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Understanding The Black Mountain Poets (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)

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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.