Black Mountain

A group of progressive poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, including Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.

Founder of the Jargon Society and publisher of Jargon Press, Jonathan Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended St. Albans School in Washington, DC, and then Princeton University, before…

Born in Boston, poet John Wieners was a Beat poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance, Wieners was also an antiwar and gay rights activist. His poetry combines candid accounts of sexual and drug-related…

Poet and newspaper columnist Joel Oppenheimer grew up in Yonkers, New York, and was educated at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and Black Mountain College, where he studied with poet Charles…

"It is a shameful comment on our present-day literary situation that Hilda Morley's work has been largely neglected, that a great deal of it has gone unpublished, in spite of the author's productivity and …

Lawrence Joel “Larry” Eigner was born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where he lived with his parents until moving to Berkeley, California, in 1978. Born with cerebral palsy, Eigner made use of a wheelchair …

Edward Dorn was born in eastern Illinois at the start of the Great Depression. He once wrote he was “brought up off and on during / the intensity of depression nomadism,” and his hardscrabble early existence…

Paul Blackburn is best known as a Black Mountain Poet because of his role as contributing editor and distributor of the Black Mountain Review and his subsequent inclusion with the group in Donald Allen’s influential…

Charles Olson was an innovative poet and essayist whose work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s. In his influential essay on projective (or open) verse, Olson asserts that "a poem…

During the course of a prolific career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reflected her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraced a wide variety of genres and themes…

Once known primarily for his association with the group called the “Black Mountain Poets,” at the time of his death in 2005, Robert Creeley was widely recognized as one of the most important and influential…