Natures: Wordplay: the Laureate's Radio hour

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Wordplay: the Laureate's Radio hour

New shows up on the Wordplay Archive, a pair of shows featuring N.C. Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers and her special guests:

March 21, 2010, Cathy welcomed her former student Stephanie Biziewski to the show, and workshopped a poem Stephanie had underway;

April 18, 2010 Cathy welcomed the very versatile Michael Beadle to the show, and he read texts that ranged in voice from the personal/lyrical, through the historical, to the performative.

These are part of the series she and I have been calling "The Laureate's Radio Hour"; more of them up soon. Cathy will be joining me to host future programs on the 3rd Sunday of every month, except in months when her other obligations force changes to the schedule. I'll post updates when that's going to be the case.

Oh, and the schedule at AshevilleFM shifted slightly at the end of May, so Wordplay now airs at 5:00 PM Sundays, rather than 6:00.

Labels: Cathy Smith Bowers, Laureate's Radio Hour, Michael Beadle, Stephanie Biziewski, 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