Natures: Jaye Bartell Shuffles Off in Style

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Jaye Bartell Shuffles Off in Style

Jaye Bartell, who's been an important part of the Asheville poetry scene for the past five years, is planning to shuffle off to Buffalo in a week. Sebastian, Laura, and I invited him to join us again in the studio last Sunday for WordPlay, and had a great electric time; the show's still available on the website through the Archive page.

He's giving a farewell reading tomorrow night, Friday, 8th December, at 9:30 PM at the New French Bar. Jaye's recent poems move toward an engagement with language that seems to me new for him, and it should be a treat to hear them live.

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Note: There's a selection of Jaye's poems in the December Rapid River, available now; his blog is Makes a Bird.

Labels: Jaye Bartell, poets, readings

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