Natures: Loco with the Logodaedalists

Friday, July 18, 2008

Loco with the Logodaedalists

(Click for a legible version)

Saturday evening I'll be joining a host of other poets and friends of Jonathan Williams to read from his work and celebrate his life at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

The readers have been corresponding for several weeks now to declare their preferences for poems or prose selections that define Jonathan in his particularity for them. I find that I'm reminded of the old Buddhist teaching story about the blind men and the elephant; for some of us Jonathan was a winnowing basket, for others a plowshare, for others a column. It'll be interesting to hear these takes on Jonathan converge; I'm hoping we get close to providing a glimpse of the whole elephant before we're done.

Loco Loodaedalist
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
56 Broadway, Downtown Asheville
Saturday 19 July, 2008
Doors at 7:30, reading at 8:00

Labels: BMCMAC, Diana Stoll, Hannah Bonner, James Thompson, Jay Bonner, Jeffery Beam, Jonathan Williams, Paul McDonald, readings, Reuben Cox, Thorns Craven, Tom Meyer, Tom Patterson

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