History
The Black Mountain Movement started at Black Mountain College, a college located in a collection of church buildings in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was an educational experiment lasting from 1933 to 1956. Black Mountain was one of the first schools to stress the importance of teaching creative arts. In combination with analytical and technical skills, the arts were proven to be essential to human understanding. Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson were a group of influential poets who studied, taught, or were associated with the school. Even when each poet's work was remarkably different, they shared creative philosophies that came to be known as projective verse. Olson taught at the college from 1948 to 1956 and was the school's last Rector. He coined the projective verse term in 1950. The ideas of the term center around process rather than product. It owes much to objectivists such as William Carlos Williams and modernists such as Williams Ezra Pound. This process is known as "composition by field", which urges poets to simultaneously remove the subjectivity from their poems and project the energy of their work directly to the reader. Reason and description are replaced by spontaneity and "the act of the poem". Creeley was a student at the college, but taught at the college as well. Formerly Olson's pupil and peer, Creeley quickly became a tremendous influential figure. He later became the editor of the groundbreaking Black Mountain Review. Olson's work was derived from the same theories as Creeley's. His was expansive and filled the pages, accompanied by Creeley's operated by means of compressed, narrow columns. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov also attended the college. They became prominent projectivist figures and were soon a dinamic pair themselves, being intimate friends for years. Their relationship became strained, however. Levertov deviated from Duncan's "grand college" poetics. She fused humanist politics into her verse.
Robert Creeley- A SongI had wanted a quiet testament
and I had wanted, among other things, a song. That was to be of a like monotony. (A grace Simply. Very very quiet. A murmur of some lost thrush, though I have never seen one. Which was you then. Sitting and so, at peace, so very much now this same quiet. A song. And of you the sign now, surely, of a gross perpetuity (which is not reluctant, or if it is, it is no longer important. A song. Which one sings, if he sings it, with care. |
Poem AnalysisThe narrator wants to sing, but is wondering about a specific song. the song that comes from the heart. The one that's worth being sung. The song that you sing with care.
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