Natures: Black Mountain College Show Amazes Philly

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Black Mountain College Show Amazes Philly

Poet CA Conrad has a note up at PhillySound about the opening of "Greetings from Black Mountain College" at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, which I mentioned here. CA says it was "an amazing event;" I don't doubt it at all.

PLEASE, YOU MUST MUST MUST MUST MUST GET YOURSELVES OVER TO THE GALLERY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! It's FILLED with Black Mountain artists' work, from Jonathan Williams, to Robert Motherwell and Elaine de Kooning. What an exciting show it is!

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GET TO THE SHOW!
It really would be silly to miss this one!

The enthusiastic caps are from the original post. It sounds like Michael Rumaker was in great form for his reading, too.

If you're in Philadelphia this summer (the show's up until August 19th), take CA's advice.

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Photo of the Studies Building at Black Mountain College (now Camp Rockmont) borrowed from PhillySound.

Labels: Black Mountain College

Praise for NatureS

"Way back when, a literary gent by the name of E.L. Pound, from Hailey, Idaho, announced to the world: 'I divide poetry into what I can read and what I cannot read.' I am new to Jeff Davis's work but hit'll read!!! It reminds me that writers named Robert Creeley and Charles Olson once taught at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County NC - and made a difference."

~Jonathan Williams

"These poems are succinct in language and insights - no waste of words here - lovely and moving jewels of the Eleusinian luminous darkness, a magnificent shining in the dark. Poems (all of them) that are gifts, with a sassy bit of awareness to ground them all. At their best, they show an excellent eye and ear for the images and rhythms of nature - fresh, clear, as any sparkling mountain stream - and sing with that limpidity Olson was always trying to drum into my head at Black Mountain. Jeff Davis is a poet who knows what most males thirst to know - and die, not knowing. 'I am written,' Rimbaud said, and he is just that in these poems."

~Michael Rumaker

"Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind."

~Thomas Meyer