Glossary of Poetic Terms

A group of progressive poets who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. These poets, including Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, promoted a nontraditional poetics described by Olson in 1950 as “projective verse," resulting in the additional designation "Projectivists" for this group of writers. Charles Olson advocated an improvisational, open-form approach to poetic composition driven by the natural patterns of breath and utterance. The Black Mountain School of poetry is often associated with the Beat poets and the San Francisco Renaissance poets including Robert Duncan, as many of these writers were associates. Browse more Black Mountain poets or read from our Black Mountain Poets collection.