E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tales from Black Mountain A look at the experimental arts college that scaled the heights of educational possibility BY WILLIAM CORBETT

What: Black Mountain College.

Where: Six hundred acres in Buncombe County, North Carolina, near Asheville birthplace of Thomas Wolfe.

Why: Experimental college in the arts.

When: 1933-1956

Who: Faculty — Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Aaron Siskind, Peter Volkus, MC, Richards, Buckminster Fuller.... Students — Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, John Wieners, Dorothea Rockburne, Ed Dorn, Francine du Plessix Gray, Ray Johnson, Michael Rumaker ...

Michael Rumaker heard of Black Mountain College in the same way most of its students did: by chance. Eighteen, dirt-poor, "queer" — his word — living alone in Philadelphia in 1951 and dreaming of becoming a writer, he happened to attend a lecture by the artist Ben Shahn, who "extolled" the college’s "unconventional and innovative virtues." Inspired, Rumaker drove down for a visit and discovered the college’s heart and soul and his teacher, the six-foot-eight poet Charles Olson, then hardly known. Olson stunned Rumaker, who describes him as "the first total person" he’d ever met. By the end of the weekend, he knew that it was the place for him.

Then, as now, Black Mountain sounded more like experiment than college. No compulsory classes. Students designed their own field of study. No grades, but to graduate, students had to take an examination administered by an outside examiner chosen by the student. Three rules: "Students couldn’t carry firearms, hop freights and if an unmarried female student got pregnant, she and the male student had to marry or else leave campus." There were 33 students when Rumaker enrolled. Those physically able had to work on the college farm that provided most of the school’s food. The place had to operate on so little money that de Kooning complained, "The trouble with Black Mountain is that when you teach there they try to give you the place," meaning the college offered shares in the school in lieu of a salary. This was a school that once served a salad of hot dogs and bananas for lunch.

During Black Mountain’s last years, Olson — courtly, bullying, huge in size and spirit, traditional in his attitudes toward women, impatient to get beyond Pound and Williams in his poetry — stood at the center of the place. He was a teacher who drew students to him, devoured those he most cared for, and who once held a class that began at 7 p.m. and ended at 1 p.m. the following day. He was capable of inspiring a student to type copies of D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, one of the school’s bibles. Along with Robert Creeley, another prodigious talker, he became the defining teacher of Rumaker’s life.

(I knew Olson in the late 1960s, the last years of his life, and Rumaker’s portrait gets him to a T. Olson is the only artist I’ve ever known who could be simultaneously totally incomprehensible and totally inspiring. Some dismissed him as a windbag, but if you fell under his spell, as I did, you held on for the ride. He gave poetry stature and significance. His genius has been caught by those who knew him well — Rumaker, Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Gerrit Lansing — but eluded the poet Tom Clark in his biography of Olson.)

What exactly did Olson teach? The same things most teachers of creative writing teach in scores of American universities today: trust yourself, work hard, be ruthless in judging your work — Olson loved to quote Dostoyevsky’s "My faith was forged in the fires of doubt" — experiment, read with passion, and so on. Rumaker’s book lets you hear the way Olson said these things that made them memorable, and you feel the force of his physical presence. You also see that he was teaching what he was discovering for himself as a writer. For Olson, writing and teaching were not separate, unequal acts, but joined and equally valuable.

Olson captured in word and deed is one of this clear, plainspoken book’s virtues. Another is that Rumaker delivers the feel, sights, sounds, and smells of the place. His memoir fills out the picture of Black Mountain given by two fines books, Martin Duberman’s Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community and Vincent Katz’s Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Rumaker has done superbly what Olson, quoting the ancient Greek Pausanias, asked of his students: "Go out and see for yourself and come back and tell what you saw and heard, firsthand." Endowed with a remarkable memory, Rumaker’s account of Black Mountain is both firsthand and deep. His book is testimony to the life of the free mind, to risking and failing, to throwing away the rules so that the imagination can flourish. Black Mountain is what can happen — perhaps to only a few, and perhaps not as the result of every experiment — but it can happen.

Why does this matter today? Because our rigidly over-organized, deadeningly expensive — many college graduates have to work what MIT students call dog years (seven years in one) to pay off their student loans — school system is stunned by fear: fear of sex, alcohol, and lawsuits, of SAT scores, of "accountability," of not staying on track, of giving offense. There are so many ways to fail and such narrow expectations of accomplishment. Our politicians are useless. Even the brightest of them do not want to know what goes on in classrooms or to think about what might be possible in them. The current secretary of education was wrong; there are not enough terrorists teaching today. Perhaps to reflect on what Black Mountain’s company of poets, artists, musicians, and visionaries called forth from one another will lift the sights and spirits of those good men and women laboring in schools today. No one could imagine being inspired in this way by a memoir of Harvard, Yale, or Wellesley in the 1950s, but Rumaker has, without explicit intent, written a book that ought to provoke. His readers will wonder at the self-imposed limitations of our present educational system. Some will dismiss Black Mountain, but others will glimpse, even in the college’s messier aspects, possibilities we are not bold enough to act upon today.

William Corbett can be reached at Bevcobett@aol.com.

Black Mountain Days: A Memoir, by Michael Rumaker, Black Mountain Press, paperback, 542 pages, $25.