Natures: WordPlay: Further Adventures

Thursday, September 21, 2006

WordPlay: Further Adventures

For the past few weeks I've been working with Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond, and Sebastian Matthews to bring the second season of WPVM's WordPlay, "the program by and about poets and writers ...", to the air each Sunday at 4:00. We've had some fun shows already, and we're just getting underway. Last week, poet Gary Lilley, who writes poems very much in the spirit of jazz, brought a band with him to the show. There were, if I remember correctly, seven folks in the studio (it's maybe 10'x10'), probably an all time record. It was a total hoot. Thanks to a malfunction of the station's automation system, you can still hear it in the station's Archive; just scroll down.

We've got a blog underway. We plan to use it to continue the discussions we have on the shows, to present some work by our guests, and ... well, who knows? There's not a whole lot there yet, but check it out.

The WPVM broadcast signal, for several reasons, including the fact that it was chartered as a "low power" station, is too weak to hear much of anywhere, but the station also streams on the web. I've heard some good radio there, regardless of the station's size. Check out the program schedule, if you want, or just dive in. It'll perk up your ears.

Labels: Wordplay, wpvm

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