Author: sla33287

The Black Mountain School of Poetry

The Black Mountain School of Poetry

 

I ask you, Ladies and Gentlemen, to keep your minds sharp and gasps quiet as I relate to you a tale of rebellious artists, of the small, brave group who shattered the status quo of those less courageous and less adventurous than themselves, of the individuals who turned their backs on the rigid structure and careful planning of poetry and breathed new life into an artform old as time itself. In short, my friends, I give you the Black Mountain Poets.

Now, listen up as I unfold for you a set up with the makings of a great film or play – a pattern of interactions that could easily be made into a dramatic work, one complete with an isolated setting and compelling characters, characters who were criticized for their progressive views and artwork, who ignored their critics and improvised swiftly and beautifully, whose work still guides and influences poets today, whose cornerstone beliefs are laid out briefly in this web post, and who it would do anyone remotely interested in poetry well to know about. So, without further ado, let us begin . . .

Setting:

 

Our tale begins at Black Mountain College, an educational experiment located in a collection of church building in Black Mountain, North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s. This college was one of the first schools to stress the importance of teaching creative arts and promoted the belief that the arts, combined with technical and analytical skills, are essential to human understanding. The school was comprised of a surprisingly intimate community, and there were as few as 13 students in attendance one winter. Although multiple art forms were taught and promoted, the college’s heart, and therefore its focus, belonged to poetry and its writers, an innovative group whose most important members were . . .

Charles Olson

Olson, who taught at the college and was its last rector, was most famous for creating the concept of “projective verse”  and coining the phrase in 1950. The idea behind projective verse focuses around process rather than product, and objectivists like William Carlos Williams and modernists like Ezra Pound had obvious influence on its creation. This poetry style urges poets to simultaneously remove their subjectivity from their poems and project the energy of their work directly to the reader. Spontaneity and the physical act of writing and speaking the poem thereby take the place of reason and description.

Olson went by ear, and his lines are breath-conditioned. The two halves, he says, are: “the head, by way of the ear, to the syllable/the heart, by way of the breath, to the line.” Olson believes that “in any given poem always, always one perception must must must move, instanter, faster, on another!” So, all the conventions that “logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line.”

These ideas are illustrated in this excerpt from his poem “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”:

the thing you’re after

may lie around the bend

of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird!

And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight

                                                                 (of the bird

                                                                 o kylix, o

                                                                 Antony of Padua

                                                                 sweep low, o bless

 

the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones

on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart,

 

                                                                 And the flake-racks

 

In this excerpt, the line breaks mimic breathing patterns and the syntax is vastly different from earlier forms of poetry.

Robert Creeley

Like Olson, Creeley taught at the college, but he was also a student there, which made him both a pupil and peer to Olson. As editor of the extremely progressive Black Mountain Review, Creeley soon became a highly influential figure, whose work, derived from the same theories that generated Olson’s compressed narrow columns, was expansive and filled the page.

Creeley believed that poetry had come to a static point where it was written in perfect form to please the critics rather than reflect the truth and life it dealt with.  Desiring to move toward something more authentic, Creeley focused on specific moments or thoughts to elaborate on in poetry, avoiding the concrete and tangible. His poetry often centers on feelings in a short, minimalist fashion.

Creeley also experimented in finding and developing music from common speech. He used line breaks and tested different associations in order to find how syntax was changing. He used these patterns and lineated important words strategically in order to reveal more than one meaning and music. He emphasized the music in language that is based on the changing of language itself.

Here is an excerpt from Creeley’s poem “For Love”:

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above   

the others to me

important because all

 

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.   

Today, what is it that   

is finally so helpless,

 

different, despairs of its own   

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

 

His style is obviously less syntactically dynamic and less physically wide than Olson’s work.

Denise Levertov

Finally, a woman! Levertov spent time at the college and became an influential projectivist figure alongside fellow poet Robert Duncan. Intimate friends for years, the relationship between the two became strained when Levertov deviated from Duncan’s ideals regarding poetry and infused humanist politics into her verse.

Levertov’s poetry reflects nature, humanism, love, and faith in God. She grew increasingly political and feminist in her poetry – a development that became particularly pronounced with the onset of the Vietnam war. Levertov believed that poems should not abide strictly by a specific form or even free verse, but that each poem should be treated as a meditation from which the poet creates content. The poet should then create a form specific to that content, an idea also related to the ideas and work of William Carlos Williams.

Here is an excerpt from Levertov’s poem “Making Peace”:

A voice from the dark called out,

            ‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

                                  But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

 

Levertov’s dislike of war and belief in the importance of poetry is evident in this excerpt.

 

Bibliography