Natures: Another link (or two) for the Laureate ...

Friday, February 12, 2010

Another link (or two) for the Laureate ...

A little more delving, and I came across another interview with Cathy Smith Bowers, this one focused largely on her then-new Book of Minutes. In it Cathy responds to a question about the presence of spirituality in her work with this:

[W]e are in a culture deprived of spirituality. We hunger for it and are always looking for ways of having the spirit fed. In the best poetry, the spirit will be fed, and it’s the spirit that should be—not the brain. The mind is also a part of it—but [the mind] is the machine that gets the reader to the spirit of the poem. I like to think of a poem as a river of spirit, and every once in a while there comes a current of intellect. I like smart poems, but I don’t want the smartness of the poem to be the main thing. I want to not even notice the smartness of a poem until many readings later.

When her interviewer, Julie Funderburk, asked for a model of such a poetic practice, Cathy cited Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I've heard her cite in other contexts as well. He's clearly one of her favorite poets. Check it out.

Update, 13 February 2010: storySouth, which hosts the interview, also hosts some poems from Traveling in Time of Danger and A Book of Minutes.

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Photos: Top: Kathryn Stripling Byer crowns Cathy Smith Bowers as North Carolina's new Poet Laureate in the old legislative chamber of the state capitol building in Raleigh, Feb. 10, 2010. NC Secretary of Cultural Resources Linda Carlisle looks on.
Bottom: Cathy Smith Bowers, North Carolina's new Poet Laureate, delivers her address accepting the appointment, and explaining her goals for the position.

Labels: Cathy Smith Bowers, interviews, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Linda Carlisle

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