hey spawned the fashion of reading poetry in coffeehouses to the accompaniment of jazz. "A reading is a kind of communion," observed Gary Snyder. "The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe." The Black Mountain PoetsThe Black Mountain poets shared perhaps the most intimate community of any group of writers, for they lived together, ate together, and wrote together in a remote spot in rural North Carolina. Founded in 1933, Black Mountain College became one of America's most fertile training grounds for musicians, writers, visual artists, and performers. (Among the students and teachers at this outpost were Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cy Twombly.) It was during the school's final years in the 1950s that poets dominated the campus; their strong presence owed a great deal to Charles Olson, who served as the college's rector. The shadow he cast was both literal and figurative; he was a towering, charismatic figure, and his seminal essay, "Projective Verse," influenced a generation to expand the possibilities of poetic rhythm. Robert Creeley, who came to Black Mountain College in its last years, not only taught and wrote direct, stripped-down poems, but also edited the Black Mountain Review, one of the most influential little magazines of the era. Two of the college's students during its final years, Jonathan Williams and John Wieners, became not only prominent poets, but also edited little magazines and ran small presses that continued long after the school closed. Other poets who came out of BMC were the following: Ed Dorn, Robert Rumaker and Joel Oppenheimer. The New York SchoolThe New York School of poets took its name from the group of painters portrayed in the "Rebel Painters" exhibition. The connections between these poets and the painters were strong--in friendship, professional associations, and artistic collaborations. Avowedly unprogrammatic, the New Yo...
