In 1925, right here in Wilmington North Carolina, Gertrude Perry West founded her little magazine, Poetic Thrills. It was the first of its kind in the state, and West had big plans. The magazine prided itself in its “national scope and international hope.” There were hundreds of poetry periodicals popping up around the country at this time, but Poetic Thrills was different. Commonly, little magazines like this would relish in the rebellious — they would push back against the popular movements of the time: engage with controversial methods and topics, and serve as testing grounds for new concepts, forms, and ideas. These magazines typically served urban audiences, as that’s where the art communities flourished, and so they catered to a highly urban flavor of discourse and ideals.

Poetic Thrills, however, was its own breed of little magazine. West didn’t just aim to criticize discourse at large, but the very little magazines she would consider her peers. In doing so, she provided a new avenue for writers and poets, creating a space for those on the fringes of the fringes. She created something entirely unique, and artistically anomalous.

Dr. Alessandro Porco has been exploring this curious little entity, and his paper “Southern Tradition and the Eccentric Editorial Talent: Gertrude Perry West and the Little Magazine in Southeastern North Carolina” is set to come out later this year. Today I invite you to dive into Poetic Thrills with us, as we attempt to get to the heart of why little magazines like this were essential to the arts, to small country life, and why they still matter today.

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.

Acclaimed American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said, that “The most daring thing (a person can do,) is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

I started going to college in the heart of the COVID pandemic. It wasn’t until my third semester that I actually started going to classes in person; and, those classrooms were not at all what I expected. They were awkward, silent, uncomfortable. Nobody looked at each other, nobody spoke, and nobody was there to make friends or meet people. I was struck by the realization that despite being finally let out of the confines of our homes, we were each still firmly living within our bubbles.

It took a few years to come out of it. And that’s understandable. Society itself had to recover from a tremendous international trauma. Becoming ourselves again was going to be uncomfortable, it was going to be weird, and difficult. But, we did it. Now, after a couple semesters back, classrooms are filled with buzzing conversation before lectures, people are getting to know each other with ease, and almost nobody is staring at their phone in absolute silence anymore.

Right behind the millions of human lives lost during the Covid pandemic, one of the greatest losses we all experienced was the death of community. Being shut inside for so long, we forgot how to live and interact every day with each other. This was especially apparent on college campuses. But, not everybody stood by and waited for things to get incrementally better. A bold few took the courageous steps forward: to build a better future, and to get people interacting and simply having fun with each other again.

Autumn Kepley and Rachel Hendrix are two of those delightful, courageous human beings, and I am exceedingly thrilled to have them both on the podcast today. Both are graduate students here at UNCW, and are both people I have had the pleasure of knowing and working alongside for a number of years now. Together, they have been making significant strides to bring the UNCW English department back into a meaningful sense of community. Their endeavors have been fun, creative, unexpected, and utterly necessary in this time of societal reconstruction. Their work has created an exciting and tangible sense of camaraderie and family, in a place and time where those two things felt distant and almost entirely forgotten.