Black Mountain Poems
When I was in Rabbinical School, there were tests from time to time. It was often the case when the teacher laid the test in front of me, I would look at it from top to bottom and say to myself, “I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.”
Lately, I’ve been having that feeling all day. In school, sitting there dumbfounded for a certain amount of time, watching everyone else writing away, would put the fear of God in me and I would think of something to say. One sentence would lead to another. Either I really did know something, or I just let loose some random flow and hoped for the best. There weren’t really any consequences for me except for my grades, and no one looks at the grades you get in Rabbinical School once you are out the door. But here, even on a bad week, enough people will see what I have to say that I can’t just say anything, and so, I say this as an apology if what I write this week seems beside the point. The news this week, impossible to ignore, even the good news, was bittersweet and smoky. Beside the point is, at least, a breeze from a different direction.
I have been reading about the artist Louise Nevelson for the past few weeks, but I am not yet ready to write about her. Among her close friends in her later life was the musician-composer John Cage and the Dancer-Choreographer Merce Cunningham. Earlier on, before the three of them became friends, while Nevelson was still struggling to break through artistically and reputationally, Cage and Cunningham were occasional teachers at a small, but influential experimental school, Black Mountain College in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Black Mountain opened in 1933 and closed in 1956. It never enrolled more than a hundred students at a time, but it has had an outsized influence on American art, poetry, and education. The founder of the college wrote, very much under the influence of the teachings of John Dewey:
"Here our central and consistent effort is to teach method, not content, to emphasize process, not results; to invite the student to the realization that the way of handling facts and him amidst the facts is more important than the facts themselves.
There is a technic [sic] to be learned, a grammar of the art of living and working in the world. Logic, as severe as it can be, must be learned; if for no other reason, to know its limitations. Dialectic must be learned: and no feelings spared, for you can’t be nice when truth is at stake…. Man’s response to ideas and things in the past must be learned. We must realize that the world as it is isn’t worth saving; it must be made over. These are the pencil, the brush, the chisel."
Black Mountain’s faculty was led by Josef and Anni Albers, refugees from Hitler’s Germany who were among the leading figures of the Bauhaus and later under the influence and subsequent tenure as Dean, the poet Charles Olsen. The education there consisted of, or involved in part, producing the thing being studied. The remote location of the school engendered a great degree of communal self-reliance. There was little in the way of radio, no television and none of our contemporary culture of distraction. The larger history of Black Mountain is a subject for another time.
I came back to thoughts of Black Mountain because of a poetry anthology that I found recently, “Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology,” edited by Jonathan Creasy. Below are a few poems from that anthology.
Robert Duncan: “Come, Let Me Free Myself”
Come, let me free myself from all that I love.
Let me free what I love from me, let it go free.
For I would obey without bound,
serve only as I serve.
Come, let me be free of this master I set over me
so that I must exact rectitude
upon rectitude
right over right. Today
I am on the road, by the road
hitch-hiking. And how, from one side,
how glad I am no one has come along.
For I am at a station. I am at home
in the sun. Not waiting, but standing here.
And, on the other, I am waiting,
to be on the way, that it be my way.
I am impatient.
O let me be free of my way, for all that I bind to me
--- and I bind what I love to me,
comforting chains and surroundings---
let these loved things go and let me go with them.
For I stand in the way, my destination stands in the way!
John Wieners: “A Poem for Movie Goers”
I Sit in the late evening
in a quiet restaurant on
the International Settlement of San Francisco
My friends, the poets are gone.
Talk of opium and 4 days on a horse
riding across country. Talk of cancer
the sickness sweeping the world
As we poets sit. We who should be outdoors
on battlefields in silver suits
drink our energies away. David
talks of hanging wires with no connections.
And I say we are the conductors.
No wonder Walt Whitman loved them.
2.
The records change.
Green vines hang
down one white column on the balustrade.
There is a marble terrace at my right
and my lover walks miles away.
On the other side of town
where the cable cars go down
and the neon lights stay on all night.
Orange lamps along the wall
and oak leaves sprout too small
My lover’s thoughts are not
of me at all.
Denise Leverton: “Action”
I can lay down that history
I can lay down my glasses
I can lay down my imaginary lists
of what to forget and what must be
done. I can shake the sun
out of my eyes and lay everything down
on the hot sand, and cross
the whispering threshold and walk
right into the clear sea, and float there,
my long hair floating, and fishes
vanishing all around me. Deep water.
Little by little one comes to know
the limits and depths of power.
