Natures: Michael Rumaker Brings Geetings from Black Mountain College

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Michael Rumaker Brings Geetings from Black Mountain College

If I were in Philadelphia tonight, I'd head over to the Bridgette Mayer Gallery on Walnut Street to catch novelist and poet Michael Rumaker reading from Black Mountain Days, his extraordinary memoir of his student years at Black Mountain College.

The Gallery is hosting "Greetings from Black Mountain College," featuring work by students and faculty at the college, including Josef Albers, Elaine de Kooning, Joseph Fiore, Ray Johnson, Leo Krikorian, Gregory Masurovsky, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jonathan Williams, and others. Given the transformation in American art these folks helped create over the last sixty years, it should be an amazing exhibit. The Gallery's page on the exhibit has images of some really striking pieces. Artist Robert Godfrey curated the show for the Gallery.

Michael will be reading at 7:00.

The show runs through August 19th. I do plan a trip north, so perhaps I'll get a chance to see it before it comes down.

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The photograph (by Alice Sebrell, if recollection serves) captures Michael at the reception for the publication of Black Mountain Days held at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. The Center, incidentally, loaned many of the pieces in the show at the Gallery.

Labels: Black Mountain College, Michael Rumaker

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