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."

Old story, fresh life

The rise of the counterculture is a familiar story, detailed in countless histories, memoirs and literary works.

"The Beats and Beyond" breathes fresh life into this saga by exploring it through books, magazines and other materials created by and connected to the period's leading poets.

"We want to help people experience these groundbreaking works like their first readers did," McNamara said. "These objects have an immediacy that transports you back in time, that illuminates subtle facts and connections."

Start with a gem of the collection, one of the few remaining blue-ink copies of "Howl" that Ginsberg mimeographed for friends before the landmark poem was published in 1956.

"Today people publish their own stuff online; back then they had the mimeograph," McNamara said. "They had a real do-it-yourself ethic. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example, would type out a poem, go to a photocopy shop, put down 25 cents and leave the copies out by the register for sale."

While stressing that Beat and avant-garde writers did not speak with a single voice -- they wrote in various styles, had a variety of concerns -- McNamara said they formed a loose circle.

"They often published in the same magazines," he said, "went to the same parties, stayed at each other's homes, stole each other's lovers."

Especially in the 1950s, this social network was small enough to seem intimate yet broad enough so that the poets could sense that they were part of a wave. This camaraderie is reflected by the issue of "Jargon" on display.

Published by North Carolina poet Jonathan Williams, it includes works by disparate and far-flung poets including Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Gilbert Sorrentino and Louis Zukofsky.

Fass, the exhibit's curator, said the poets' friendships were not just limited to writers.

"There was tremendous cross-pollenization," she noted, "among artists, musicians, dancers, writers."

She pointed to the library's rare volume (only 20 copies were printed) of Frank O'Hara's first book of poems, "A City Winter," which was published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York and includes an original drawing by Larry Rivers.

These connections could often produce comic results, McNamara said. One night, for example, O'Hara was reading at New York's Living Theater.

"The poet Gregory Corso starts heckling him," McNamara said. "Then Corso gets on stage and [artist] Willem de Kooning heckles him. Corso starts bragging about sleeping with Jack Kerouac's girlfriend. Kerouac, who was drunk and lying on the floor, gets mad and winds up on the stage reading from [his novel] 'The Dharma Bums.' "

Remove the alcoholic ruckus, McNamara said, and that story illustrates another core belief of many Beats and avant-garde writers: their commitment to the public performance of their work.

"They saw their work as a force for change," McNamara said. "They tried to write it in plain language that people could understand, to recite it when they could in front of audiences."

And so, one of the exhibit's cases features posters advertising public readings.

A public trove

Those are just a few of the materials on display at "The Beats and Beyond."

Other treasures include Robert Duncan's hand-colored copy of one of his books that he gave to painter R.B. Kitaj; a copy of Ferlinghetti's most famous book of poems, "A Coney Island of the Mind," that he inscribed to Ginsberg; the private notebooks of Corso, Creeley, di Prima and Ted Berrigan filled with manuscript poems and jottings and a series of short poems Brautigan published on seed packets.

Although the materials featured in "The Beats and Beyond" are within glass cases, Fass noted that they, and the other 10,000-plus items that form the Wilson Library's collection of Beat and avant-garde, are available for public use.

"One of the goals of the exhibit is to let scholars and other people know about all that we have here," she said.

It is only through people seeing, reading and thinking about these works that the beat goes on.