Understanding The Black Mountain Poets (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) [Hardcover]

Edward Halsey Foster (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 206 pages
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press (November 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570030146
• ISBN-13: 978-1570030147
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,518,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edward Foster is a widely published critic, essayist, editor, and poet. His poetry has been translated into, and published in, many languages, including single-author volumes in Slovenian, Romanian, and Russian.

The poetry editor of "MultiCultural Review," Foster is the founding editor of "Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics," Talisman House, Publishers, and Jensen/Daniels, Publishers. He is a co-editor of "Contemporary Turkish Culture." He is also the president of Greenfield Distribution, Inc., a book distribution company located in New Hampshire.

A Professor of History and Associate Dean for Administration in the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology, he is a former visiting professor at Drew University Graduate Faculty and Beykent University (Istanbul) and was a Fulbright lecturer at Haceteppe University in Ankara, Turkey, and at the University of Istanbul.

The co-director of the Russian/American Cultural Exchange Program, he has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards from Columbia University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the USIA arts program, the New Jersey Historical Commission, Choice, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Fulbright Commision, the Greve Foundation, the Fund for Poetry, the Trubar Foundation, and the Turkish Ministry of Culture.

He has served on the Advisory Committee for the Middle East of the Council for Insternational Exchange of Scholars and is currently a member of the U.S. Student Fulbright National Screening Committee for Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. He serves on the advisory committees for the Light Millennium, Inc., and the journal "Reconfigurations" and as an associate member of the Institute of Turkish Studies.

For further information, see the "Directory of American Scholars," "Contemporary Authors," "Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series," "The Writers Directory," "The International Writers and Authors Who's Who," and "Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series." See also "Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series," ed. Shelley Andrews, Vol. 26; "Olivier Brossard Interviews Edward Foster," "Double Change" (2003) (online version: www.doublechange.com/issue3); radio interviews archived at "Penn Sound" (www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/XCP); "Twentieth-Century American Poetry" (Facts-on-File); John Olson, "Inner Light," "Jacket Magazine" (2006); "The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry."

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5.0 out of 5 stars Black Mountain Poets - Those Were The Days, June 6, 2009

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This review is from: Understanding The Black Mountain Poets (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) (Hardcover)

This is a great little book - with an overview of the three luminaries from Black Mountain, and answering the basic questions one might have about Black Mountain poetics, taking Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan as touchstones for the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings that would come to characterize, broadly, what is referred to as 'Black Mountain poetry.'
Olson, of course, the main man, literally and literarily speaking (6 feet 7 1/2 + inches tall). His Projective Verse - his Objectism - which strove to eliminate "the lyrical interference of the individual ego", the famous "Always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER". "That it was not the business of the poet to mimetically represent the exterior world or to testify in some neutral capacity to what was `real', but to speak from within the self, within `his nature as he is participant in the large force'".
Not to speak of Olson's reversals: his rejection of the classical humanist tradition and elevation of the Maya and Aztec over the Greeks (the Maya of Eric Thompson, of course)....the poet as priest-king, as Sachem....that old phallic wisdom.
Creeley's New Englander transcendentalist roots, best romantic poet of his generation, language was its own occasion, its own subject, "shaping thrust of rhythm and syntax." "I put it this way That I am, say, myself, that this, or this feel, you can't have, or from that man or this, me, you can't take it."
Duncan's Gnostic revelations and Neoplatonism. Duncan's transcendent aims. Duncan's `proposition/in movement': "language is drawn forward most fundamentally not by meter, and certainly not by the desire to formulate a particular idea, but by cadence, modulation in sound (moving for example, from long to short vowels as the poem reaches ecstatic awareness) and meticulous attention to line breaks."

The roster of Black Mountain poets is splendid, indeed, and this book describes the philosophical/spiritual forces that flowed powerfully into American poetics from this most famous of small experimental colleges.....this 'Chinese Monastery', this 'hill-fort'. A fine introduction.