Natures: Scenes from the Festival

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Scenes from the Festival

The Spirit of Black Mountain College Festival, that is, which took place at Lenoir-Rhyne University in September, 2008. The Arts Council of North Carolina recorded many of the performances and readings, and apparently the recordings are now up on YouTube. A new friend who was exploring the web in search of some of my work came across them, and kindly let me know.

Not sure why I chose to read all new, unpublished work this day in Hickory, but there's no denying I did. The poems have changed a bit in the years since.

There are also readings by Michael Rumaker, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Meyer, and Thomas Raine Crowe from the festival. Cool, extremely cool.

Labels: Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Michael Rumaker, readings, Spirit of BMC, Thomas Rain Crowe, Tom Meyer

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