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down the hall a couple of times to make sure Iâm comfortable, apologizing for my pilotâs absence, pouring me cups of coffee I donât want but drink anyway, chatting about the new aircraft the school is to receive next week.
Black Mountain was a Euro-Yankee experiment in the Southern highlands, the majority of its faculty being from abroad and its student body from the Northeast. People at the college wanted nothing to do with hillbillies. And the schoolâs willful isolation was fine with the locals, who saw the place as a haven for free love, godlessness, homosexuals, and egotists.
For a college in the middle of nowhere that teetered on the brink of financial ruin, that existed for only twenty-three years, and whose enrollment never reached a hundred students, Black Mountain attracted a remarkable collection of talent. Its instructors included Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham. Among its visitors were Albert Einstein, Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Zora Hurston, and Langston Hughes.
When enrollment dipped to two dozen in the early 1950s,faculty and students hit upon the idea of creating a magazine as a means of publicizing the college. The Black Mountain Review started out small and ingrown, pieces by instructors Charles Olson and Robert Creeley front and center.
Even as the student body fell to single digits and it grew obvious the college was a lost cause, the magazine took flight. Carl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges submitted material. Black Mountain Review #7, the final issue, ran well over two hundred pages and included original pieces by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and sections from William S. Burroughsâs unpublished Naked Lunch. By the time it came out in the fall of 1957, the college had disbanded.
A mix of poetry, short fiction, criticism, essays, letters, and photography, the Review was one of only a handful of print outletsâand probably the premier forumâfor avant-garde artists in the political climate of the mid-1950s. Its influence on the next generation of writers was considerable. It is still admired today.
Carl Sandburg and the college, though neighbors, found little common ground.
âWhere is the Sandburg who talked of picket lines?â Black Mountain poet Kenneth Rexroth asked. âWhere is the Sandburg who sang of whores?â
âI am not going to talk about whores at my age,â Sandburg remarked upon hearing Rexrothâs queries.
But radicals come in different stripes.
Sandburgâs MGM-contracted novel weighed in at over a thousand printed pages. An attempt to encompass the entire American experience, it spanned the years from the Pilgrims through World War II. He called it RemembranceRock. It was a critical failure lambasted for its clunky structure, its tangle of subplots, and its woodenly allegorical characters. âAs dull and tedious a literary performance as has been foisted on the public in many months,â one reviewer wrote. âAn amazing exhibition of how not to write a novel.â Commissioned for screen adaptation, it was entirely unusable for that purpose.
Yet there is something heroic about a man with little to gain and much to risk who tackled a new form in his late sixties and tried to write something for the ages.
Still energetic in his seventies, Sandburg published his Complete Poems, which won him a second Pulitzer; wrote the autobiography of his early years; condensed his Lincoln opus into a single-volume edition; and wrote the prologue for The Family of Man, Edward Steichenâs landmark photographic collection. A man of humble origin who considered himself poor even when he was rich, Sandburg grabbed whatever financial opportunities came his way, intent on building an inheritance for his two invalid daughters, one of whom was epileptic and the other of whom was hit by a car when she was sixteen, suffered a fractured skull, and lived the rest of her life on the
Black Mountain was a Euro-Yankee experiment in the Southern highlands, the majority of its faculty being from abroad and its student body from the Northeast. People at the college wanted nothing to do with hillbillies. And the schoolâs willful isolation was fine with the locals, who saw the place as a haven for free love, godlessness, homosexuals, and egotists.
For a college in the middle of nowhere that teetered on the brink of financial ruin, that existed for only twenty-three years, and whose enrollment never reached a hundred students, Black Mountain attracted a remarkable collection of talent. Its instructors included Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham. Among its visitors were Albert Einstein, Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Zora Hurston, and Langston Hughes.
When enrollment dipped to two dozen in the early 1950s,faculty and students hit upon the idea of creating a magazine as a means of publicizing the college. The Black Mountain Review started out small and ingrown, pieces by instructors Charles Olson and Robert Creeley front and center.
Even as the student body fell to single digits and it grew obvious the college was a lost cause, the magazine took flight. Carl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges submitted material. Black Mountain Review #7, the final issue, ran well over two hundred pages and included original pieces by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and sections from William S. Burroughsâs unpublished Naked Lunch. By the time it came out in the fall of 1957, the college had disbanded.
A mix of poetry, short fiction, criticism, essays, letters, and photography, the Review was one of only a handful of print outletsâand probably the premier forumâfor avant-garde artists in the political climate of the mid-1950s. Its influence on the next generation of writers was considerable. It is still admired today.
Carl Sandburg and the college, though neighbors, found little common ground.
âWhere is the Sandburg who talked of picket lines?â Black Mountain poet Kenneth Rexroth asked. âWhere is the Sandburg who sang of whores?â
âI am not going to talk about whores at my age,â Sandburg remarked upon hearing Rexrothâs queries.
But radicals come in different stripes.
Sandburgâs MGM-contracted novel weighed in at over a thousand printed pages. An attempt to encompass the entire American experience, it spanned the years from the Pilgrims through World War II. He called it RemembranceRock. It was a critical failure lambasted for its clunky structure, its tangle of subplots, and its woodenly allegorical characters. âAs dull and tedious a literary performance as has been foisted on the public in many months,â one reviewer wrote. âAn amazing exhibition of how not to write a novel.â Commissioned for screen adaptation, it was entirely unusable for that purpose.
Yet there is something heroic about a man with little to gain and much to risk who tackled a new form in his late sixties and tried to write something for the ages.
Still energetic in his seventies, Sandburg published his Complete Poems, which won him a second Pulitzer; wrote the autobiography of his early years; condensed his Lincoln opus into a single-volume edition; and wrote the prologue for The Family of Man, Edward Steichenâs landmark photographic collection. A man of humble origin who considered himself poor even when he was rich, Sandburg grabbed whatever financial opportunities came his way, intent on building an inheritance for his two invalid daughters, one of whom was epileptic and the other of whom was hit by a car when she was sixteen, suffered a fractured skull, and lived the rest of her life on the
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