Senior Seminar

[Note: Students enrolling in this senior seminar will be assumed to have had experience with the close reading and the analysis of poetic form, content, and context, and to be at least somewhat familiar with the main lines or moments in American poetry’s 19th-20th C. development, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, through the modernism of  Pound, H.D., Eliot, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Brooks, et al.]

Perhaps the three most influential experimental or avant-gardist groupings within the period of American poetry beginning just after 1945 are the Beats, the New York School, and the poets of–and associated with–the educational and arts experiment known as Black Mountain College.  Located in a collection of church buildings in Black Mountain, North Carolina, the College actually began (in 1933) well before “Beat” or “New York School” poetry came into being.  Black Mountain College was, moreover, a crucial venue for teaching and experiment in the various arts and their possible interactions, from painting and sculpture to musical composition and performance, dance, and poetry.  Key–and some very famous–figures of American post-World War II art and culture taught or studied (or did both) at Black Mountain.

This seminar will consider a number of the poets who taught or studied at Black Mountain, or whose work was eventually drawn into its orbit and legacies.  We’ll focus our readings on the poetry, poetics, and criticism of (and we’ll read criticism about and related to) Charles Olson (who was for some years Rector of Black Mountain College), Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan. We’ll also consider, more briefly (and depending on time) American poets often linked–sometimes fairly directly, sometimes in complex relation–to Black Mountain poetics, such as  Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Susan Howe, and Michael Palmer.  The seminar will of necessity look back–and thus read some of–the earlier modernist poetry so vital to the Black Mountaineers: that of Pound, H.D., Eliot, Williams and others. Significant attention will be paid to Olson’s theories of “projective verse” and “open field composition”: to what they do or don’t mean for Olson’s poetry and that of other post-World War II poets; to their relation on the one hand to Romantic theories and practices of “organic form,” and, on the other, to classic modernist notions of expression, construction, constellation, and force-field; and finally, to the ways that the formal or stylistic matters at issue in all of these do or don’t themselves become sociopolitical questions.  In its last weeks the seminar will, if all too briefly, comparatively consider Black Mountain poetry and poetics’ international dialogues and its reach, by engaging the conversations between Black Mountain and British, French, German, and Latin American poetry.  [Note: While the ability to read in French, German, and/or Spanish will obviously be helpful, it is NOT required; all poems originally written in languages other than English will be read in facing-page, original-plus-English-translation versions.]