Natures: Easter on the airwaves

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Easter on the airwaves

For Easter's Wordplay I went to the vault* and brought up a vintage reading by Jonathan Williams from 1981. It was the year he published Get Hot or Get Out in merry old England, and the reading features a sequence of poems from that book that's grounded in the work of composer Charles Ives. Like too much of Jonathan's work, it hasn't, I believe, appeared in another collection since its first book publication.

The show also features part of a 2003 interview of Jonathan by Hillsborough poet (and Wordplay vet) Jeffery Beam for RainTaxi Review of Books. The transcription of the interview is still available on the RainTaxi site.

Music for the show includes some Ives, of course, and some tracks from Monk, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and British entertainer Mike Harding (his "Manuel" is pretty hilarious) that Jonathan enjoyed .

It's another Jargony treat. Tune in!**

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*Actually, Thorns Craven's vault. Thorns was long-time treasurer of the Jargon Society, and graciously shared some of his tapes with me last fall. Thanks, Thorns.

** The link now works, so the file transferred properly to the archive server after today's rebroadcast.

Update 4/21/2009: Last spring's Wordplay show featuring Jonathan's 2005 reading from Jubilant Thicket is now up on the Wordplay ibiblio archive, here (.mp3 file).

Labels: Jeffery Beam, Jonathan Williams, 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