Jane Mayhall and the Recovery of Black Mountain College Women’s Poetry

Black Mountain College was an experimental arts college in North Carolina that was active from 1933 to 1957. Black Mountain College is known producing well-known avant-garde poets. Most narratives of Black Mountain College poetry tend to focus on experimental males poets and to ignore women poets who wrote in a more lyrical or personal style. In my research, I studied Black Mountain College student Jane Mayhall’s unpublished poems and other archival materials to establish a picture of her life during her time at Black Mountain College. There has been little research previously done on Mayhall’s life at the college, because her school records were not released to the public and because she attended Black Mountain College during its early years. My research contributes to recovery projects because I am focusing on a lesser-known writer. Archival recovery work is important to literary studies because we can learn from individuals who have been left out of other narratives. By reading Mayhall’s early poems, her sketches, and her letters to Black Mountain faculty, I found that she greatly wanted to go to Black Mountain College because she felt it would give her a chance to live outside of her house. We can see that pursing the arts and the desire to escape a small town is a theme that resonates to this day. Mayhall’s life and work provides a more complete picture of what writing communities were like at Black Mountain College.English, Department ofHonors Colleg