Natures: Another birthday for Robert Bly

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Another birthday for Robert Bly

And his birthday seems as good a time as any to mention that he'll be back in Asheville on the 28th of March, this time performing with the musicians of Free Planet Radio. This Asheville world fusion group includes bassist Eliot Wadopian (just now back from his annual Solstice performances with the Paul Winter Consort, the group with whom, I believe, he won the first of his Grammys), percussionist River Guerguerian, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Rosser.

Bly will be reading from his love poetry in this performance; the program's being titled "Awakened Heart: An Evening of Love Poetry and World Music". It'll be held at the acoustically splendid Diana Wortham Theater downtown.

Marshall's fascinating Prama Institute is once again sponsoring this springtime foray by Bly down from the northern plains, his home country, into the southern Smokies. The Institute brought him down this past spring for his first Asheville reading, which proved to be a fine event, indeed. We featured significant portions of it on Wordplay in June.

More, of course, as we approach the occasion.

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Thanks to the Diana Wortham page for this event for the image.

Labels: music, Prama Institute, readings, Robert Bly, Wordplay

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