Black Mountain poets

Group of experimental US poets of the 1950s who were linked with Black Mountain College, a liberal arts college in North Carolina. They rejected the constraints of rhyme and metre and the politically conservative orthodoxy of T S Eliot's classical, academic poetry. Instead, they pioneered open forms and drew on a wide range of non-Western cultures or hermetic traditions. Leading members included Charles Olson and Robert Creeley (1926- ).

The Black Mountain College 1933-56 was a unique experiment in a utopian educational community, attracting many of the period's finest poets, painters, and musicians, especially under the rectorship of Olson 1951-56. Painters who came to teach, exhibit or work collaboratively included Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg; writers who taught or studied included Edward Dahlberg, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, LeRoi Jones, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Creeley, who edited Black Mountain Review (1954-57), and Robert Duncan; music and dance was represented by John Cage and Merce Cunningham. The College's interaction of disciplines traditionally kept apart led to prototypes of the multimedia events and happenings that became common in the 1960s.