II The Fifties / Sixties: Black Mountain: San Francisco (1)
In this talk, delivered at Naropa in the spring of 2005, Anselm Hollo traces the lineage
of The Kerouac School, especially its relationship to Black Mountain College.
Listen to the audio. Part 1 | Part 2 (These link to mp3 files) Naropa Archive Project
In the first one of these rambles through the antecedents of the Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics I touched on some of the American cultural and political background
phenomena that influenced writers coming of age in the late forties and fifties, including
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Those two first met in New York City, and both went
"On the Road" at various times, not stopping much on the way except to rhapsodize,
in Kerouac's case, about lonely silos in undulating cornfields, but certainly always
ending up in San Francisco.
Now I would like to take a look at Black Mountain College, an extraordinary place
that in the twenty-four years of its existence gathered in a stream of writers, visual
artists, composers, choreographers that is a major component of late twentieth century—and
I daresay early twenty-first century—American culture.
There is an entry for "Black Mountain poet" in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"Any of a loosely associated group of poets that formed an important part of the avant-garde
of American poetry in the 1950s, publishing innovative yet disciplined verse in the
Black Mountain Review (1954–57), which became a leading forum of experimental verse.
The group grew up around the poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson
while they were teaching at Black Mountain."
According to information provided by the North Carolina State Archives, which hold
the Black Mountain College Papers, the school was established in 1933 as an independent,
coeducational, four-year college, and was originally located in buildings leased from
a religious organization, the Blue Ridge Assembly, near Black Mountain, a small town
in North Carolina. In 1941 the college was moved nearby to property purchased by the
college, and it remained at that location until it closed in 1956.
The college was created as an experiment of "education in a democracy," with the idea
that the creative arts and practical responsibilities are equal in importance to the
development of the intellect. The emphasis was that learning and living are intimately
connected. Dramatics, music, and the fine arts were regarded as an integral part of
the life of the college. Everyone, faculty and students alike, participated in work
on the farm operated by the college, constructed buildings, did maintenance work,
served meals, etc. Many classes were held at night, and none were scheduled in the
afternoons in order to allow time for work on the campus. There was no organized athletic
program as it was thought there should be no sharp distinction between work and play.
Classes, which were a combination of recitations, lectures, tutorials, and seminars,
met at the discretion of the teacher and attendance was voluntary. There were no required
courses but each student prepared with his advisor a plan of work and was expected
to complete a well-rounded course of study.
To date, the most comprehensive book on the college is a handsome volume titled The
Arts at Black Mountain College by Mary Emma Harris. I quote from her introduction
to the book:
American education *in its beginnings* was sponsored by the church or modeled on European
forms, created to prepare the aristocracy for a life of leisure. For the common man,
it was autocratic, teaching discipline and submission to authority and including only
the essentials in reading, writing, and mathematics. The new progressive American
education was to be an education for democracy, through which the diverse American
population would learn a common way of living and working together. The fostering
of initiative, ingenuity, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility rather
than submission, competitiveness, and rugged individualism were to be its goals. [.
. .] The quest for reform in higher education in the nineteen-thirties has been equaled
only by the upheaval in American universities in the nineteen-sixties. By the nineteen-thirties,
an effort was being made to apply the principles of progressive education, which previously
had been primarily the province of elementary and highschools, to higher education.
Schools such as Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Black Mountain College
were opened; and other schools such as Bryn Mawr, Reed, Antioch, Rollins, Columbia,
Whittier and Swarthmore began to experiment with a more flexible curriculum. [. .
.] Black Mountain College was conceived at a critical moment in American and international
history. The crisis that precipitated the colleges founding occurred simultaneously
with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany in January 1933, with
the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, and with the beginning of the persecution
of artists, intellectuals, and Jews on the European continent. The United States was
in the depths of the Great Depression. [. . .] Despite the unemployment and financial
hardship, the Great Depression gave rise to a garden of utopian ventures, some ephemeral,
some enduring. The collapse of the financial system brought disillusionment with the
existing political, economic, and social order. At the same time, Americans remained
optimistic in their belief that the system could be successfully reformed and that
an ideal society could be created through a new economic or spiritual order. Artists,
intellectuals, educators, and politicians—many unemployed and with time on their hands—envisioned
an ideal world. [. . .] It was in this spirit of cultural nationalism, experimentation,
idealism, and international turmoil that Black Mountain College was born and from
which it was to emerge a generative force in American life. In many respects, the
college was a microcosm, both reflecting and altering the intellectual and creative
life of its time.
The roll call of teachers and students at the college is impressive, to say the least:
painters Josef Albers, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell,
Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly; composer John Cage, sculptor John
Chamberlain, poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer,
Russell Edson, Galway Kinnell, John Wieners, Edward Dorn; dancer and choreographer
Merce Cunningham; writers Edward Dahlberg, Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker, Francine
du Plessix Gray; architect Buckminster Fuller, art critic Clement Greenberg, film
director Arthur Penn, ceramic artists and writers M.C. Richards and Peter Voulkos,
filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, composer Stefan Wolpe . . . and counting notable artists
and writers associated but never in residence at the college, this list could easily
be twice or three times as long.
Founded by classics scholar John Rice, Black Mountain was the first American experimental
college boasting complete democratic self-rule, extensive work in the creative arts,
and interdisciplinary academic study. It was the site of the first geodesic dome built
by Buckminster Fuller in 1948; the first multimedia happening occurred at Black Mountain
College in 1952, staged by John Cage; and it was the spiritual home of the Black Mountain
Review, edited by Robert Creeley, which in seven issues from 1954 to 1957, published
a great number of writers both antedating and "anteceding" the Jack Kerouac School—among
them Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Denise Levertov, M.C. Richards,
Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Charles Olson, and Jonathan Williams.
Fielding Dawson, eighteen years old in 1949, wrote home to his sister and her husband
(back in Ohio, I think), after just one week at Black Mountain—I'm excerpting:
I'm having a wonderful time here just as I told you in the first letter. [. . .] Well,
brother-in-law and sister, a few things I have on my mind and I want to tell you them.
For one: the girls around this place, not all, but a good many, use terrible language.
Now, for a male to say son of a bitch and for a male to call another a bastard is
o.k., I can see that, 'cause I do it myself; but, for a female to drink gin and to
call the guys she's with dirty names, why I just can't see it. For that, one of the
guys called me grandma and pious and whatnot, so, you see the kind of people that
are here. Even the teachers use bad lingo. [. . .] My vision of a college boy, is
one who leads a decent life, swears, drinks beer, that's o.k., but these guys, just
because they're labeled artists, drink gin and swear, and the girls do too . . . [.
. .] I want to tell you about Mr. Olson {at that time, a teacher, but two years later
rector of the college}. He is . . . gosh, words fail me . . . about ten steps higher
than stupendous. He is about six feet eight or nine and has shoulders like an ox.
He must weigh about two hundred and sixty or seventy. [. . .] He likes Ezra Pound
very much. We are, at the end of the year, going to [do] three plays, the first, our
version or interpretation of Homer's Odyssey; the part about the cyclops and Ulysses.
The second (they are all fifteen minutes long) will be a selection of Ezra's and the
third will be something we can make up, our own creation. Doesn't it sound wonderful?
Gosh, I'm overwhelmed . . . then think of the painting and the sculpture, I'm taking,
and the Hindu Philosophy, and the French . . . ? Boy, it's over my head, but it's
still wonderful!
Fielding went on to become a terrific short story writer and novelist; he also wrote
a memoir of his time at Black Mountain and another one of the painter Franz Kline.
But to get back to the years of the Black Mountain Review—here's some of what Robert
Creeley, its editor, had to say about it in an essay published in 1969:
Toward the end of 1953 Black Mountain College [. . .] was trying to solve a persistent
and most awkward problem. In order to survive it needed a much larger student enrollment,"
and here I should mention that the *total* student body over the twenty-four years
of Black Mountain's existence was only about twelve hundred—"and the usual bulletins
and announcements of summer programs seemed to have little effect. Either they failed
to reach people who might well prove interested, or else the nature of the college
itself was so little known that no one quite trusted its proposals. [. . .] Whatever
the cause—and no doubt it involves too the fact that all experimental colleges faced
a very marked apathy during the fifties—some other means of finding and interesting
prospective students had to be managed, and so it was that Charles Olson, then rector
of the college, proposed to the other faculty members that a magazine might prove
a more active advertisement for the nature and form of the college's program.
Creeley, who by that time had dropped out of Harvard, served in Burma as an American
Field Service ambulance driver during the final years of that gruesome World War Two
campaign, lived in France and Mallorca and started his own literary press, The Divers
Press, had been in touch with Ezra Pound about the possibilities for a magazine comparable
to the great magazines published between the wars—Transition, Blast, The Little Review,
many others. Creeley writes: "What he did give me [. . .] was a kind of *rule book*
for the editing of any magazine. For example, he suggested I think of the magazine
as a center around which, 'not a box within which / any item.' [. . .] He suggested
I get at least four others, on whom I could depend unequivocally for material, and
to make their work the mainstay of the magazine's form. But then, he said, let the
rest of it, roughly half, be as various and hogwild as possible, 'so that any idiot
thinks he has a chance of getting in.'"
In the way Lucien Carr (who, by the way, just passed away in late January, aged seventy-nine)
was the one person in New York City destined to introduce Kerouac and Ginsberg to
Burroughs and Neal Cassady, as I mentioned in my previous talk—in a similar way, a
Bostonian poet and radio broadcaster, Cid Corman, was the person to introduce Creeley
to Charles Olson—and published both of them in the first issues of *his* magazine,
a quarterly called Origin. Creeley again: "Origin was, in fact, the meeting place
for many of the writers who subsequently became the active nucleus for The Black Mountain
Review. More than any other magazine of that period, it undertook to make place for
the particular poets who later came to be called the 'Black Mountain School.' In its
issues prior to 1954, and continuingly, it gave first significant American publication
to Denise Levertov, Irving Layton, Robert Duncan, Paul Carroll, Paul Blackburn, Larry
Eigner, myself, and a number of others as well."
Back to the Black Mountain / North Carolina State Archives:
Although the college continued to espouse the inherited ideals of the 1930s such as
community living, a farm, work program, and faculty-run college, the community was,
in fact, comprised largely of artists and scholars with little interest in farming,
administration or maintenance. Periodic efforts to give the college a more traditional
structure and program were unsuccessful. A conventional college with an authoritarian
administration inevitably meant a loss of academic and creative freedom. The GI Bill
benefits were dwindling, and the conservative atmosphere in the 50s made it virtually
impossible for experimental ventures to raise funds. Eventually, the faculty were
paid in beef allotments from the remaining cows, and parcels of property were sold.
In its darkest hours, despite the inevitable demise, Charles Olson continued to postulate
new schemes. Finally, in the fall of 1956, the remaining faculty directed Olson to
begin the process of closing the college. The few students left the campus, many for
San Francisco where the college continued to sponsor programs including a drama workshop
directed by Robert Duncan and Olson's Special View of History lectures. In March 1957
the courts ordered Olson to cease all programs, and the college closed although a
postmortem issue of the Black Mountain Review did not appear until Autumn 1957.
{Note: Text only from this point}
"Many left for San Francisco": in October 1955, at the Six Gallery, six poets gave
a by all accounts rambunctious reading to an audience of two hundred and fifty: Philip
Lamantia, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen—the occasion
emcee'd by Kenneth Rexroth, the elder statesman of the San Francisco poetry scene.
Jack Kerouac was present, and in his own words did his best to liven up the scene:
"I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters
from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with
three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy."
It was the first public performance of Howl, whose publication, prosecution, and vindication
were to follow in rapid succession.
To dwell on Black Mountain for a moment longer, and specifically on its last rector,
Charles Olson, the author of a groundbreaking study of Herman Melville titled Call
Me Ishmael and a massive epic or cycle or epic cycle, The Maximus Poems—a book that
has inspired several younger poets, the most prominent among them Susan Howe and Anne
Waldman. In a short essay written in 1952, "The Present is Prologue," Olson calls
himself "[. . .] an archeologist of morning. And the writing and acts which I find
bear on the present job are (I) from Homer back, not forward; and (II) from Melville
on, particularly himself, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, and Lawrence. These were modern men
who projected what we are and what we are in, who broke the spell."
Elsewhere, Olson again links Melville and Rimbaud: "both of them, in wholly differing
ways, were prevented from work beyond what they did do [. . .] by an exasperation
that a reality equivalent to their own penetration of reality had not come into being
in their time. [. . .] Both had seen ideality for the discrepancy it is." And again:
"Rimbaud's question is the incisive one—'What is on the other side of despair?' There
is no where else to go but in and through; there is no longer any least piece of pie
in the sky."
If that sounds a wee bit too "heroic" to present ears, it may not be more so than
Ginsberg's "I saw the best minds . . . ." I think we have to acknowledge that many
of the writers we have been discussing here, the writers who came of age in the forties
and fifties, are indeed as much postromantics as they are postmoderns—the latter a
term, by the way, first used by Charles Olson, although not quite in the way it is
commonly interpreted now.
Both Ginsberg and Olson see Rimbaud as a forerunner, a herald of the modern. While
Olson understands him as a denier of "ideality"—which term includes both religious
and ideological systems—Ginsberg considers him a "see-er," a visionary similar to
William Blake. There may or may not be a contradiction there. Both Olson and Ginsberg
also reject the "ideality" of the eighteenth century enlightenment: Descartes is a
particular bête noire in Olson's book. On the other hand, both of them also reject
the capitalist corporate model of cultural and social organization, the set-up symbolized
by "the man in the gray flannel suit" back in the fifties. And they do, of course,
share that revulsion with contemporaries not immediately connected to the antecedents
we're talking about here—Norman Mailer, James Jones, Arthur Miller, to mention just
those three.
Living, as we now do, at a time when an administration of radical right-wing looters
uses rampant hypocritical superstition for its mercenary ends, one might well wish
for a return to the good old Enlightenment, or at least some of its positive aspects—let's
say, Voltaire and Tom Paine, not Robespierre and the Terror. And this may make it
a little harder to quite see where Olson is coming from when he assumes his back-to-the-Sumerians
or Mayans stance, a stance initiated by D.H. Lawrence in the time between the world
wars, in Lawrence's case sometimes perilously close to the German National Socialists'
vision of "blood and soil." (Speaking for myself, every nostalgia for ancient hierarchical
forms of human existence has always struck me as suspect, although probably more harmless
than the mindless approval of present hierarchical forms masquerading as "democracy.")
As a teacher at Black Mountain and later on in various universities, including the
State University of New York at Buffalo, still a lively center for writing in recent
times, Charles Olson rejected the "workshop" mode, which concentrates on student work
and round robin discussion of same. While I was never a formal student of his, I gather
from writings—his and former students'—and conversation that his focus was on an increase
of the participants' interest in history, cosmology, lesser-known or only recently
discovered or rediscovered traditions in the "human universe" (the title of one of
his essays). Thus, a kind of groundwork that would give the aspiring writer or artist
a new sense of material and direction. Olson's thirteen-page Bibliography on America
for Ed Dorn, composed in 1955, is obviously too long to quote in its entirety, but
here are a few highlights:
Assumptions: (1) that *politics* and *economics* (that is, agriculture, fisheries,
capital and labor) are like love (can only be individual experience) and therefore,
as they have been presented (again, like love) are not much use, that is, any study
of the books about (2) that *sociology,* without exception, is a lot of shit -- produced by people who
are the most dead of all, history as politics or economics each being at least events
and laws, not this dreadful beast, some average and statistic
[. . .] Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know
more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn't matter whether it's Barbed
Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But *exhaust* it. Saturate it. Beat it. / And
then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years).
And you're in, forever. [. . .] / So far as it's reading (& history is, because you
can't find em all in Justus Garage of an afternoon!) reading (=s oral history, if
one's ears are open as well as one's eyes -- [. . .] the point is to get *all* that's
been said on given subject. And I don't mean *books*: they stop. Because their makers
are usually lazy. Or fancy. Or they are creative. And that's the end. [. . .] And
that's where the trouble comes in: so few are, but so many think they are.
Thus, to grossly oversimplify the teaching, once you've spent a decade or a decade
and a half finding out about one subject, you won't ever be lacking for "subject matter"
in your writing or art, from then on in.
When Charles Olson was left the last man standing—quite literally—on the Black Mountain
College campus in October 1957, he wrote a poem titled "Obit." It was published for
the first time thirty years later, seventeen years after his death.
The quail, and the wild mountain aster, possess the place
"It was a place of blood" sd the mother of two daughters whose husband is buried here, and who at seventy was a woman. "It's hell to be here," sd the southerner who founded it
Now the animals, and snakes, have come down in. I saw a fox cross the road last night
The mountain lion is rumored in the hills. The last man of the place dreamed of 14 persons on this hillside like the mountain in the Chinese classic to whom all those repaired who were useless, the empire had become that good it was impossible it was so dull, the court had no use for the imperial instructor in fencing, the greatest wrestler in the nation with his tight beard was on the roads picking fights at bridges, the mistress of the tea house was also wandering, all of them, 400 of them fetched up in Kwansing [kwan sing]
-- all the ultimate Adam of this American place hoped for, was 14. 14 who could take a vow of obedience. "Poverty?", he said, to the Bishop of Raleigh when the able man noticed the farmhouse needed paint. I should say. And a form of chastity? Claritas. But the last vow? Who knows, any more, what it is that one does obey to?"
"It was a polis," sd his friend, "no wonder you wanted to take part in its creation."
Hm.
What one can say, is, that there are 400-odd human creatures, more or less, who were here and, according to their powers, which have a ratio, carry it, carry the October morning, the soft August moons, the fabulous hailstorm on the lake whose hails people kept in their ice boxes and are now, of course, the size of grapefruits, the mist off the water, or, the night he drank Tokay and did say to the least likely man to hear it, 14 people. When he walked down
to his pad he didn't set foot on the earth, he walked right out over May West, an acre of
Nights, how the wind off the oldest mountains can blow the hell out of clouds: we have seen the sky here be torn as the sea swept of its peopling the speed the clouds have run before it, as there are people who ran, when others stayed, and some got down [. . .]
It goes on for a couple more pages, but you get the drift—the voice, moving along
from one perception to the next, the focus flickering back and forth between close-up
and long distance, the elegiac tone, the romantic recall of the Chinese story with
its refugees—from a court gone dull and hostile to their arts—who find *their* mountain.
And there is, of course, a strong sense of disappointment and bitterness that it had
proven impossible to keep the college afloat.
Thinking here, for a moment, about one literally *visible* difference between poems
in the Beat and Black Mountain mode on one hand and the more conventionally traditional
on the other—especially back then, in the fifties and sixties—is that the former tend
to *use the page* in ways considered extravagant, or even frivolous, by the latter.
In Anglophone poetry, such use of the printed page goes back to Ezra Pound and the
great Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones, both of whom work with variable margins, white
space, and carefully arranged word clusters on the page. It continues in the writings
of Olson, Paul Blackburn, others in the fifties, and on through the New York Schools
all the way up to the present. It is undoubtedly related to Olson's sense of keeping
things moving, or Rimbaud's "thought hooking on to thought and pulling"—a visual manifestation
of those mental hooks and trapezes. Olson, in his essay "Human Universe": "There is
only one thing you can do about kinetic, reenact it. Which is why the man [presumably
Plato] said, he who possesses rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is the only
twin life has—its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact."
The Black Mountaineers who, in the mid-fifties, emigrated away from the not always
idyllic wilds of North Carolina to the foggy hills of San Francisco / found congenial
spirits there: Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, strictly San Fran at that
time, and Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, Reed College graduates from the
Pacific Northwest whose work seemed to look even farther west, across the Pacific—particularly
in Snyder's case, who was soon to move on to Japan and become a Zen scholar of classical
Chinese and Japanese traditions of poetry. There is also a clear link, here, to Ezra
Pound's work and interests in the early decades of the twentieth century—sparked,
perhaps, by an acquaintance with Englishman Arthur Waley's pioneering translations
from the Chinese canon. Pound's poem "The River Merchant's Letter to His Wife" resonates
with the cadences of Snyder's poetry to this day. The refugees from Black Mountain
also encountered, or re-encountered, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer,
a not always all that holy trinity of word-magicians. More about them next time around,
on March 13.
Now I would like to end this talk by a look at yet another transplant to San Francisco,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the famous City Lights Book Shop and the City Lights
publishing house, both of which are approaching the half-century mark. Matched only
by Allen Ginsberg on the poetry bestseller lists, Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of
the Mind—which incorporates his first book, Pictures of the Gone World—has been a
steady seller for almost fifty years. Speaking of antecedents: Ferlinghetti is also
the most prominent translator of French poet Jacques Prévert. Prévert (dates: 1900–1977)
was the most popular poet of post–World War Two France, a songwriter whose songs were
performed by all the greats, from Juliette Gréco to Yves Montand. His "Autumn Leaves"
was taken up by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Miles Davis. As if that weren't enough,
he also wrote the screenplays for some of the greatest French movies of the forties
and fifties—The Children of Paradise, The Night Visitors, Port of Shadows, The Crime
of Monsieur Lange: classics all.
His book Paroles, in Ferlinghetti's translation, is still in print in a bilingual
edition. Let me wind this up by reading a poem from that book, and one by Ferlinghetti
himself. Here is Prévert's "Pater Noster":
Our Father who art in heaven Stay there And we'll stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty With its mysteries of New York And its mysteries of Paris Worth as much as that of the Trinity With its little canal at Ourcq Its great wall of China Its river at Morlaix Its candy canes With its Pacific Ocean And its two basins in the Tuileries With its good children and bad people With all the wonders of the world Which are here Simply on the earth Offered to everyone Strewn about Wondering at the wonder of themselves And daring not avow it As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself With the world's outrageous misfortunes Which are legion With their legionaries With their torturers With the masters of this world The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops With the seasons With the years With the pretty girls and with the old bastards With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons.
A kind of "default mode" of poetry, in its simplicity, or, if you wish, effectively
"faux" naïveté—perfectly matched by Ferlinghetti's poem number 22 in Pictures of the
Gone World, 1955:
crazy to be alive in such a strange world with the band playing schmaltz in the classic
bandshell and the people on the benches under the clipped trees and girls on the grass
and the breeze bowing and the streamers streaming and a fat man with a graflex and
a dark woman with a dark dog she called Lucia and a cat on a leash and a pekinese
with a blond baby and a cuban in a fedora and a bunch of boys posing for a group picture
and just then while the band went on playing schmaltz a midget ran past shouting and
waving his hat at someone and a young man with a gay campaignbutton came up and said
Are you by any chance a registered DEMOCRAT?
