At The Nation, Lynne Feeley Relooks at Women of Black Mountain College

In a review for The Nation of Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology (New Directions), edited by Jonathan Creasy, scholar and writer Lynne Feeley writes about the overlooked women of Black Mountain College. Feeley notes that, while the anthology's inclusion of poets Hilda Morley and Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards "makes Black Mountain Poems a more accurate and more beautiful volume, Creasy could have taken his project of inclusion much further." 

Feeley also sheds light on the way women were often treated at Black Mountain:

...Black Mountain closed in 1957 under political fracture and financial stress, but for a college that hosted no more than a hundred students a year and sometimes as few as a dozen, it had come to be considered a hallowed gathering place of revolutionary artistic energies. “Not so for me!” exclaimed [Mildred] Harding.

And not so for many Black Mountain women. The poet Hilda Morley, who taught at the college from 1952 to ’56, said she felt a sense of discomfort when she walked past “Olson’s boys” in the dining hall as “they sat against the wall with expressions on their faces which seemed to say that [she] was a questionable character” because she did not participate in their mentor’s rambling, booze-fueled poetry seminars. Francine du Plessix Gray, who would go on to author a dozen books and become a staff writer at The New Yorker, remembered Olson “pressing his five fingers hard into [her] scalp until it hurt” in an effort, she recalled him saying, to “get the highfalutin Yurrup and poh-lee-tess and stuck-up schools out of [her] noggin.” He berated her for writing “pure shit” and shouted at her that if she wanted to be a writer, she should keep her juvenilia to a journal and above all [not] try to publish anything for ten years!—advice she followed. “I remained, as ever, an obedient daughter,” she wrote. Asked in the early 1990s about her experience as a student at Black Mountain from 1946 to ’48, one woman wrote that her memories were “still very painful to [her] now.”

Read the full review, which goes on with intimate familiarity to write about poets and artists missing from the anthology, at The Nation.