In an aging building overlooking the cypress and moss-lined Hillsborough River, just upstream from the dam, David Croft is quietly making high art. He's recording local poets in the home studio he has spent years assembling.
Croft has merged lifelong interests in sound and the written word in the form of Xeximian Records, which has released Poets of Tampa Bay. The compilation of original poetry by eight of the Bay area's better-known poets includes Silvia Curbelo, Phyllis McEwen, Peter Meinke and James Tokley.
Croft, a 47-year-old family counselor at Hillsborough Memorial Gardens, says he has always been interested in qualities of voices and the skill of reading.
"In many ways I've always compared (others) to my mother," he says. As a child growing up in South Georgia, his schoolteacher mother didn't punish him "with this Mother Goose stuff." Instead she read to him works by the likes of Poe and Shakespeare.
Along with poetry and spoken-word, Croft loved listening to radio announcers and the yarns of Georgia farmers he grew up hearing.
The path that got him where he is today is almost as tortuous as the river his apartment overlooks. After six years in the Marines, Croft attended college, eventually graduating from University of Central Florida with a degree in marketing — not where his true interests lay.
"I was a typical artist lost in the business world," he says. "I always found it very, very hard to make a firm career decision because when I worked in business, I was still interested in the arts."
Croft writes poetry himself, and did so all along while he was struggling to find direction. "When I wrote, I tended to write poetry," he says, "… because you can say so much in so little."
Who's in the market to listen to recorded poetry? That's the challenge facing Croft and his "hobby business," Xeximian Records, which also released Shoe, a collection of poems set to music by Sarasota's Gary Drilling.
"The main reason that I want to record poets is because I don't have time to read," Croft says. "And I want to force-feed good poetry on the American public. … I want them to be able to listen to good poetry read by the authors or good readers that sound so natural that it feels like they're really sitting with them."
Croft wants to liberate everyone from the tyranny of the computer, get them to "throw their televisions in the trash."
Maybe clean, high-quality recordings of thoughtful, intelligent poems will do the trick. He certainly shanghaied a good crew, each of whom has three poems on the disc. Stop clicking and start listening, and you'll be taken to Disney in Meinke's sense-memory rich "Magic Kingdom," stricken by Nicholas Samaras' emotive voice and earnest humanity in "Black Monastic Mulatto Soul."
If you've ever been turned off by poetry, Croft is with you. "There's enough bad poetry out there to sink a ship 10 times over," he says with a chuckle. That's why he took pains to assemble the poets he has.
Among the first poets Croft recruited for this initial project is University of Tampa's Richard Mathews, director of University of Tampa Press, editor of Tampa Review and eventual co-producer of the CD.
All the poets on it have been published in Tampa Review; gaining their trust and interest wasn't difficult once Mathews became involved. He served as a liaison between the poets and Croft, who was not known within poetry or literary circles.
Though a bit self-effacing because of his vested interest in the album, Mathews is pleased with the results. The flow of the CD, he says, and the poets included, reflect the cultural mix of the area.
"It sounds like Tampa Bay," Mathews says. "You get gulls, water, poems that are about this place but also about the world as a much bigger place. I don't think it sounds provincial."
Once the two began discussing the project, Mathews found Croft's interest in recording poems catching. "You can't speak to him for long without picking up on that," Mathews says. "It just becomes contagious."
Croft credits his years in the Marines for his "take the hill" approach — as well as his accumulated years.
"You start kicking up those numbers that have four's in front of them, you start realizing, "Huh, whatever I want to do, by golly I better grab hold of it and do it," he says.
"It's nothing about fear. It's simply about living. Don't be scared of dying. It's just get out there and live. Don't sit on your carcass and watch life pass you by. Get out and engage it, and do it."
Available in Tampa at Borders, Black Hawk Cafe and CD City; in St. Pete at Globe Coffee House. Learn more about Xeximian Records at www.xeximian.com
Features writer David Jasper can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 111, jasper@weeklyplanet.com, or by singing telegram at 1310 E. Ninth Ave., Tampa.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2001.