In the Fall of 1933, John Andrew Rice and and a half dozen ex-Rollins professors set out into the unknown. Spurned by their previous employers, sick and tired of the American higher education system, they took to the wilderness—setting up camp in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. There, they did what any rag-tag ensemble of renegade college professors would do: they built a school. They attempted to build a new kind of educational facility: one that cared not about classicism, canonized texts, and memorization, but about the well-rounded formation of the student. They called the place: Black Mountain College.

Black Mountain would go on to change not only the way liberal arts education was approached in academia, but the very way art and music were thought about and created. It would come to produce some of the greatest poets, artists, writers, and composers of the mid 20th century. It would become the global center for the Avant Garde. And then, it would disappear. Like a candle in the wind it would sparkle, shine brightly, and extinguish.

Black Mountain shut its doors in 1957, only twenty four years after its creation. It’s a blip on the timeline of progress, and yet, we still feel its echoes today. The legacy of the college lives on, remaining a persistent presence in art, culture, and academia. In July of 2022, the New York Times published an article about this enigma, titled: “Why Are We Still Talking about Black Mountain College?” Today, we might get an answer.

Dr. Alessandro Porco has been fascinated by the phenomenon of Black Mountain college for a long time. He has hunted down troves of untouched information, traversed heaps of unseen poems and pieces, and has discovered a side of the school that very few have ever come in close contact with before. His book, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry which he co-authored with Blake Hobby and Joseph Bathanti is set to come out next year, and today he was gracious enough to give us a sneak peek.