Natures: Another birthday: Thomas Meyer ...

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Another birthday: Thomas Meyer ...

... who turns sixty-one today.

You certainly brought me good Fortune
But that is just what I regret, my success. The worst thing is once to have been happy.
A mouth and some yarrow stalks. Two witches dance for rain. Future foretelling.
A dish covered but full. Everything that was predicted comes about.
What you want will be done. Your heart's desire is the plan from now on.

(A few lines from the very fine "The Magician's Assistant", which appeared recently in Damn the Caesars, Volume III.)

Many more, Mr. Meyer.

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Here's a previous post on Meyer's translation of the daode jing , and a link to other posts on his work. Though things have been quiet there lately, the Musings page over at the Jargon Society remains worth delving into.

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The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

Labels: birthdays, Jargon, Reuben Cox, Tom Meyer

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