Timeline of Black Mountain College:
1933- John Andrew Rice is dismissed from his position at Rollins College (FL) and soon after founds Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina
1937- BMC purchases a tract of land near Lake Eden; Rice resigns and Josef Albers becomes rector
1949- Olson first visits BMC as teaching faculty for the Summer Institute series
1950- Josef Albers leaves BMC for Yale
1951- Charles Olson becomes the rector
1954- Creeley joins faculty at BMC
1957- BMC closes
(see also: https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/bmc_idea_and_place/)
Perhaps Robert Creeley names a “company” the genesis of poetic production because his craft is borne of Black Mountain College (BMC): an astonishing experiment in postwar pedagogies aesthetic pedagogies in the rural U.S. South. In this blog post, I offer a detailed summary of an academic article, “A Community Far Afield: Black Mountain College and the Southern Estrangement of the Avant-Garde,” written by Jon Horne Carter, which was included in an edited collection titled The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk, published by UNC Press in 2017. Taken together, it seems to me that this collection of essays traces at least one line of a fundamentally productive tension in American letters: the supposed opposition between rural (or conservative) and cosmopolitan (or progressive) territory, taste, and politics. My affinities with the South paired with my ongoing alarm over the bureaucratic effacement of humanistic inquiry led me to choose this chapter.
In locating the origin (to parrot Osborne’s invocation) of BMC’s enduring effects on postwar American literature, Carter tells a story of the institution’s founding. John Andrew Rice was in 1933 dismissed from his professorship at Rollins College in Florida, and though the AAUP overturned the firing, he went on to found Black Mountain College on the grounds of a Protestant summer retreat center. How, or what type of, Southern was this place? The main building they rented was named after Robert E. Lee.
According to Carter, Rice’s many goals for the school were to provide a comprehensive training in the liberal arts and sciences, inspired by the prioritization of “experience” in the work of American education philosopher John Dewey. It was here that the work-study model of learning, where students and professors alike contributed to the upkeep of the grounds, built furniture for classrooms, and foraged for their own food, became central to the project of the BMC. Carter further argues that Rice “openly ridiculed art when it was practiced purely as a means of self-discovery or an expression for personal struggles. At BMC art would be the means to producing well-rounded intellectuals by refining judgement, sense, and taste” (55). This spirit was suffused through the multidisciplinary curriculum.
As fascism swept across Europe, dispossessed intellectuals found refuge in this Appalachian nook. One of the first faculty members was Josef Albers, who helped to found the Bauhaus in Germany. This early link to the international avant-garde (and, I might add, its often coastal, Northern, and/or city-dwelling) helps to explain the peculiarity of the BMC. Carter notes the many regional colors and even foliage that leached into Albers’ work and goes at length to describe its connection to its surroundings. During World War 2, BMC was investigated by the FBI for suspicions of espionage and harboring suspected “commies.” And in 1944, the campus was paid a visit by Zora Neale Hurston, who I was surprised to learn actually agreed with Rice that the school should not integrate because it was such a fragile experiment in a region already very hostile towards integration. Carter goes on to describe how, following the war, student enrollment increased drastically due to the GI Bill, which paid for veterans to attend college, and obtained other material supports from the federal government. There were ongoing disputes among faculty and students about a number of issues, as to be expected from a place with such a decentralized structure. According to Carter, “Bohemianism at BMC, emerging across the 1940s, was a powerfully modernist project. That sensibility was all the more excited as it was haunted by the gothic temporality of Southern life” (63). Despite the international acclaim of its faculty, Black Mountain College would remain deeply tied to its Southern environs. Furthermore, Carter paints an idyllic picture of living at the BMC’s newly constructed campus on Lake Eden, with artistic experimentation of pre-Woodstock long-haired barefoot hippies frolicking in the Appalachian meadows—what came to be, in sum, “a sociocultural laboratory, where infrastructure and landscape were an artistic medium through which ideas materialized” (64).
In a rockier period that followed John Rice’s resignation (after an affair with a female student), Carter shows how the focus shifted from rehearsed European belletrism to American experimentation. The impressive roster of faculty expanded to include architect R. Buckminster Fuller, choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer and music theorist John cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, poet Joel Oppenheimer, and more. Public intellectual Paul Goodman taught there, and the openness of his sexuality led to what’s been called “The BMC’s Homosexual Summer”. Carter names the air of “sexual experimentation” as a reason for which many of the European faculty members resigned. (Imagine if they’d read what would be published in Black Mountain Review!)
Caption: artists associated with the BMC were rooted in the South. This is a photo of Rauschenberg’s composition titled “Louisiana” (taken by me, when I saw this piece on exhibition at the Palacio de Cibeles/CentroCentro in Madrid, in July 2022)
Olson took the position of rector at the BMC just after a major study of Mayan glyphs on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Carter attributes this to the “composition by field” style for which Olson would become famous, leading to his unique Projectivist style of “writing that overcame the alienation from experience that was driving the suburbanization and consumer capitalism” (67). As enrollment waned, so too the faculty shrunk to nine, and in 1954 Creeley joined—just three years before the place shut down. Olson and Creeley founded the magazine Black Mountain Review (originally titled Origin), though, before the BMC met its demise. Olson ended up selling their recently built campus to a Christian summer camp.
Being from Western North Carolina, I see the South all over the poems of the Black Mountain College, seen even in the “pungent colloquialisms,” (Osborne 176) (I add: pungent indeed! and atrocious! how distressingly provincial!) of “The Cackleberry Hermit Brown” by Jonathan Williams. Having spent time in the area myself, I know that BMC is linked in spirit to Warren Wilson College, a 4-year college where students similarly work with professors to upkeep the grounds. BMC’s permanent campus was situated where the international Lake Eden Arts Festival has been held semiannually for quite some time. The countercultural and multidisciplinary ethos of BMC, reaching its apogee before the arrival of those poets who inherited its name, remains a fascinating complication to the oversimplified history of the U.S. South. I am intrigued by how the ecological landscape in the Black Mountain school doesn’t quite reach back to pastoralism, for how it focuses on the somatic presence of the poet in the poem, but manages to make its surroundings known in that quenching pace of lineation emblematic of its lasting effect on lyric poetry.
Works Cited:
Carter, Jon Horne. “A Community Far Afield: Black Mountain College and the Southern Estrangement of the Avant-Garde” in The Bohemian South : Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk, edited by Shawn Chandler Bingham, and Lindsey A. Freeman, University of North Carolina Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=4857671.
Osborne, John. “Black Mountain and Projective Verse.”
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