Poetry with Ted Olson & Thomas Rain Crowe

Name: Poetry with Ted Olson & Thomas Rain Crowe
Start: 2025-04-13T13:00:00-04:00
Location: 3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779

Schedule

Sun, 13 Apr, 2025 at 01:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779 | Sylva, NC

Ted Olson & Thomas Rain Crowe will visit City Lights for a poetry reading on Sunday, April 13th at 1:00pm. Ted will share is new poetry collection, "Blue Moon".
Ted Olson’s poetry chapbook, "Blue Moon", continues this East Tennessee-based author’s longtime celebration of Appalachian life and landscapes. His writings explore a range of topics and places. His poems are connected by the poet’s assessment of the quotidian realities experienced in a particular time (the turbulent decade leading up to the 2020 pandemic) and in a beloved but misunderstood region (Appalachia). Olson’s earlier poetry displayed a facility with sound, form, and understatement, and the poems in "Blue Moon" continue that approach, interweaving musical phrasing, subtle rhyming, taut stanzaic structures, and elliptical presentation of details. On the surface these 29 poems relate anecdotes from daily life in contemporary Appalachia, but the poems’ ultimate aspiration is to transport readers beyond reflection on lived experiences to a state of awareness regarding the universality of those experiences. A blue moon is a rare astronomical phenomenon with (according to folklore) the power to imbue a sense of mystery in the everyday lives of people. The poems in Ted Olson’s "Blue Moon" have the power to conjure up memorable flashes of mystery and meaning.
Ted Olson has lived for many years in Appalachia, where he has worked as a naturalist, a park ranger, and a professor. His poems, articles, essays, encyclopedia entries, reviews, and oral histories have appeared in a wide variety of books and periodicals. Olson’s poetry collections include "Breathing in Darkness: Poems" (2006) and "Revelations: Poems" (2012). Among his other publications are several scholarly books, including "Blue Ridge Folklife" (1998), "The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music" (2005), and "A Tennessee Folklore Sampler" (2009). He has edited books featuring literary works by James Still, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, and Cesare Pavese. Book series editor for the University of Tennessee Press’s Charles K. Wolfe Music Series as well as associate editor and music section editor for the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Olson is a Grammy-nominated record producer and album notes writer. Presently Professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, he served in 2008 as Fulbright Senior Scholar of American Studies in Barcelona, Spain.
Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally published author, editor, and translator of more than thirty books, including the multi-award-winning nature memoir "Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods" (2005); an anthology of contemporary Celtic-language poets titled "Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence" (1997); a collection of original verse, The "Laugharne Poems", written at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse in Laugharne, Wales (1997); two volumes of translations of the poetry of the Sufi poet Hafiz—"In Wineseller’s Street" (Iran Books) and "Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved" (Shambhala Publications); and "The Perfect Work: Poems of Hafiz", a work of poetry and music (Fern Hill Records, 1999). He has been an editor of major literary and cultural journals and anthologies and is the founder and publisher of New Native Press (www.newnativepress.org). He lived in San Francisco during the 1970s, working alongside the people cited in his book "Starting from San Francisco: The Baby Beat Generation" and the "Second San Francisco Renaissance" (Third Mind Books, 2018), and was an original member of the group responsible for the resurrection of Beatitude magazine during those years. A longtime resident of the southern Appalachians, he lives in the Tuckasegee watershed within the “Little Canada” community of Jackson County in western North Carolina.