An experimental school of poetry & its leading proponents.

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.

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.

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

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.