Maps of Poetry and the Surrounding Territories
Labels: Black Mountain College, Black Mountain poets, BMCMAC
posted by Jeff Davis at 5:18 PM
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Labels: Black Mountain College, Black Mountain poets, BMCMAC, UNCA
posted by Jeff Davis at 5:15 AM
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Labels: Black Mountain College, Black Mountain poets, BMCMAC
posted by Jeff Davis at 5:00 AM
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Labels: Archives, Black Mountain College, Charles Olson
posted by Jeff Davis at 1:20 PM
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Labels: Abby Wendle, Black Mountain College, Cilla Vee, Mary Emma Harris, Michael Rumaker, Rand Brandes
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:59 AM
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Labels: Black Mountain College, BMCMAC, Francine du Plessix Gray, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Mary Emma Harris, Robert Johnson, Ruth Hershberger, Thomas Rain Crowe
posted by Jeff Davis at 1:47 PM
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Labels: Black Mountain College, poets, Rand Brandes, readings, Spirit of BMC
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:14 PM
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Labels: Audrey Sprenger, Black Mountain College, Galway Kinnell, Wordfest2008
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:56 AM
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Labels: Black Mountain College, BMCMAC, Fringe Festival, John Cage
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:26 AM
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...stones collected from the New River were sorted into three groups according to size, which were separately numbered; numerous and varied brushes were divided into two separately numbered groups; likewise, feathers to paint with, colors and washes, and papers were also divided and numbered. In this way, chance procedures using pages of random numbers that were now generated by a computer program could be used to determine the specific materials utilized for each painting (e.g., which painting instruments, what type of paper and which colors, how many washes, which stones to paint around, where to locate the stones on the paper).
... although he was interested in expression, he was not interested in self-expression. From Zen Buddhism he came to believe that to truly experience the world around oneself one had to free the mind and the self from control by the ego. Ego, according to Zen, is the one barrier to experience because ego, which is connected to emotion, taste, memory, and desire, fixates on pre-conceived expectations and aesthetic possibilities, on the already known. In this way it prevents exploration and experience of the new. Chance, on the other hand, was a way to rise above control by the ego into new and unexplored territory. This could happen because once an overall format for a work was consciously created, chance allowed unexpected things to happen; chance allowed musical or visual "events" to occur, without the ego's intervention at the conscious level of taste or the subconscious level of desire. The artist then would be in a new situation which required a conscious, disciplined response. Chance, when understood properly, still involved discipline, discipline to not do just anything, but to free oneself from, as Cage said, "likes and dislikes" in order to explore and experiment. For Cage, chance was to be used as a discipline and not, as some people allege, as a way of giving up choices. "My choices," he said "consist in choosing what questions to ask."
To fire and smoke the paper, assistants... had placed crumpled newspaper on dampened printing paper. After igniting the newspaper, they immediately threw a wool printing blanket over the flames and passed the entire ensemble through the printing press. The result was that the paper retained bits of the newsprint and the gray smoke from the fire.
Labels: Black Mountain College, BMCMAC, Fully Awake, John Cage, Ray Kass
posted by Jeff Davis at 4:27 PM
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Black Mountain was more than a college. It was actually a collection of real people.
It wasn't trying to save the world. ... The one real dilemma of that reality was that the world wasn't finally there, although people lived and died, tried to commit suicide, put themselves in extraordinary intellectual and existential patterns, but somehow the world was absent. .. . There was an inexorable sense of practicing for the world ... One thing now in retrospect is that extraordinary rehearsals did take place - Black Mountain was an extraordinary rehearsal of possibilities.
That was its intellectual wonder.
The awful hostilities of the situation I won't rehearse for you, the fading grandeur of Black Mountain now shrunk to twenty-five persons, momently to shrink to twelve enrollment, the great intellectual authority of that situation. The nation waits, the world waits, the FBI waits, the State Board of Health awaits ... You didn't have to worry about who was watching you, because there they were.
. . . Have you ever had a college in which there were no students?. . . I remember being in this faculty meeting when the enrollment for the subsequent term was nil, there were no students and we had to say why we were going to continue as an educational facility.
. . . No students, no college.
I'm not at all here to celebrate the isolation of an educational pattern within a social autonomy or reality that has no use for it. My proposal is that insofar as we are human, and we are, insofar as we continue information variously collected, and we do, that sudden flashing moments ... exist for an instant in time, they inform the individuals that collect in that pattern, but the hierarchy of their information is paradoxically of no value, except to the persons present. In other words, there's no way of translating that information apart from the experience of it.... There 's no substitute for being there.
. . . But, you know, the authority of being here and now is that you are here and now.
in the very interstices of sentences,Or, of himself, his own speech. Of that, his poems are evidence enough.
be can breathe and feel out all that
is worth beating, worth grabbing on
to, of another man.
They are taking all my letters, and theyThe other poems in For Love likewise speak with a solitary authority. They are sometimes occasional (in a fortunate sense), or addressed to specific persons, sometimes folding in presumably actual words and voices of others in dialogue and counterpoint; but they don't really specify the world, human or otherwise, in which they find their occasions. So it remains mostly uncreated as such - except, of course, whatever the occasion, one does get the activity of the mind, its feelings and its explorations of the situation via its language, which encounters and reveals sudden, bright instants. Olson, in a review of the book, spoke of "a generalized symbiosis of [Creeley] and those he places in the forged landscape," which still seems an accurate account of the activity of the poems, and Creeley's stance then in relation to the world.
put them into a fire.
I see the flames, etc. But do not care, etc
They burn everything I have, or what little
I have. I don't care, etc.
The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness - this is the courage
necessary. This is something
quite different.
I'll not write againOr, the conclusion to one passage of another, “Later”, which turns to include the speaker in the double predicament, keeper and kept:
things a young man
thinks not the words
of that feeling.
There is no world
except felt, no
one there but
must be here also.
If that time was
echoing, a vindication
apparent, if flesh
and bone coincided –
let the body be.
See faces float
over the horizon let
the day end.
there's more always here"The descent beckons/as the ascent beckoned”; so W. C Williams discovered. It beckons one into the self and into the world, to make light of both. As Creeley says:
than just me, in this room
this attic, apartment
this house, this world
can 't escape.
… now the wonder of life isFor me, having met Creeley's work anew, there is new certainty that the reports of this voyage his work offers will be of real use, a delight, as I follow the consequences of a common morphology here, and now, and beyond, on the path home.
that it is at all
this sticky sentimental
warm enclosure,
feels place in the physical
with others,
lets mind wander
to wondering thought,
then lets go of itself,
finds a home
on earth.
Labels: Black Mountain College, Black Mountain poets, poets, Robert Creeley
posted by Jeff Davis at 5:45 PM
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Sometimes when I'm at Black Mountain's Camp Rockmont, now home to The Lake Eden Arts Festival, and the former site of Black Mountain College, I wonder what it would have been like to hang out in the dining hall a half-century ago and listen in as the great Black Mountain poets read to one another and discussed each other's work. When Donald Allen placed the Black Mountain College poets first in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, the great anthology that introduced a generation of experimental poets to a national audience, he might have done so based not just on the quality of their intellectual and formal adventures, but on a solid hunch about the significance their work would assume for the rest of the twentieth century. While they didn't achieve the momentary mass audiences a few of the Beat poets found, it'd be difficult to find another contemporary group of poets who did as much to shape the subsequent course of American writing. The energy of their work has rippled through the imaginations of the several generations and many schools of poets who've come down the road since, and ripples still.
This Friday, November 17th, at 6:00 PM, the Asheville Art Museum celebrates the legacy of these artists with a special evening of poetry that features local poets reading works of these groundbreaking Black Mountain College writers.
Language poet Ron Silliman recently noted on his weblog that when he met Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley in the mid-sixties, he was already the "dean" of American poetry. Ron caught some flack for that; Creeley was only in his mid-thirties, and his mentor, the visionary Charles Olson, was still living, though he had to that point little audience. I think, given that "dean" can imply the lofty heights of academic seniority, that Ron might have chosen a better word. But having met Creeley just a few years after, I can testify that the man had real mojo, genuine moxie, some serious virtu, as Horace might have said, and that by the time he was in his early forties, he had already discovered passes through language that settlers are still trooping through.
"Form is never more than the extension of content," he famously noted. Later he came to acknowledge that the statement was also true if the roles of content and form were reversed. Form embodies content, is the extension of the feeling that's the poem's initial premise. His insight into the nature of poetry, its relations to speech and mind, his consummate feel for rhythm, and his awareness of the fields of meaning within which the language of the poem must dance, make his work one of the enduring testaments of twentieth century poetry.
Charles Olson, certainly one of the most influential poets of his generation, had once befriended Ezra Pound (until he lost patience with Pound's reflexive anti-Semitism), and so provided a bridge back to the great Modernist poets who offered him, and his generation, an initial stance. When he came to Black Mountain College, he'd published a handful of poems and a short critical work on Melville; by the time he closed the College in 1957, he'd published, via Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press, the first two sections of his Maximus Poems, and completed the work that appeared as The Distances in 1960, displaying in both the gift for radical insight into history and the project of consciousness that makes his work of such value.
It was Olson, with his vision of new possibilities for poetry, and for life, who decisively shaped the minds and imaginations of the writers who gathered at the college in its final years. He brought Creeley to the college to teach, and later recruited Robert Duncan. Edward Dorn, John Wieners, and Jonathan Williams, to note just a few of the other significant poets who came through the college's refining fires, had ventured there as students. Other writers, Denise Levertov and Paul Blackburn, for instance, never visited the college, but were published by Creeley in the Black Mountain Review. The Review presented Creeley's and Olson's vision of useful modes of writing to the world, introduced the poets of Black Mountain to a larger community of like-minded writers, and became a meeting place for some of the most creative spirits of the era.
Robert Duncan went on from Black Mountain to become a leading figure in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the nineteen sixties, producing a major body of work that included The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, as well as the important late work published in the two collections of Ground Work, republished in one volume just last year. He also authored over a period of decades the amazing HD Book, not yet published in book form, but available at the moment on the web (it's a large .pdf file) in an unofficial electronic format that bears the imprint of the crucial, elusive Frontier Press. It began as a study of the work of Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (who published as HD), but became a major work on poetic imagination. It's similar, in many ways, I think, to Coleridge's rambling, monumental Biographia Literaria, still one of the indispensable texts of the English Romantic period.
Speaking of that scepter'd isle ... Denise Levertov was English, born in Ilford, Essex, in 1927; she married an American, Mitch Goodman, after World War II, though, and moved to the States in 1948. Her Here and Now, published in 1956, and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, published three years later, established her as a major voice in the new poetry. She published more than twenty volumes of verse during her lifetime. Though she and her husband were personal friends of Creeley, her closest relationship with another Black Mountain writer was probably with Robert Duncan, with whom she had a long and illuminating, if sometimes contentious, correspondence, published in 2004.
Ed Dorn is perhaps one of the least well known of the Black Mountain poets, though there's hope that his Collected Poems, due out next year, will bring his work the larger attention it deserves. He was the most contrary of the contrarians who stood at the college, and ever afterwards, against the generalizing mass culture that seemed, seems, to strip individuals of their particularity, of the ability to stand grounded as creative, active participants in the polis of the world. His next-to-last collection, High West Rendezvous, contained sections from "Languedoc Variorum", a major late work that remains mostly in manuscript, which reveal it to be a poem of astonishing technical achievement that also challenges the pious orthodoxies of the history of heresy. It's an amazing, polyvocalic montage that mocks, on one level, the structures of contemporary media news presentation. He had his chops till the end. Unfortunately, it'd probably be next to impossible to perform, so Thomas Rain Crowe, charged with presenting the work of Dorn, will, I hear, read from another, earlier, masterpiece, his Gunslinger.
The reading will feature the works of these Black Mountain poets, and works, as well, by the poets gathered for the occasion: Sebastian Matthews, who organized the event, Thomas Rain Crowe, Jaye Bartell, Glenis Redmond, Keith Flynn, and myself. The reading is a part of the Museum's year-long celebration of Black Mountain College and its legacy in the arts.
Olson died in 1970, Duncan in 1988 , Levertov in 1997, Dorn in 1999, Creeley just last year, but on the 17th of November, the voices of their poems will return to Western North Carolina once again, and ring out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Labels: Black Mountain College, Black Mountain poets, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, John Wieners, Jonathan Williams, poets, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:11 AM
1 comments
PLEASE, YOU MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST GET YOURSELVES OVER TO THE GALLERY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! It's FILLED with Black Mountain artists' work, from Jonathan Williams, to Robert Motherwell and Elaine de Kooning. What an exciting show it is!
...
GET TO THE SHOW!
It really would be silly to miss this one!
Labels: Black Mountain College
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:13 AM
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Labels: Black Mountain College, Michael Rumaker
posted by Jeff Davis at 1:10 PM
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Labels: arts, Black Mountain College, Hazel Larsen Archer
posted by Jeff Davis at 2:02 AM
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The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will be opening a show this later month of work by the photographer Hazel Larsen Archer, one of the (mostly) unseen lights of the college - until now. I'll have another post about her work and career up in a day or two, but wanted to post some instances of her way of seeing now.
Labels: arts, Black Mountain College, BMCMAC, Hazel Larsen Archer
posted by Jeff Davis at 3:22 AM
1 comments
NatureS/Selected Poems 1972-2005
Original content © 2005-2012.
