Creative Seedbed: Two new books discover the unexpected in Black Mountain College's food and poetry scenes

The Farm at Black Mountain College

By David Silver

An avant-garde arts institution—especially one heavily populated by immigrants during times of domestic and international upheaval—required extraordinary ways to feed itself. By scouring archives, surveying the former site of Black Mountain College, and interviewing many of its alumni, David Silver has unearthed an important but scantly known story of the sustenance undergirding so much innovation. Throughout BMC’s scrappy existence, he concludes, the farm “was of vital importance to the college, not only because it provided necessary food from organic farming, but because it served as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living, and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college.”

The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry

Edited by Blake Hobby, Alessandro Porco & Joseph Bathanti

This landmark compendium of verse composed by students, professors, and visiting faculty of Black Mountain College presents a dazzling survey of the college’s wide-ranging poetic output, as influential as it was experimental. Among the more than 50 voices here, many such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, M.C. Richards, and Denise Levertov will ring familiar to BMC poetry aficionados. Unexpected additions include interdisciplinary appearances from the likes of inventor Buckminster Fuller, social theorist Paul Goodman, composer John Cage, and artist Josef Albers. In the creative alchemy that was Black Mountain College, the poetry was hardly left to the wordsmiths.