Beats won't stop

In its way, North Carolina nurtured the counterculture poets who pushed the nation toward new ways of thinking

North Carolina wasn't exactly a hipster haven during the 1950s and '60s. As the Beats thrived and the hippies flourished, the Tar Heel state seemed anchored in Mayberry. We were more Gomer Pyle's "Golly" than Allen Ginsberg's groovy.

Still, it makes perfect sense that the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill starts its sweeping new exhibition, "The Beats and Beyond: Counterculture Poetry, 1950-75," in North Carolina. In vital ways, tiny Black Mountain College outside Asheville was an epicenter of avant-garde poetry and art during its brief life (1933-57).

In addition to faculty members who helped revolutionize dance (Merce Cunningham), music (John Cage), the fine arts (Robert Motherwell) and architecture (Water Gropius), Black Mountain nurtured some of the nation's most innovative poets, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Jonathan Williams. Its legendary journal, the Black Mountain Review, showcased experimental writing that helped change how people looked at literature and the world.

"Black Mountain was one of the key places where we saw a new sensibility emerging in postwar America," said Charles McNamara, curator of rare books at the Wilson Library.

"It's where people were criticizing the rigidity and conformity of American life and trying to develop new ways of thinking."

Black Mountain College was a small yet dynamic ripple in the cultural tsunami that swept across America after World War II. It is this larger story -- of a time when the arts were not at the margin but at the center of American culture -- that the Wilson Library tells in "The Beats and Beyond."

Through 15 glass cases, it draws on UNC-Chapel Hill's world-renowned collection of poetry books, magazines, notebooks, posters, photographs and other materials from the period to trace the development of profound artistic, cultural and political movements.

"We want to give a bigger, broader picture of the postwar period," explained the exhibit's curator, Sarah E. Fass. "The Beats may be the most famous group from this period, but they were only one part of the literary avant-garde during these years."

Besides the Black Mountain poets, the first cases feature works by Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other Beat icons. They also spotlight stars of the New York school of poets including Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest and luminaries from the San Francisco renaissance, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan and Joanne Kyger.

Later cases document how political concerns seeped more deeply into the arts during the 1960s. They track the rise of black nationalism through the poems of Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka). They trace growth of feminism through the works of Adrienne Rich and Diane di Prima. And they reflect the mounting opposition to the Vietnam War with Robert Duncan's 1966 book "Of the War: Passages 22-27," and Gary Snyder's 1967 poem, "A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon."

Together the 125 items on display show how the early effort of writers to question their society, to address sex, drugs and other taboo subjects, to find meaning in their lives through ideas and religious practices not part of the mainstream mix, blossomed into art that helped change the world. One case, devoted to censorship, suggests the doomed efforts by the powers that be to silence them.

"At heart, it was about freedom of speech," said Bill Morgan, a historian who donated much of the material he gathered on the period to UNC. "By expanding the things you could think, talk and write about -- and how you could think, talk and write about them -- these poets helped us confront a range of pressing but long ignored issues."