Natures: Curious sightings in Sylva ...

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Curious sightings in Sylva ...

Thomas Rain Crowe wrote last Wednesday:

the Jackson Co. grapevine has been working overtime and....the word has reached Tuckasegee that you were downtown around noon today with a "beautiful tall blonde woman" and looking very happy--as in having a good time. Then someone I know ran into Kay Byer at Ingles, who proceeded to tell the tale of Jeff Davis and his new girlfriend who, oddly, has the same initials as our new poet laureate. Hmmm... I said to myself. That explains the request for the jakoosi and the upscale B&B and a good restaurant. So, are you keeping secrets from your poet-friends? You ole dog, you.

Well, arf; for now, though, I'm sworn to secrecy - the Jackson County grapevine, though, is impressive. More soon.

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Update 29 January, 2010: Edited to remove a small elision required by the need for secrecy at the time of the original post.

Labels: Cathy Smith Bowers, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Laureate, Thomas Rain Crowe

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