Bebop Agility: Jonathan Creasy, The Black Mountain Letters: Poems & Essays

Jonathan Creasy’s ‘new form of expository elegy’ constructs a personal history of Black Mountain College to jointly mourn the loss of his mother (who sadly died while Creasy was working on the project), and the closure of the experimental arts college, whose key figures are remembered and elegised like extended relatives. Through a complex layering of essays, memoir, interviews, archival material, and poetry, Creasy makes a bold claim to a piece of Black Mountain history and to ‘affinities’ with some of Black Mountain’s most famous faculty poets – Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Despite Creasy’s interesting push for a hybrid form, The Black Mountain Letters perfectly demonstrates the strange allure of Black Mountain: the seemingly irresistible temptation for those studying the college of trying to participate in its incredible past in some way by writing oneself into its history.