Natures: Olson's Maximus Too Much?

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Olson's Maximus Too Much?

Maybe so! At least for the CD player in AshevilleFM's Studio A. It freaked out Sunday and cut short the first three tracks I tried to play from Olson's Maximus Poems. Fortunately, most of the material I'd intended to use for the show was available from the great PennSound website, so I was able to go online and stream the poems I'd programmed. Of course, I'd also planned to use three poems that weren't on PennSound, my own edits from Fred Wah's recording of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, but, thankfully, the CD player worked fine for them. Go figure.

The glitches did mean that I couldn't include the "Maximus From Dogtown IV" I had on the playlist, but I'll edit it in when I post the show to the WordPlay archive on ibiblio, along with the tracks the player truncated.

Labels: Charles Olson, PennSound, 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