Black Mountain Poets

The Black Mountain poets were a group of American avant-garde poets associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the 1950s, where the poet Charles Olson served as rector and articulated the group's defining aesthetic in his 1950 essay Projective Verse, which argued for a poetics of open form driven by breath and the poet's own physical and perceptual process rather than fixed metrical convention. Alongside Olson, the movement's central figures included Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, several of whom taught at or passed through the college and later contributed to and edited the Black Mountain Review, the group's principal literary organ. Rejecting the formal, ironic style then dominant in mainstream American academic poetry, the Black Mountain poets' emphasis on open, process-driven form and direct perceptual attention made them one of the most influential currents feeding into the wider mid-century American poetic avant-garde alongside the Beat Generation and the New York School.