Natures: The Spirit of Black Mountain College

Monday, July 28, 2008

The Spirit of Black Mountain College

For the last year and a half folks at Hickory's Lenoir-Rhyne College, including the apparently tireless Rand Brandes, have been working with the Hickory Museum of Art, Asheville's own Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and other organizations to put together a festival honoring Black Mountain College. The web site's now up, so do go have a look.

Poets will have major roles in the festivities, just as they did in the life of Black Mountain College.

It'll run from September 25 thru 27, and promises to be quite the celebration. More to come in the weeks ahead ...

Labels: Black Mountain College, poets, Rand Brandes, readings, Spirit of BMC

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