Natures: On Wordplay: Ross Gay

Monday, May 26, 2008

On Wordplay: Ross Gay

This week Wordplay features Philadelphia-based poet Ross Gay. Ross visited Asheville in February, read at Malaprops (with Patrick Rosal) and Warren Wilson College, and also sat down with Wordplay veteran Joanna Cooper, an old friend from their days at Temple, for a nice long interview. This week we feature a couple of poems from the Malaprops reading, and much of Joanna's interview. Joanna herself joined me in the studio to provide some background and context.

For our music, Joanna chose Stevie Wonder's "Love's in Need of Love Today" from his Songs in the Key of Life, Vol.1, and Cat Stevens' "Tea for the Tillerman," from the album of the same name.

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Photo of Ross by Joanna Cooper, Asheville, February 15, 2008

Labels: interviews, Joanna Cooper, poets, readings, Ross Gay, 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