Weekend Guide: 06.25.2021

open field poetics

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Calm down

what happens

happens mostly

without you

excerpt from MORE OR LESS by Josef Albers

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We are the protagonists of our own story. The ‘good guy’. It is easy to forget that the earth does not rotate for you and you alone. This is all we know. Life happens to us, not the other way around.

Those four lines stopped me dead. Super direct and lucid. This is the kind of poetry I like. This is the poetry I would like to write.

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This week I sat down with Black Mountain Poems: An Anthology. It’s a quick little number - containing works from sixteen artists who attended Black Mountain College.

Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage to name a few.

Black Mountain College was an experimental college in Asheville, NC that existed from 1933 to 1956. BMC’s mission was to create rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure. If you have yet to go down a Black Mountain Wikipedia rabbit hole - carve out a few hours and drop in.

Black Mountain Poetry was, and is, still considered avant-garde. That is to say that it’s almost unintelligible. Open field poetics. Basically, anything goes. This anthology is a nice entry point to the world of Black Mountain College. Open your eyes. Take a stroll out of bounds.

If you like this sort of avant-mid century writing. I think you may dig this collection. BMC was a dream. Art as a lived condition rather than a collectible - a state that seems so far from our current reality, that it’s fun to view as an ideal.

Kids having fun and making art in black and white, see below:

Thanks for checking in this week. I love you all. Your continued support and email replies make me smile. I encourage you to share this newsletter with a friend.

I have hope for a world in which groups of friends gather around a dinner table and discuss books, not tv shows.

I say this with peace and love. Speak to you soon.