Natures: A Night Out ...

Thursday, January 24, 2008

A Night Out ...

In a few minutes I'm headed down to the Center* for the "Night Out with Bob and John" (that'd be Rauschenberg and Cage, respectively). Last year's similar "Night Out with John Cage" sold out quickly; even though I'm a board member, I couldn't get in, and wound up having coffee a few blocks away with old friends who couldn't get in either. This year I'm bartending, so at least I'll get in the door.

The show kicks off the annual Fringe Arts Festival, which always offers delights and surprises. If you're in this part of the woods and looking for something to do this weekend, check it out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* That would be the awkwardly named Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, of course - which, despite the place reference in its name, is actually in downtown Asheville, at 56 Broadway.

Bye, now.

Labels: BMCMAC, Fringe Festival, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg

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