In The Action Image of Society: On Cultural Politicisation (1970), Alfred Willener defined the uprisings of 1968 as a “process” that unites jazz musicians, poets, painters and political dissenters, each expressing “a revolutionary desire for social emancipation … the emancipation of the non-formal.” This chapter takes off from Willener’s observations to explore how propositions emerging across mid-century American avant-gardes might potentialize new models of community. It focuses upon Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1960), as a means of framing performativity as the subject of study and its means, standing as both metaphor and enactment. Such aesthetic experimentation implicitly swarms outward to underscore the techniques of the 1968 uprisings, which are removed from established Third International forms of resistance. Its participants, as a consequence, are positioned on the edge of becoming otherwise, threatening the stability of given social codes and producing vital new modes of sociability and encounter.

This chapter discusses the story of Black Mountain College and its history and far-reaching influence. The chapter focuses on the work of key poets associated with Black Mountain College, including Charles Olson and his landmark essay “Projective Verse,” Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov, and examines their characteristic formal innovations and thematic concerns, including their interest in experimentation, spontaneity, and organic form.

This chapter explores avant-garde literary communities at mid-century, and explains the relationship between the Beats, Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School.