BLACK MOUNTAIN POEMS: AN ANTHOLOGY
edited by Jonathan C. Creasy
New Directions 2019
Jonathan C. Creasy’s Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology is unlikely to satisfy readers familiar with the subject matter. Creasy himself acknowledges, “Grouping writers into ‘schools’ has always been problematic.” There are going to be reasons why some of those who are left out arguably should have been included. In the case of Black Mountain, Creasy recognizes one key crux is whether to limit inclusion to only those who actually spent some amount of time at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1933-1956) or also include those who are “Black Mountain” by way of association: “Difficult questions persist in attempting to define a ‘Black Mountain’ school of poets. Do we look to the physical and historical circumstances of Black Mountain College, or the complex pattern of friendships, influence, correspondence, publication, and collaboration that constitute the broader notion of this artistic coterie?” Creasy, however, sidelines these issues and simply moves forward with his gathering. Having pointed out the difficulties confronting his project he proceeds without offering any reasoning for exclusion or inclusion of specific individuals, making no attempt to justify or explain any editorial decisions.
Creasy acknowledges that the very notion of a Black Mountain School of Poets is largely owed to the grouping as found in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960. Unfortunately he then goes on to erroneously state “students like John Wieners […] are left out of Allen’s book and many other important anthologies of U.S. poetry.” In fact, Wieners is one of the many “stars” of Allen’s anthology. Allen just placed him under the San Francisco grouping instead of Black Mountain since his Hotel Wentley Poems appeared, garnering much praise, in 1958 from Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press of San Francisco. Wieners has hardly fallen among the under-acknowledged poets who happened to be students at Black Mountain. Any anthology covering a similar territory of poets as Allen’s generally includes his work and he is by far one of the most widely recognized names to have emerged from out the period.
A recent piece in The Nation by Lynne Feeley focuses upon Creasy’s lamentable failure of inclusion with regard to many women who attended Black Mountain. Feeley’s discussion is valuable for beginning to point out some of the oddities of Creasy’s selections. For instance, she discusses in depth how “Creasy’s inclusion of [Hilda] Morley and [M.C.] Richards in Black Mountain Poems addresses the gender bias of Allen’s canon-making anthology. There were women writing poetry at Black Mountain, as Creasy’s volume makes slightly clearer. The selections (three poems by Morley and six by Richards) obscure as much as they reveal about these women’s creative lives, however.” Going on to detail the remarkable writing and lives each women enjoyed. No real sense of which is conveyed by Creasy’s anthology. In fact, he does not attempt in the least to convey any broader contextualizing of the work and lives of any of the individuals he does include.
Feeley also mentions the writer Francine du Plessix Gray who is excluded by Creasy, as well as that while a photo of Asian-American sculptor Ruth Asawa is included, nothing from her “206 boxes of correspondence, drawings, photographs, lesson plans, and notes for her exhibitions at Stanford” appears. And Feeley also notes that “Black Mountain was the first predominantly white college in the South to admit a black student, the musician Alma Stone Williams, who attended the 1944 summer institute. […] Creasy mentions Williams in his introduction but does not include her in the anthology. This is all the more striking because she wrote a memoir about her time at the college.” As Feeley argues “If prose works by another musician (Cage) can appear in Black Mountain Poems, why not a selection from Williams?” Indeed, why not?
The inclusion of Cage’s memoir-like prose, which is quite clearly not poetry—of which Cage does have an abundant amount of in print, is only one of many decisions which don’t make much sense. Cage’s writing arguably adds some context to the collection as it describes times at the college, but then why not include something by others a little less popularly known, such as Williams and du Plessix Gray? Or, for that matter, as well as by students such as Michael Rumaker or Fielding Dawson, each of whom have written extensively upon key events at the campus they observed and personal relationships they struggled over.
Rumaker and Dawson studied at Black Mountain under poet Charles Olson. Feeley focuses much of her piece on taking down Olson for sexist demeaning behavior. Yet Olson, who oversaw the college’s final years as rector and whose continuing legacy afterward hinged in many ways upon the impact he had upon any number of students during the time, serves undeniably as the central figure in any version of a Black Mountain School of Poetry. Creasy rightfully opens with poetry by Josef Albers, of Bauhaus renown, who preceded Olson as rector and justly serves as a foundational figure for the enduring Black Mountain legacy, yet Albers never came near to Olson’s prominence as a poet and promulgator of poetry. Olson’s behavior towards women in and out of the classroom shouldn’t be ignored but neither should it be used as the basis for ignoring or otherwise denigrating the pervasiveness of his influence. It is worth re-stating, without Olson there is no “school” of Black Mountain Poetry. Such attacks as Feeley’s upon Olson fail take accurate assessment of the undeniably broad impact of his life and work upon women poets often just as much as men as attested by Ammiel Alcalay’s revelatory a little history (re:public/Upset Press 2012).
Creasy himself identifies Olson as “the nucleus of what we have generally considered Black Mountain poetry” and builds much of his anthology off of Allen’s original grouping led off by Olson. Yet he also obviously seeks to further define and broaden the scope of who is included. However, his additions to Allen’s core group are all rather straight forward, of little surprise, and generally found lacking: Josef Albers, Buckminister Fuller, Paul Goodman, John Cage, Hilda Morley, and M.C. Richards. Each of these writers spent time at the college and several are well known figures—but none are prominently well recognized poets. As has been noted, there are a plentiful number of others whose work likewise fits these same categories who might have been included and for whose exclusion Creasy offers no reasoning.
In addition to “poems”, Creasy’s anthology also features (seemingly included at random): the previously mentioned photograph of Asawa; a photograph of Annie Albers, wife of Josef, along with a short statement by her from the Black Mountain College Bulletin (1941) regarding how the college goes about confronting “problems” of “education”; a cover shot of The Black Mountain Review #6 by painter Dan Rice below an appreciative quote regarding it and the importance of the Review in general to his own work at that time by Amiri Baraka; the photo Buckminister Fuller’s geodesic dome at BMC (summer 1949) by Masatao Nakagawa; a reproduction of Willem de Kooning’s Asheville (1948); and a pretty infamous photo of Rice (looking out from inside a barrel) and Creeley, mucking it up for the camera.
While it’s excellent to include the image of Annie Albers, where she is working on a loom producing artwork for which she is recently gaining belated recognition, there are several other important spouses, men and women alike, who were present at the college as instructors and/or students. In the case of Baraka, there are clear reasons to include his comment yet none are indicated. Prior to his Black Nationalist awakening when he was known as Le Roi Jones, he was pals with several of the included poets and was deeply immersed in Olson’s work. There’s an abundant amount of nuance surrounding these personal relationships, as well as clear debt his work owes to Black Mountain poetics that is utterly missed by simply attaching his short statement to Rice’s cover of the Review. It is similarly the case for each of the images Creasy includes. They are nice to see, yet lacking any sense of contextualization as they are, their inclusion is puzzling and feels arbitrary. Again, why not include other, additional photos, perhaps some that are less well known?
Creasy observes that Allen “includes Olson, [Robert] Duncan, [Robert] Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, and Joel Oppenheimer under the Black Mountain banner. Allen makes this selection based on these poets’ publication in two important little magazines of the fifties, Origin (edited by Cid Corman) and The Black Mountain Review (edited by Creeley from 1954 to 1957).” Without giving reason, Creasy cuts Paul Carroll from inclusion in his own grouping. Carroll may have never spent time at the college but neither did Levertov, Blackburn, or Eigner. Why not cut them as well? Alternately, why not take advantage of including Cid Corman? He was as substantially influenced by and working out of the same set concerns as any of these poets and was decidedly quite active with nearly all of them via correspondence.
Creasy’s selection is hopelessly undecided. He attempts broaden common understanding of who and what might be considered as being part of Black Mountain poetry, yet failing substantiate his methods and procedures his end result leaves only questions without answer. Why not cut back on more recognized poets such as Olson, Duncan, Creeley, and Dorn whose Black Mountain affiliations are abundantly clear and whose work is amply available elsewhere in order include more work by those less recognized? Or why not cut out any poet who never set foot on the campus? And why not restrict inclusion of poems to only those written during the period? (In some cases, Creasy includes poems written decades later.) Why not include figures such as Gerrit Lansing, Robin Blaser, and Stephen Jonas, who formed a major underground nexus of the 1950s poetry scene in Boston alongside Wieners that centered in part around Olson? And why not include some West Coast poets of the period whose work demonstrates clear affiliation with Olson’s thought and the Black Mountain scene such as Joanne Kyger, Kirby Doyle, or Ebbe Borregaard (who incidentally was actually at Black Mountain as well as included in Allen’s anthology)? These poets are of the same generation as those Creasy includes and they were all in touch with one another. An anthology with more of an in-depth clearly argued focus behind its grouping would prove by far the more valuable endeavor.