Women writers of Black Mountain College

by Lois Carol Wheatley

            Black Mountain College has attained near-myth status for the prominent roles it played in modern art, in the Beat poetry movement, and as a groundbreaking experiment in sociology. From its inception in 1933 until its closing in 1955, the college was populated by nonconformists and free thinkers who, for over two decades, furiously argued the issues of democracy, education, African Americans, Communists, and homosexuals amid a flurry of progressive painting, sculpting, music and poetry.

            While many remarkable milestones were achieved on this remote mountain site near Asheville, North Carolina, most of its enduring legacy would prove to be of an artistic nature, rather than the achievement of any significant social reform. African Americans were tolerated on guest status only; Communism entered the debate only as a McCarthy-era sort of discussion topic; and homosexuality would not become generally accepted until the college’s last years.

            Leading sources on the college—Fielding Dawson’s The Black Mountain Book, Martin Duberman’s Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Mary Emma Harris’s The Arts at Black Mountain College, Mervin Lane’s Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds, an Anthology of Personal Accounts, and Katherine Chaddock Reynold’s Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College—are unanimously silent on the issue of feminism. “We never talked in those terms,” M.C. (Mary Catherine) Richards, a BMC English teacher, told me in a telephone interview.

            When BMC emerged as a considerable presence on the literary scene, it was as an impressive contingency of white males; Joel Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson, Jonathan Williams, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Dan Rice, Michael Rumaker and Ed Dorn were in the fraternity of Charles Olson students during the 1951-55 period. For the most part, these poetic careers were launched in 1960 with the publication of Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, which ranked BMC along with the other major literary movements in New York and San Francisco—quite a heady distinction for a small band of misfits operating in an apparent vacuum from an obscure Southern mountain.

           There were a few women associated with BMC Beat poetry, but they were neither faculty nor students at the college, and none of them appeared in the Allen anthology. Denise Levertov is considered one of the Black Mountain Beat poets, apparently for her contributions to the Black Mountain Review, for she never set foot on the college campus. Also considered Black Mountain poets were May Sarton and Anais Nin, who at least visited the college. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was associated with the group, if only in spirit, and largely through a flurry of correspondence.

            Little evidence exists that there were any female faculty or students who were writing during the time of their attendance at the college, although M.C. Richards made her presence felt as editor of the Black Mountain Review.  In retrospect, the BMC women who ultimately emerged as writers did so at some point (in most cases, a decade or two) after leaving the college, and did so on their own, not as part of a larger movement.

In 1995, using a list of phone numbers compiled by Mary Emma Harris, I telephoned the women identified as writers in Harris’s book and asked them about BMC writing courses—whether they learned how to write while at BMC, or later and elsewhere—and about the sexual politics of the college—whether their attendance was a liberating or oppressive experience. Bear in mind, of course, that these women are of a generation who might not have recognized what is believed to be sexism or oppression by today’s standards. Also, BMC has been greatly romanticized in recent years, which might tend to color certain recollections of the women surveyed for this project.

The response was fairly surprising in light of my expectations. With relatively little dissent, they described their classes and teachers as purely inspirational and as having positive, lasting effects on their writing and in their lives. Only a minor amount of resentment surfaced in the works and words of the BMC women writers; in fact, many express themes and ideas that echo the sentiments of their teachers.

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 For organizational purposes, the women writers of BMC discussed here are grouped according to the time frame in which they attended BMC and, within each group, ordered alphabetically. The first group studied writing with John Andrew Rice, the college’s founding rector, or at least attended during the first decade or so when Rice’s influence permeated all academic departments. The second group studied with the poet Charles Olson and/or attended BMC during the second decade when Olson was rector.

In conversations with these women, I noted a certain shift in attitude between the Rice-era writers and the Olsonians. Women writers who studied with Rice or during his tenure unanimously emphasize the positive impact and enormous significance of their time at BMC and claim it provided direction and purpose in their lives. Particularly when compared to the comments from the Olson group, what few complaints were made seemed to be appended almost as a footnote to a glowing report.  The Rice-era women’s interest in writing generally came along later, after they went to BMC to study art, music or drama, and many felt it was the progressive atmosphere and free, open environment that most profoundly influenced them. In fact, most of them seemed more inclined to discuss the general atmosphere rather than specific academic curriculum.

(The complete article runs about 20 pages, pp. 61-80 in the 2002 issue of NCLR. To order this special ten-year anniversary issue, visit http://www.ecu.edu/nclr.)

Postscript: Source books on Black Mountain College (the very best being Harris’s The Arts at Black Mountain College) are still in print and still available on www.amazon.com.  Publications from BMC women writers are also mostly still in print. M.C. Richards developed a bit of a cult-like following with her essays collected in Centering (now out of print), and prior to her recent death collected her best poetry in Imagine Inventing Yellow. Hilda Morley, also recently deceased, won numerous awards for her poetry, collected in A Blessing Outside Us, To Hold In My Hand, Cloudless at First, and What are Winds & What are Waters.