Natures: Do Tell

Monday, June 22, 2009

Do Tell

Now it can be told! One of the things I've been busy with these past few weeks while I've been off-line is a festival; it will take place July 11th a few miles down I-26 from Asheville in Hendersonville, NC. The Do Tell Festival is more than a bit unusual in that it will include both poetry and storytelling, two ancient arts of verbal performance. The poets will include Thomas Rain Crowe, Laura Hope-Gill, Sebastian Matthews, Thomas Meyer, and yours truly - a diverse bunch if ever there was one - and the storytellers cover quite a range as well, from teller of traditional Jack Tales Badhair Michael Williams, to Candler Willis, who covers the lore of Abraham Lincoln, and Lloyd Arneach, who tells tales from the Cherokee tradition. And others. Not quite something for everyone, perhaps, but dang close.

And if you haven't been to Hendersonville lately, it'll provide a good excuse to visit. It seems to be getting lots more lively; it's not just about apples anymore.

Check the website. You might want to put it on your calendar.

Labels: Do Tell Festival, Laura Hope-Gill, Sebastian Matthews, storytelling, 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