Black Mountain Poets

Black Mountain Poets, a group of American poets, whose experimental yet disciplined style took its impetus from the essay “Projective Verse” (1950) by American poet Charles Olson, which stressed the reader's share in the creative process and called for the use of colloquial language. The group was loosely associated with Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, during the 1950s. The college, founded in 1933 as an experiment in community education, attracted many avant-garde musicians, artists, and writers. Several poets were members of the faculty and formed the core of the Black Mountain Poets, including Charles Olson (The Maximus Poems, 1953-1975), who believed that a poem's essential energy is translated through the poet to the reader; Robert Creeley (For Love: Poems 1950-1960, published 1962), whose short, precise poems reflect his often-quoted statement “Form is never more than the extension of content”; and Robert Duncan (Derivations: Selected Poems 1950-1956, published 1968), whose verse is characterized by the use of lyric, magical language. The works of these poets, and of such contemporaries as William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, were published in the Black Mountain Review (1954-1957). This journal is regarded as one of the most important influences on later American poetry.