The News & Observer has the story about a vital part of our local, funky history:
North Carolina wasn’t exactly a hipster haven during the 1950s and ’60s. As the Beats thrived and the hippies flourished, the Tar Heel state seemed anchored in Mayberry. We were more Gomer Pyle’s “Golly” than Allen Ginsberg’s groovy.
Still, it makes perfect sense that the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill starts its sweeping new exhibition, “The Beats and Beyond: Counterculture Poetry, 1950-75,” in North Carolina. In vital ways, tiny Black Mountain College outside Asheville was an epicenter of avant-garde poetry and art during its brief life (1933-57).
In addition to faculty members who helped revolutionize dance (Merce Cunningham), music (John Cage), the fine arts (Robert Motherwell) and architecture (Water Gropius), Black Mountain nurtured some of the nation’s most innovative poets, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Jonathan Williams. Its legendary journal, the Black Mountain Review, showcased experimental writing that helped change how people looked at literature and the world.
“Black Mountain was one of the key places where we saw a new sensibility emerging in postwar America,” said Charles McNamara, curator of rare books at the Wilson Library.
“It’s where people were criticizing the rigidity and conformity of American life and trying to develop new ways of thinking.”
Black Mountain College was a small yet dynamic ripple in the cultural tsunami that swept across America after World War II. It is this larger story — of a time when the arts were not at the margin but at the center of American culture — that the Wilson Library tells in “The Beats and Beyond.”
Through 15 glass cases, it draws on UNC-Chapel Hill’s world-renowned collection of poetry books, magazines, notebooks, posters, photographs and other materials from the period to trace the development of profound artistic, cultural and political movements.
“We want to give a bigger, broader picture of the postwar period,” explained the exhibit’s curator, Sarah E. Fass. “The Beats may be the most famous group from this period, but they were only one part of the literary avant-garde during these years.”
Besides the Black Mountain poets, the first cases feature works by Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other Beat icons. They also spotlight stars of the New York school of poets including Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest and luminaries from the San Francisco renaissance, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan and Joanne Kyger.