Natures: Coleman Barks comes (back) to Wordplay

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Coleman Barks comes (back) to Wordplay

Sebastian and I are both out of town this Sunday, so I've set up a show from a couple weeks back to play again, via the wonders of computer automation.

That show was a real treat, and well worth hearing once more: Coleman Barks reading live at Asheville's Fine Arts Theater on April 26th (as part of WordFest2008) with bassist Eliot Wadopian and percussionist Byron Hedgepeth. It assuredly wasn't your standard poetry reading.

Barks is well-known, of course, as the premiere translator of the works of the 13th Century Persian mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi into English, but he's a master poet in his own right, and in this performance gave us both some of his own insightful, genial work, and a selection of his translations from Rumi and Hafez.

On an earlier visit to Asheville, Coleman came by the studio to talk with me about (among many other things) his long relationship with Rumi's poetry; part of that interview is featured in the show, too.

The reading audio is a little boomy, but listenable. I'd set my mics up too close, as it turned out, to the PA that afternoon; I edited out the resulting signal clipping.

Incidental music for the show included tracks from Ali Akbar Khan's 1993 Garden of Dreams.

It'll air at 2:00 PM on Sunday from the station website. As always, the show will be available all next week from the Archive page as an on-demand stream and free podcast.

Enjoy, and I'll be back live in the studio (if the creek don't rise and the sky don't fall) next week.

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Coleman provided the photo, taken by his son Benjamin.

Labels: Byron Hedgepeth, Coleman Barks, Eliot Wadopian, Hafez, Rumi, Wordfest2008, 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