Anthologies are a basic part of literary and cultural life as well as scholarly research. They are even more needed when addressing work taking place in the margins, as was the case in the Black Mountain College, founded near Ashville, NC, the experimental institution that embodied during the two and a half decades of its existence (1933-1957) embodied John Dewey’s pedagogical model of learning through doing in a democratic and collective spirit, building a working community of staff, students and visitors, that has had a tremendous impact on American art and teaching. The need of a Black Mountain College poetry anthology was needed for many reasons.

First of all, to stress the importance of poetry in the liberal arts college’s curriculum, where it was not studied as a set of texts printed in books and journals but experienced as one of the forms channeling and producing the college’s credo of creativity. Granted, during the first years of its existence, Black Mountain College did not put poetry at the center of its program (it was drama and visual arts that were at the core), as will be the case during the last year of the institution, under the direction of Charles Olson and the active support of the Black Mountain Review (just seven but extremely important issues between 1954 and 1957) edited by Robert Creeley. Yet poetry had already been an active component of faculty and student work in the 1930s and 40s, as shown by the important writings of Josef Albers, now well studied in a French book by Vincent Broqua. Albers himself is not necessarily known as a poet in the first place, but his commitment to this artform highlights to what extent the highly interdisciplinary approach of the college was key to the poetic work of artists and researchers mainly trained and working in other fields, (the names of John Cage and Buckminster Fuller spring immediately to mind).

Second, this anthology also radically opens Black Mountain College’s own poetic legacy, longtime reduced to the work of its two stars, Olson and Creeley, and to its influence elsewhere. The extreme diversity and great quality of the College’s poetry, still much overlooked today, had not been totally reflected in Donald Allen's groundbreaking New American Poetry, the famous 1960 anthology that revealed the Black Mountain College poets to the larger audience with its special section of 10 authors explicitly presented as a group with a proper aesthetics. Allen’s dramatically powerful anthology disclosed the pioneering role of Black Mountain College in the supersession of formalism and the exploration of new creative practices. At the same time, it inevitably restricted the Black Mountain Community to a small set of names, with only one of them a woman, Denise Levertov, who actually never visited the College but published in Creeley’s journal. The very success of Allen’s book, thus, produced a Black Mountain poetry canon, part of the larger new avant-garde canon that since then dominates the US poetry scene. However, it also became a screen preventing from seeing the dizzying diversity of what was happening in and around the College, where poetry was no longer separated from other arts as well as community life and life outside the walls and meadows of the institution where poetry was on and off the page, in all senses of the word.

The editors of this anthology do not challenge this now well-established canon and interpretation of Black Mountain College poetry. Their ambition is not to criticize the inevitable and understandable limitations of Allen’s groundbreaking work and its reception in the public sphere and US academia. After all New American Poetry remains a vital turning point and the choices of Allen have proven courageous and insightful. What Hobby, Porco and Bathanti claim to do – and they have done a great job – is to expand on our current views of Black Mountain College’s poetry and give a more complete picture of it, both by including a very large number of poets (over 50 writers, organized along four categories: Faculty, Visiting Faculty, Students and Affiliates, all of them represented by their finest work) and by insisting on the extremely diverse, sometimes apparently incompatibles styles and tones, forms and sensibilities, dramatically reshaping the idea that in Black Mountain College poetry it is all about Olson’s “projective poetry”.

The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry is exemplary in the breadth of its selection, an impressive showcase of unity in diversity and the quality of the introductory notes that, moreover, present the immense advantage not to reproduce the traditional distinction between the College’s stars and the others. Yet as a book it can, of course, not compete with what was actually happening (pun intended) on campus. One can only imagine the marriage of life and poetry as poiesis, a term borrowed from Plato’s Symposium and rephrased by Blake Hobby as “not the creation of an isolated object or idea to be contemplated by a process flowing form the love of things that yields irreducible and ever-shifting sound happenings, which reverberate when read or performed”, p. xvii. Poetry and life were no longer opposite poles to be reconciled but part of the larger enactment of personal and collective creativity, which was no longer supposed to take the form of words on a page, and perhaps no longer even the form of words at all. Reenacting that creativity is however impossible. Documenting it in non-bookish ways may be an illusion as well. Times have changed and any form of reenactment is in danger of collapsing into an unintended parody. Perhaps the best way to grasp in current life what happened then and there near Asheville remains the reading of a book like this.