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Cultural Movements in Mid-20th Century America

• Confessional poetry emerged in the mid-20th century in the US as a genre characterized by intensely personal and autobiographical content that explored taboo subjects with unflinching honesty.
• Confessional poets drew extensively from their own lives and experiences, blurring the line between fact and fiction to lend authenticity to their work.
• While prioritizing personal expression and emotional honesty, confessional poets also exhibited a high level of poetic craft, paying attention to form, imagery, metaphor, and language.
• Black Mountain College was a school for the arts that became a crucial part of the avant-garde artistic movements of the mid-20th century in art, music, and poetry.
• The college was founded on the principles of balancing the humanities, arts, and manual labor within a democratic and communal structure to create ‘complete’ individuals.
• Black Mountain College had an emphasis on interdisciplinary work and experimentation and attracted many artists of the avant-garde movements in all types of art.
• The school had no grades or tests and students designed their own course schedules and concentrations, promoting individual decision-making and a sense of relation to others and the environment.
• The visual arts and music were at the heart of the school's curriculum, and there was an emphasis on the hand-made process, with assignments encouraging controlled trials of color and materials.
• With the arrival of John Cage, experimentation using spontaneity and chance methods became more popular, and these approaches to learning had long-lasting influences in post-war art.
• The Beat Generation took inspiration from the rhythmic characteristics of new music developing in the US, such as Bebop and Swing, and rebelled against the previously settled standards of Western music.
• The Black communities of the US started to gather in the neighborhood of Harlem in the 1940s to explore art in their own ways, creating what would later be known as the Harlem Renaissance.
• Music of this setting, such as jazz, swing, and rock and roll, was highly improvised and influenced by the African-American heritage of slavery songs such as the Blues, shifting the way of understanding music towards the feeling of rhythmic patterns and a general overview of the piece.

The New York School of Poetry and the Beat Generation: Innovative Literary Movements in Mid-20th Century America

The New York School of Poetry:

• Literary movement that emerged in mid-20th century New York City
• Associated with innovative and experimental approach to poetry
• Sought to break away from traditional poetic conventions and explore new modes of expression
• Embraced playfulness, irreverence, humor, wordplay, and unexpected juxtapositions
• Drew inspiration from mundane aspects of everyday life and ordinary language
• Celebrated beauty and significance of seemingly trivial things
• Experimented with collage techniques and fragmentation in their poetry
• Fostered a collaborative and interdisciplinary spirit, drawing from visual arts and jazz music
• Embraced spontaneity and the poetics of the moment to create a sense of immediacy and authenticity
• Prominent poets associated with the New York School include Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett
• Formed a vibrant literary community that challenged prevailing poetic norms of the time and left a lasting impact on American poetry

The Beat Generation:

• Took inspiration from rhythmic characteristics of Bebop and Swing music
• Emerged from African-American heritage of the Harlem Renaissance
• Wanted to rebel against Western society, social conformity, political oppression, and materialism
• Sought extreme freedom of the self and rebelled against Protestant ideals of art, sex, spiritualism, and lifestyle
• Enhanced individual experience of the poet, breaking with formalism and using slang, rhythms, and everyday conversation styles
• Experimented with different approaches to finding truth and changing society, including dropping out of conventional life, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, and creating new concepts such as the Beat and Beatitude