Joel Oppenheimer was born in Yonkers, New York, and raised there, in a neighborhood a short walk from the New York City line. He attended Cornell University and the University of Chicago before finding himself at Black Mountain College, where he studied writing with M.C. Richards, Paul Goodman, and especially Charles Olson, while beginning a long association with fellow Black Mountain writers Edward Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Michael Rumaker, and Fielding Dawson (later associates included Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino). Having actually been a student at Black Mountain from 1950 to 1953, taking courses with Olson and having his work published in the Black Mountain Review edited by Creeley, Oppenheimer is one of those writers most legitimately a part of the group known in recent literary history as the Black Mountain Poets, and he is included as such in Donald Allen's famous...