Natures: Adios to the Captain

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Adios to the Captain

News today that Captain Beefheart, also known in his later years by his given name, Don Van Vliet, has passed away from multiple sclerosis. His Safe As Milk and Trout Mask Replica especially spent many hours on my turntable a few decades back, and his work was always worth some good listens.

Here's the Captain:

And here's the Captain in a mellow mood:

(great video by terr0rkitten. Fast! Bulbous!)

(Hat tip to echidne, writing over at Atrios' place.)

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Update 22 December, 2010: One of the "greatest poets" of "a culture that has now all but vanished"? Jon Savage has a good post on The Captain over at The Guardian UK.

Labels: Captain Beefheart, Passings

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