Black Mountain poets
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered around Black Mountain College.
Background
Although it lasted only twenty-three years (1933-1956) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art education and practice. It launched a remarkable number of the artists who spearheaded the avant-garde in the America of the 1960s. It boasted an extraordinary curriculum in the visual, literary, and performing arts as evidenced by some of the artists and teachers listed here:
Its art teachers included Anni & Josef Albers, Eric Bentley, Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem & Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Lyonel Feininger, Franz Kline, Walter Gropius and Robert Motherwell. Among their students were John Chamberlain, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, and Cy Twombly.
The performing arts teachers included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison, Roger Sessions, David Tudor, and Stefan Wolpe. Among the literature teachers and students were Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Paul Goodman, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, M. C. Richards, Ruth Asawa, Arthur Penn, Kenneth Snelson, Stan Vanderbeek, José Yglesias, and John Wieners. Guest lecturers included Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg, and William Carlos Williams.
It was a unique educational experiment for the artists and writers who conducted it. Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement.
