Natures

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Goodbye, Zonko

Sorry to see that Billy Little died this past week. There's another poem, with a micro-bio, here.

Zonko was one of his pen names in the nineteen seventies. I knew him in both Buffalo and Vancouver, spent lots of time running in the same Vancouver circles in 1975. I always enjoyed his great, zany sense of humor.

(Thanks to Ron Silliman for the heads up, and the first three links.)

Labels: Billy Little, Passings

Name: Jeff Davis

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NatureS/Selected Poems 1972-2005 is available at some poetry-friendly bookshops, at SPD, or by mail. If you can't find it where you are, email me at jeffbdavis at gmail dot com.

"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