Black Mountain poets were a group of experimental American poets associated with Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. The college was a center not only for creative writing but also for modern art and the performing arts. It was founded in 1933 and closed in 1957. The Black Mountain poets were active during the 1950’s, but their theories and verse had a great influence on American poetry throughout the rest of the 1900’s.
The leader of the Black Mountain group was Charles Olson. Other notable Black Mountain poets included Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. The group varied widely in individual styles, but they were all heavily influenced by Olson, whose own views owed much to the free style of the earlier American poet William Carlos Williams. The Black Mountain poets published much of their work first in the magazine Origin (1951-1956) and then in the Black Mountain Review (1954-1957).
In his essay “Projective Verse” (1950), Olson rejected the traditional forms he saw in most modern poetry. He wanted poets to be open in the act of writing, not knowing ahead of time what form their poems would take. A poem’s form, according to Olson, should be dictated by the rhythm of the poet’s breath. The result often led to unconventional typography (the appearance of printed matter) and spacing in the published poem. Olson supported a form that would restore the manner of early poets called bards who presented their poems orally.
Creeley’s poems are short and unrhymed, with few descriptive details. They often deal with what Creeley referred to as “the tragedy of human relationships,” such as strained communication between lovers, friends, or parents and children. Some poems suggest a playful or passionate struggle between the mind and body, and between the self and the world. Duncan wrote of the power of pagan, Christian, and Jewish myth to restore meaning to modern life. Other related themes in Duncan’s poetry are love, the imagination, history, and the recovery of a spontaneous and magical language. Levertov wrote verse in natural, straightforward language that reflected her sharp powers of observation. Her style during the 1950’s was lyrical and conversational in rhythm and vocabulary.
