I was looking at a friend’s bookshelf this morningand I thought I saw a book with the title: “CONCERTS OF SPACE”and my heart leapt!: “What a poetic title” I exclaimed, (hearing music of the spheres and heavenly harmonies)And then my gaze lengthened, and the words read: “CONCEPTS” OF SPACE. Never mind, I said to myself, (and perhaps aloud),I shall write a poem and call it “Concerts of Space,”and it shall be for Lucy Rie and the cup and saucer she made, and gave to me on Sunday.Your pots are decisions, Lucy Rie, decisions, forms, and emblems: mots.No, no, they are pots of clay,timbres of darkness and light,suffered through, come safely through.Your hands, Lucy Rie, conduct them through the fire: “concerts of space.”
“CONCERTS OF SPACE”
For Lucy Rie
Feature Date
- August 13, 2024
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‘”CONCERTS OF SPACE”‘ from BLACK MONTAIN POEMS: by Jonathan C. Creasy.
Originally From Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person ©1989 by Mary Caroline Richards.
Published by Wesleyan University Press.
Used by permission.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
M. C. Richards (1916–1999) was an American poet, potter, and writer best known for her book Centering: in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she continued to teach until the end of the summer session in 1951.
Her teaching experience and growth as an artist while at Black Mountain College prepared the foundation for most of her work in life, both as an educator and creator. Later in life, she discovered the work of Rudolf Steiner and lived the last part of her life at a Camphill Village in Kimberton, PA. In 1985, while living at the Kimberton Camphill Village she began teaching workshops with Matthew Fox at the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, CA during the winter months. Mary Caroline Richards died in 1999 in Kimberton, PA.
An essential selection of the poetry of one of the most important twentieth-century creative movements.
Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets.
This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets— Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov—but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.
"Black Mountain grasped the dream of art as a lived condition rather than a hoarded possession."
— Holland Cotter, The New York Times
"The power of anthologies lies not only in the individual works themselves but in the relationships between them. To anthologize is to confront, and perhaps even subvert, the myth of the solitary writer. In Black Mountain Poems, editor Jonathan C. Creasy strongly engages in this type of rebellion. He is true to the nature of his subject: Black Mountain College radically pushed against glorified individualism and nourished a notion of art based on community. It is a sense of ‘scriptural communion,’ as Creasy calls it, that anchors this collection of 16 poets."
— Hyperallergic
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