Natures: The Spirit of Black Mountain College ... coming right up

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Spirit of Black Mountain College ... coming right up

This weekend brings the Spirit of Black Mountain Colleg e festival at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory. The festival, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Black Mountain College's founding, kicks off Thursday evening with a reception and a reading by Galway Kinnell, and runs through Saturday. Along the way, a mix of events, a melange of dance, music, visual arts and, of course, poetry. It's really a treat to be joining Lee Ann Brown, Thomas Meyer, Michael Rumaker (who'll actually read as a poet, though he's best known as a novelist and memoirist), Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Rain Crowe, Ted Pope, and the rest of the large company for all the brouhaha.

Here's my schedule, if you'd like to catch up with me or check out my work while you're there:

Friday:

10:15 am in Belk Centrum: Weekend overview with all performers

2:00 pm in Belk Centrum: Reading/Performance with Thomas Meyer and Lisa Jarnot. (This looks to be my main reading)

3:00 pm in Belk Centrum: I'll be the facilitator for a panel discussion: "The Poets of Black Mountain College". Is form nothing more than the extension of content?

5:00 pm at the Lenoir-Rhyne dining hall: Ed Dorn's Gunslinger Book I (a readers theater performance with Thomas Meyer, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Rain Crowe, et al.)

6:00 pm at the Hickory Museum of Art: Opening reception

8:00 pm at Hickory Museum of Art: Introduction of Poets

Saturday:

11:00 am at Hickory Museum of Art: Workshop (this is still billed in the online schedule as a reading, so I'm not quite sure which it is - but I'll be there either way).

2:00 pm in Belk Centrum: "Remembering Jonathan Williams (1921-2008): A Tribute". Thomas Meyer is coordinating this; I'll read a couple of Jonathan's poems, and speak from my memories of him.

And then I become an audience member, and spectator, hopping between shows and events. There will be some wonderful performances, I'm sure, and the exhibits will include some great pieces; much of the Black Mountain College Museum +Art Center's collection, for example, will be on display. If you're within range, do try to catch some of the festivities.

Labels: Ed Dorn, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Michael Rumaker, Spirit of BMC, Ted Pope, Thomas Rain Crowe, 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