alessandro Porco (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2019) [see my review of such here] and put together the original manuscript for Barwin’s Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024-1984 (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2024). And doesn’t he also produce an occasional (and very quiet) chapbook series as well?

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.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

“But to say that one is suspicious of absolutes,” writes Siri Hustvedt, in the introduction to her A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art,Sex, and the Mind (2016), “is not the same as saying, for example, that the laws of physics do not theoretically apply to everything.” I am thinking about change and about progress, and about the straight line. I am thinking how not even a perfectly straight line is consistent, given it has still a beginning, a middle and an end. Each element can’t be mistaken for another. Even if we appear unchanged by the end of this period, we will remain changed. What intrigues me is in how those changes might manifest, from the largest to the smallest. Who might we become?

I watch as more than a couple of friends via social media express frustration with their situations, whether the opportunity for quiet solitude, or the frustration of missing out on being able to meet up with friends or family. Some have birthdays they are unable to attend to; others, deaths. There is no simple solution. A few days ago, I was invited to participate in a birthday greeting for American poet Samuel Ace, asked to send in a video of no more than thirty seconds in length. I had our young ladies participate, fully aware of how excited they would be, yet again, to sing happy birthday. With no disrespect to Samuel Ace, a fine human being and remarkably gifted poet, I should point out that our young ladies would sing happy birthday just as easily and enthusiastically to a rock or a goat or a pencil sharpener, I’d wager, as to a stranger via video over the internet. The only variance is that when Rose turns at the appropriate time to be reminded who it is she is singing for, so she can sing out their name. Happy birthday, dear… (“Samuel,” I whisper) … Samuel, happy birthday to you.

American writer John Pavlovitz’s May 4 blog post, “I Think You May Be Wasting Freedom,” responds directly to those of his fellow citizens’ protests against lock-down. It is hard to comprehend how there are those in any part of North America that would conflate a Black protester’s anti-police violence sign “Stop Shooting Us” with a white protester’s anti-lockdown slogan “I Want a Haircut,” and Pavlovitz has clearly had enough. And why are so many of the signs by anti-lockdown protestors continually misspelled? As Pavloviz writes:

You are interpreting your temporary and fleeting inconvenience as perpetual and inhumane persecution—that’s how soft and sad we’ve become, how small our battles now are, what we see as worthy causes.

I am thinking about letters, and the amount I’ve sent out into the world, and the few I’ve received in turn. I am thinking about the social media responses to my postcards, Stuart Ross and Alex Porco responding with slightly confused delight at the poems that appeared in their mailboxes. Porco, specifically, who couldn’t believe I had sent him a poem by William Bronk, one of his favourite poets. How did you know? he asked. I seen him post on Bronk some days earlier, and decided that sending him a copy of the Bronk postcard I had on hand seemed most obvious.

Perhaps, this too, an example of something that can only be seen from a distance.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

 

Gary Barwin, For It Is a PLEASURE and a SURPRISE to Breathe: new & selected POEMS, edited with an Introduction by Alessandro Porco

RIVER

for Jeffrey Donaldson

there’s a girl walking

down the street

carrying an oar

later, another girl

walking down another street

carrying a different oar

like delta and source

the girls have never seen one another

obviously there’s a boat somewhere

and the sun disappears

behind its lip

wherever the river is

the river is someone else

One of the benefits of an increased mainstream attention for Hamilton writer, publisher and composer Gary Barwin’s work, sparked by the publication of the novel Yiddish for Pirates (2016), is seeing the attention spread out to other elements of his incredibly-expansive range of creative works—fiction, poetry, musical composition and performance, visual poetry and collaboration. His latest collection, For It Is a PLEASURE and a SURPRISE to Breathe: new & selected POEMS, edited with an Introduction by Alessandro Porco (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2019), is a hefty volume nearly two hundred and fifty pages large exploring thirty-five years of Barwin’s publishing, and a volume that can’t help but provide a spotlight on Barwin’s playful, serious writing. The selection bookends with a replication of his first self-published chapbook, produced for a class at York University in 1985, to some twenty-five pages of new and uncollected work, and run through visual works (including a section in full colour), prose poems, longer sequences, short bursts and surreal twists, and more traditional lyric poems. Before we even get to the poems, the volume begins with a forty page introduction by editor Porco that, towards the end, writes:

For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems is a collection of eighty-plus poems – “counter, original, spare, strange,” to borrow from the aforementioned Jesuit priest-poet – that demonstrate Barwin’s nimble commitment, over four decades, to divining and documenting those very “changes of mind” in la(w)nguage and by the way of old and new techniques of writing.

            Barwin’s poetry has been published by micro, small and large presses in Canada, the United States and Europe; however, it has also appeared in public and semi-public spaces – the musical stage, gallery walls and city streets – as well as across social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) and in various formats (e.g., cassette tape, CD and MP3). He identifies with and occupies multiple convergent and divergent artistic, social and geographic communities, including the post-WW II avant-garde, the Toronto small press scene, the literary Niagara region and the Jewish mystical tradition, among many others. Suspicious of Canadian nationalism and its reified forms of literary power, Barwin’s poetry moves and mows between the lyrical and ludic, folk and fabulous, musical and visual, civic and conceptual, verse and prose, and local and diasporic. Barwin recognizes both the ideological force of language and the arbitrariness of the sign, but he also believes – like his mentor bpNichol – that making and sharing poetry, or poetics, is a deeply human and humanist practice. It breathes. Poetry is wildly imperfect, yes, but it aspires, formally and proprioceptively, to be open and present to dialogue with the universe’s smallest and grandest elements.

Alessandro Porco provides the sort of thorough introduction that many authors could only dream of, extending his own foray into critical exploration and literary archaeologies (he is also responsible, as editor and critic, for Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro’s Poems by Gerard Legro, Steve Venright’s The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings, and Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick [see my review of such here]), writing of Barwin’s engagement with the fabulous, surreal, magical lyric and lyric narrative. Porco also gives the impression that this collection is less an assemblage of Gary Barwin’s “greatest hits” than a volume that explores the movement and expanse of Barwin’s poetry, including some corners of his work that might have been overlooked the first or even second time, providing a portrait of that the author himself might not have been able to shape. Part of what I really do appreciate about this volume is the acknowledgment of the range of Barwin’s interest and attention, which is incredibly broad, even when you consider that the range of his creative interests and engagements exist far beyond the scope of even this incredibly generous volume (novels and short stories, musical composition and performance, and collaborative works). In a review I did of the recent A CEMETERY FOR HOLES, poems by Tom Prime and Gary Barwin (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) [see my review here], I wondered aloud, knowing this volume was forthcoming, if a selected volume of Barwin’s collaborative works might be worth considering, and I suspect Porco might easily be one of the best choices of editor for such a project. Given Barwin already has another novel forthcoming, might some the readers of his fiction be brought along for the ride? For their sake, I certainly hope so.

we have a dog. his name is martin.

one day martin walked over to my wife and said, you should have a baby. then martin walked over to his dish of water and drank from it. then he walked over to the fireplace, lay down on the rug and went to sleep. martin was asleep for a long time. this is what he dreamed:

he was walking across a field without end, a field the colour of his blonde hair. at one end of the field was a large red house. out of its chimney came puffs of smoke, the shape of dogs. the sun lay low on the horizon and all about him, he heard the arfs of small dogs, calling.

he turned around. at the other end of the field there was also a red house. puppies spilled from its windows onto the soft grass of the lawn. they looked silvery and mysterious by the moon’s pale light. he tried to call them, but his barks fell into the field without sound.

it seemed he had been walking for days, the moon never rising, the sun never sinking, when suddenly he heard a voice, my voice, talking on the phone. i was saying, i think we will call him martin, and yes, we can hardly wait. (“MARTIN’S IDEA”)

Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco

            I always write about the places I’m in, even if it’s not explicit. I mean, it seems explicit to me, but that’s because the inside of my brain makes sense to me. Sometimes there’s just an observation to write down, but often it is a point on a path in a poem. Words are great that way—they can be very descriptive in a visual way—and they can also be cairns, places to stop on a line and gather thought, then change direction, or go down a side trail. Sometimes the place I’m in isn’t a physical place but a situation, and that’s what I’ll write about, or it connects with other places that are physical. Becoming a mother was a landscape I entered and am travelling through until I die, for example, so that often comes up in my poems. My body is a place that has changed, in how it has been received by others, and how I have thought of it, how I now think of it. The words are along for the ride—and they are always a home themselves. (Alice Burdick, “Afterword”)

Having known of her work since, most likely, the turn of that century or earlier, I’m fascinated to see this critical overview of East Coast poet Alice Burdick’s work-to-date, the long awaited Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, selected with an introduction by Alessandro Porco, produced as part of the ongoing Laurier Poetry Series (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018). Deportment selects from a healthy overview of Burdick’s published work, including from her four trade collections and seven chapbooks spanning some twenty-five years of publishing—Voice of Interpreter (Toronto: Eternal Network, 1991), Signs Like This (Vancouver: Eternal Network, 1994), Fun Venue (Vancouver: Eternal Network, 1994), Covered (Toronto: Twobitter 54 / Letters, 1995), a Time (Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1995), Simple Master (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2002), The Human About Us (Toronto: BookThug, 2002), 3 Poems (Mount Pleasant: Laurel Reed Books, 2006), Flutter (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2008), Holler (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2012) and Book of Short Sentences (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2016)—as well as three opening poems from the unpublished manuscript “Deportment” (1988-1993), from whence the collection takes its name:

Graffiti

Bad aim doesn’t equal

friendly fire.

In the washroom,

the graffiti says,

“Are you attracted

to his brightness,

or are you just blinded

by the light shining through

the holes in his head?”

Wisdom is a question

of hierarchy. It is

gauged by experience,

like that of abortion.

“Well, I’ve had one,

so I should know.”

“And I’ve had three,

so I know more.”
Responsibility leaks out

onto the floor, and

I could easily spend an

hour just reading.

I never carry a pen

to the toilet.

The poems, as Burdick suggests, have a way of carrying themselves, and do; a fine deportment, sketching out short lyric scenes and explorations of perception, memory and dreams. “Sometimes the motion of this time,” she writes, to open the straightforwardly-titled “For Gary,” “crosses each established line.” The strains of her more ethereal or shifting waves, from the surreal to the dream-elements, feel more tangible through her straight descriptions. If surrealist poets such as Barwin or Ross write out the impossible, Burdick writes the impossible into being.

I’ll not be Queen of the nodding men. My game isn’t their game. Their game is full of cologne bottles and runny shit. Their game is golf gone up the hill and right up the fucking tree. Not even close to the sun. If I’m wrong about this, well let me be wrong about this. The nodding men never notice dissent. My game is walking along a sidewalk and seeing the manikin hand covered in flesh-tone and plastic rings, handcuffs with bendable keys looped around the wrist. Also the dog who always sneezes. By the way, I’ll not be Queen of anything. It’s not hard to figure out why so don’t strain your brain. I stand on the corner of a street somewhere, anywhere, and soon I see the nodding men. They don’t always wear suits but their hands are always tied. (“from Voice of Interpreter”)

Burdick’s work has long been associated with numerous other poets working in similar realms, from Victor Coleman, Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin, Lillian Necakov, Gil Adamson, Kevin Connolly, Steve Venright, Mark Laba and Daniel f.Bradley, a number of whom were collected into a loose grouping of poets alongside Burdick by editor Ross in the anthology anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian poets under the influence (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2004). As Ross wrote in his introduction to the anthology:

Such is the range of this small anthology: there are those here who feel they are writing a pure Surrealism, and even live the philosophy, and others who absorbed their surreal content through other sources: the Burroughs wing of the Beats, magic realism, Language poetry, the New York Poets, and neo-surrealists and absurdists like Joe Rosenblatt and Opal Louis Nations.

Having been aware of Burdick’s work for as long as I have (and knowing there have been those who have known of her work far longer), it is good to see this overview, as well as what is most likely the first real critical exploration into her work as a whole, as editor Porco writes as part of his critical introduction:

Burdick’s poetry is indebted to the “non-national Surrealism” of the twentieth century: from André Breton and Paul Éluard to the Beats and the New York School, to postmodern Canadians like Joe Rosenblatt, Opal Louis Nations, and David McFadden. Dream visions, chance-based composition practices, and automatic writing are central to Burdick’s poetics. At the same time, Burdick writes in the tradition of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls “the analytic lyric,” a feminist twist on Ezra Pound’s logopoeia (“a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas”). The analytic lyric “leverages” the verbal hijinks and cool irony of logopoeia in the greater fight “against social and ideological structures,” explains Blau DuPlessis. The analytic lyric scoffs at the preciousness of “poesy.” It replaces ideals of beauty (e.g., the melodious phrase or well-wrought image) with diagnosis and dissent, or what Blau DuPlessis calls “discursive gear stripping.” Accordingly, the analytic lyric is always anti-sentimental and often satirical. However, in Burdick’s unique case, it does not preclude the possibility of encounters with the dead, alien, or mythical.

In the end, it is Burdick herself who has the last word, with one of the highlights of this series of critical selecteds being an afterword by the author, providing her own sense on, and approach to, this ongoing body of work as both a home and an infinite collage of possibilities. Her “Afterword” opens:

Language is a cradle. Words swaddle and make a home. People grow and words are rooms in the home we walk through and open up to others. They stack up and make shapes, and fall or are knocked down, repeatedly—and then re-form again.