Natures: Saturday Nights at Black Mountain College ...

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Saturday Nights at Black Mountain College ...

... all manner of wild and crazy things happened. The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the Media Arts Project hope to revive the tradition. As Kelly Gold, a long-time board member at the Center, writes:

Saturday night was when the work clothes were stashed away and the party garb came out. Saturday night meant music, mayhem and moonshine. Saturday night bore witness to an "alchemy of artistic experiments". Intrigued? We hope so.

... We're staging a not-so-hostile takeover of the entire Phil Mechanic Building in the River Arts District from 8pm until midnight. All you have to do is bring your best party self, grab some friends and allow us to wine you (well--beer you, thanks to Wedge Brewing!), dine you and fill your dance card. You'll also have the opportunity to purchase pre-sale tickets for the first Saturday Nights at Black Mountain College event, taking place at Camp Rockmont (the former BMC campus) in November.

Rumor has it tonight's festivities will even include poetry! I'm taking along a folder of new work, just in case. Should be a fine way to spend a rainy night.

Labels: BMCMAC, readings

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