Natures: Wordplay Today ... and the Altamont Tomorrow Night

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Wordplay Today ... and the Altamont Tomorrow Night

Wordplay last Sunday featured great readings by poets Gyorgyi Voros and Katherine Soniat. It's still available from the program page, or at http://stream.ashevillefm.org/afm-word-play-07072013.mp3

Today's show brings Lee Ann Brown and L. Lamar Wilson to the airwaves. They'll also be reading at the Altamont, 18 Church Steet, tomorrow, Monday evening, July 15th. Doors open at 7:00, and the reading starts at 7:30.

Lee Ann was born in Japan, grew up in Charlotte, and now lives in New York City and Marshall, NC. She's the author of Polyverse, The Sleep That Changed Everything, and In the Laurels, Caught. Her new collection, Crowns of Charlotte, celebrates the city of her rearing and some of the characters it brought into her world.

L. Lamar Wilson's Sacrelegion, just out from Carolina Wren Press, is a stunning reinvention of the memoir poem. Lee Ann says that it "chants new songlines of the sacred and profane, radiating legions of regions we must all negotiate together. Love, life, identity and language wrestle and riff here with pure expressive power." He's currently pursuing a doctorate in African-American studies at UNC Chapel Hill.

Tune in at 5:00 on AshevilleFM.org.

Labels: Altamont, audio, Gyorgyi Voros, Katherine Soniat, L. Lamar Wilson, Lee Ann Brown, 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