Monday, January 31, 2022

PSA lab report

 CELEBRATING

My post-op PSA lab test came in at 0.1, which is basically negligible, as I understand itki.

Forgive me for focusing on my personal health but this is a big hurdle. Itki means I'm in remission from my prostate cancer post surgery. We will keep monitoring, and this one low reading doesn't mean the cancer can't return, but itki does mean the surgery was successful in removing the cancer that was there.


After two years of challenges -- throat cancer, radiation, chemo, pneumonia, Covid, hernia and prostate cancer -- I may be healthy again. Huge thank yous to my wonderful team of docs -- Dr. Heather Linder, Dr.  Michael Murray, Dr. Duane Hartshorn, Dr. Vernon King, Dr. Kyle Work, Dr. Helen Goldberg, and various consultants and corollary providers; my kind, generous and loving family; and my whole crew of caregivers, friends and well-wishers. You've made the difference for me. Bless you.

I won't be using my CaringBridge site from now on. And hopefully far into the future. But I hope you'll make comments here on my blog, if you're so moved.

Year of the Tiger

13022 [Western Slope Calendar] 

my son Gregorio's birth year

a propitious omen for a gentle man

Photo by Rio Coyotl









If you missed the Holocaust Remembrance Reading 27jan22, you can catch it now on YouTube here

POETRY DOUBLEHEADER

First Tuesday this February First  at 7 pm isn't Lupercalia, but itki's a poetry doubleheader with KC Trommer reading on the East Coast and the Art Goodtimes  in Telluride. Trommer, essayist and poet-in-law of San Miguel County's own Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, headlines a Jackson-Heights-based First Tuesday reading series at 7 p.m. EST (5 pm. MST). The zoom series is run by Richard Jeffrey Newman and sponsored by New York State and Poets & Writers, Inc.

Trommer's reading is free but requires registration with Newman of Nassau Community College.  


A MFA graduate of Univ. of Michigan at Ann Arbor, KC has published books, founded poetry programs, been awarded grants and fellowships in the U.S. and the Czech Republic, collaborated with Grammy-recognized composer Herschel Garfein  on a poetry song cycle, and served as poet-in-residence both for Works on Water and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's COVID-19 Response Residency Program on Governors Island. KC is the Assistant Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.

At 7 pm MST (same time but not simultaneous shows thanks to different zones) Art Goodtimes of Wrights Mesa (who has spent the last two years healing from multiple challenges) is having a poetry coming-out party of sorts as part of the Bardic Trails virtual reading series sponsored jointly by the Wilkinson Public Library and the Telluride Institute's Talking Gourds poetry programs.

Join us and bring a poem/story/heartsong to share in the Gourd Circle portion of the reading.

<zoom link came>

Join Zoom Meeting
Bardic Trails
Feb 1, 22 
7:00 pm MST (Mountain Standard Time)
Meeting ID: 810 6884 6690




Sunday, January 30, 2022

Elissa Dickson in Stockholm

 




GREEN THUMB


What if you just never knew

Your heart is a greenhouse

Outside

Icy hate, shame bruised sleet,

The gathering dark of apathy

Sure, sure

But 

Inside

Just today

A superbloom

A cacophony of

magenta tangerine vermillion

All clamoring for more

The air thick with lavender

And everywhere 

Butterflies busy 

Pollinating just one thing


-Elissa Dickson

This poem is dedicated to 
my mentor @rosemerry.trommer 

who teaches us all everyday 
how love is everything

Saturday, January 29, 2022

Back to the Paleo Present

 



looking for mushrooms



takes one back to the Paleolithic

on a forest time machine, hunting

& wild harvesting as our ancestors did


but with new tools: African baskets

Finnish knives, Lincoff field guides

& edibles laced with magic


Photo by Linnea Gillman
  

parading into a mountain rainbow

under Colorado's highest peaks

looking on looking back looking at us


Photo courtesy of Rick and Marty Hollinbeck


Friday, January 28, 2022

Let Us Never Forget

Poems in Remembrance of the Holocaust 

On behalf of the Colorado Poetry Center, the trio of Beth Harris, Judyth Hill and Tina Bueche ran a quite impressive virtual poetry reading in honor of UNESCO's International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27jan22.  Itki was the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the complex of German concentration/extermination camps in Poland.


I hope the full video is available at some point. There were many powerful moments and readings by my cohort of impressive fellow readers. But here at this blogspot I wanted to share my script portion of the evening, with the new poem that came out of remembering the Shoah and participating in this important world event. 

Dedicated to my dear friends Pamela & John Lifton-Zoline.


Death Fugue 

from European poet and Romanian Holocaust survivor 

Paul Celan (1920-1970]

Translated from the German by American poet Pierre Joris


Todesfuge 

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts

wir trinken und trinken

wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt

der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete


Black milk of morning, we drink you evenings

we drink you at noon and mornings 

we drink you at night

we drink and we drink


A man lives in the house

he plays with the snakes

he writes 

he writes when it darkens to Deutschland

your golden hair Margarete  


he writes and steps in front of his house 

and the stars glisten 

and he whistles his dogs to come

he whistles his jews to appear 


let a grave be dug in the earth

he commands us 

play up for the dance


Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you mornings and noontime 

we drink you evenings

we drink and we drink


A man lives in the house 

he plays with the snakes 

he writes

he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland 

your golden hair Margarete


Your ashen hair Shulamit [Shoo-lah-might]

we dig a grave in the air 

there one lies at ease


He calls 

jab deeper into the earth 

you there 

and you other men sing and play 


he grabs the gun in his belt 

he draws it 

his eyes are blue

jab deeper your spades 

you there 

and you other men continue to play for the dance


Black milk of dawn we drink you at night 

we drink you at noon we drink you evenings 

we drink you and drink 


a man lives in the house 

your golden hair Margarete 

your ashen hair Shulamit 

he plays with the snakes


He calls out 

play death more sweetly 

death is a master from Deutschland 

he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly 

then as smoke you’ll rise in the air 

then you’ll have a grave in the clouds 

there you’ll lie at ease


Black milk of dawn we drink you at night 

we drink you at noon 

death is a master from Deutschland 

we drink you evenings and mornings 

we drink and drink 


death is a master from Deutschland 

his eye is blue 

he strikes you with lead bullets 

his aim is true 


a man lives in the house 

your golden hair Margarete 


he sets his dogs on us 

he gifts us a grave in the air 

he plays with the snakes and dreams 

death is a master from Deutschland


your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamit

Photo courtesy of Jerry Roberts

















This famous poem from Israeli poet and Romanian Holocaust survivor

Dan Pagis (1930-1986)


Written in Pencil 

in the Sealed Railway-Car


here  in  this  carload

I  am  eve

with  abel  my  son

if  you  see  my  other  son

cain  son  of  man

tell  him  that  I



Death Camp 

from American-Yiddish poet, lesbian scholar and Warsaw Ghetto survivor 

Irena Klelpfisz (1941 to the present)





when they took us to the shower 

i saw the rebbetzin her sagging breasts sparse

pubic hairs i knew 

and remembered the old rebbe 

and turned my eyes away


i could still hear her advice 

a woman with a husband a scholar


when they turned on the gas 

i smelled it first coming at me 

pressed myself hard to the wall 

crying rebbetzin rebbetzin

i am here with you 

and the advice you gave me

i screamed into the wall 

as the blood burst from my lungs 


cracking her nails in women's flesh 

i watched her capsize beneath me 

my blood in her mouth 


i screamed 

when they dragged my body into the oven 

i burned slowly at first 

i could smell my own flesh 

and could hear them grunt 

with the weight of the rebbetzin

and they flung her on top of me 

and i could smell her hair 

burning against my stomach


when i pressed through the chimney

it was sunny and clear 

my smoke was distinct 


i rose quiet 

left her 

beneath


Photo by Vero López


Holocaust


Conceived in war

she was born after the catastrophe

Raised Christian


Stories sprinkled on baptized hair

like holy water. Catechism class

her boot camp


Jesu Christos, they tell her

was, according to the Book, rejected

by the Pharisees. By the Jews


And yet the Haight’s Capt. Barefoot

finds herself celebrating Shabbat

every Friday


Turning distant rites

into family practice. Obedient

to a learned vigil of kinning


Fervent in remembering

the Shoah, that shared WWII story of

yellow-star roundups & gunpoint liberation


She too has seen the arms

tatooed in the algebra of Auschwitz

Skeletons in stripes behind barbed wire


Read of women, children, whole families

boxcar’d & shipped like cattle

to the Nazi factories of ethnic cleansing


She’s staying with the troubles

Not to exceptionalize

since world horrors abound


But to believe and grieve

To conceptualize itki

To see through the media’s cacophony


to the twisted steel plates of a possible future

The architecture of a dozen religious

arguments for a just war


As if, as converts, justice, or just us

could be salvaged from genocide

with a nuclear lock on blocking chaos


As if everybody else’s divinities

were apocalypse zombies. Intent

on dismembering her-him-us


As if the scapegoat infections

of even the healthy were merely

the viruses of evolution


As if the black milk of dawn

rises in the East

Dreaming gold. Drinking ash


As if winnowing

were the only way to assure

the rapture of the species


Photo of Pinwheel Cave Datura by Devlin Gandy


Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Rosen & Goodtimes prosepoeming




 THE EXCHANGE


    dR

Art, I'll have Mr. Fuoco, who probably died years ago, arrange a limo at the corner of North and liquor store across First where fashion junkies hang and shout good lourd willin we'll work something out...! spend the night why doncha - we'll talk of Nacadoches and other places of things and feelings felt presently us old tejas with our ancient words blueberries viruses and galaxies above the stars all the way out to the James Webb Space Telescope just kick the tires a bit and have a look your bed is set glass of water and all


    aG

Yo Dano, well now pard, i’d prefer no coast sushi to north & liquor, only that fish haus don’t open till 11:30 & the fuoco boyz want my errant  accord in at 10, so’s why doncha let me call itki in as text (tossed err roan) in time for a dispatch in spite of setbacks inside practice hurdles or looped in the folds of interlinear Nacadoches, teja tacos, blueberry virus & the tin foil telescope making itki’s webb way across our earthy orbit, dodging a plethora of unregulated disposable mini-sats from the private unregulated sector of this hypercapitalist solar system in this public unregulated democrazy we’ve kicked back into since the last atomic bomb & oh! in there can we plan a visit to wendalicous at some palisaditious recovery point & thank you yes i like my night water & a small bowl to expectorate the fluoride into & if itki’s okay to bring/buy some urine liners for the bed since i maintain a mildly leaky faucet & to let you know I need to sleepwalk out to the urinal every two or three hours through the night & maybe i’ll bring my heating pad since my challenged soles have taken a coastal dislike to cold & also will have the bipap apparati, my basket of weaving, a set of teeth tools & the 50+ pills i need to take morning & evening, but all this only if there’s connectivity somewhere there in fruitocrazy so i can make my telepathic health visit with head team doc linder at 10:30 am thor's day & get back in time to snorwood or maybe stay late there to catch the to-hell-you-ride institute presentato (rhyming with potato) of Indigenous literary elder Linda Hogan with my attendancing obligatory as a TI “trustee emeritus” (they won’t let go!) ... which is to say, maybe but unlikely overnight, just a 10 to 5 hop that wed nez pierced day & even then itki’s a drive in the dark but if i go via montrovia can do some needed double-time non-amazonian  bucket short list purchases from my closest big box supply chain ...  phew! ... as in the knot few view


Monday, January 24, 2022

Colorado Poets Center

Bob King reading in Fruita in 13016 [WSC]

Bob King was a towering figure in Colorado poetry, although he came back to his home state late, after years teaching college in North Dakota. He and his wife Beth Franklin founded the Colorado Poets Center. Itki provided the first internet connectivity for Colorado-based poets with a page for each of us and locating us in our different regions of the state. Beth has rejuvenated the site, selected a board of directors, and is doing interviews again.  

Bob was a wonderful interviewer. He did an interview with me in the Spring of 13014 [WSC]  just after Western Eye Press in Sedona (AZ) come out with Looking South to Lone Cone: the Cloud Acre Poems. Not only had he read it, but he went to the heart of the book with his questions. An amazing man, and now his legacy is the website that Beth has brought back to us -- an incredible resource for the poetry community in Colorado. 

Here's the interview Bob did with me eight years ago:

https://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/eWords/issue26/goodtimes.html




Looking South to Lone Cone: The Cloud Acre Poems (Western Eye Press, 2013)


Bob King: Art, I want to talk about your latest book, Looking South to Lone Cone: the Cloud Acre Poems, the last phrase the name you’ve given to your mountain property. It’s divided into three sections, a brief introductory one, then a tour through the four seasons, and an ending section, or conclusion, “”In the Clouds.” Did this organization come easily or did you spend some time wondering about this or that regarding the order of the poems?

Art Goodtimes: My publisher, Lito Tejada-Flores, is a good friend, and had been asking me for a book of poetry for his Western Eye Press out of Sedona, Arizona, for some time. But I was dealing with my wife’s health issues in 2012.

Plus, I enjoy a full life. I had a re-election campaign for a fifth term as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner (I won). The downturn had dried up property taxes and San Miguel County was facing drastic cutbacks. My youngest daughter Sara was heading off to college, and my youngest son Gregorio to high school. I grow 50+ varieties of heirloom potatoes each summer, serve as poetry editor of Fungi magazine in Wisconsin, write a weekly op-ed column for the Telluride Watch (“Up Bear Creek”) and a monthly one for the Four Corners Free Press (Cortez). I co-host a Talking Gourds Poetry Club monthly reading series in Telluride and perform regionally doing poetry readings with friends. Not to mention various political and non-profit boards and commissions.

I didn’t have time to put a book together. But I had been collecting a bunch of poems in a file folder on my computer under this title, Looking South to Lone Cone. It was only a sampling of poems I’d written about my acre homestead at the headwaters of Maverick Draw just outside of Norwood. Nevertheless, I sent the batch of them off to Lito, and said if he wanted a book, to see if he could shape one. Which is what he did, focused mostly around the seasons. I reviewed various drafts, but Lito was really responsible for turning my congery into a chapbook.

BK: “Where Are We?”—your final poem in the book—starts by situating your home, Cloud Acre, near Maverick Draw, as you’ve just said, on Wright’s Mesa and so on. You go on in the poem to situate it with other travelers and end with the Athapascan migration that first inhabited this country. I also notice these names are not infrequent in other poems. You speak of driving to Norwood, for example, when you could as easily say “town”. So there’s a kind of poetic insistence on place names. What’s the strength of these names, these locations, for you?

Art reading at an Earth First! rally 12984


AG: Well, my poetic sensibility has been shaped by my times and by growing up in the Bay Area on the West Coast. “No idea but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams. And I come from the Pound/Williams/Snyder lineage with big doses of Lew Welch, Marge Piercy, Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Reg Saner, Jack Mueller, Judyth Hill, Joan Logghe, Mike Adams, Phil Woods, Wendy Videlock, Danny Rosen, David Feela, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, and Dolores LaChapelle. I met George and Mary Oppen hiking on Mt. Tamalpais, and have always treasured his koan: “…Ultimately the air / is bare sunlight where must be found / the lyric valuables…” Names are like Snyder’s rip-rap—a series of stones that form a path towards an idea. And, linguistically, English is a naming language, as opposed to most indigenous tongues (Ute, Navajo, Pomo etc.) which are verbal languages. Actions carry the ideas. For English speakers, names do.

Plus, my time as a Vista volunteer on the Crow Reservation in Montana during the Sixties taught me the importance of place. Of place names. And of lineages. Crow folks could name their ancestors going back hundreds of years, as can most Indigenous traditionals. And in native stories, specific places are integral to the embedded meaning of the myths (c.f. Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits In Places).

When I found Colorado in the Eighties, I became a student and friend of Dolores La Chapelle, whose seminal work, Sacred Land Sacred Sex Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life (Finn Hill Arts, Silverton, 1988) cites bardic poetry as one of her seven pathways to get Industrial Growth Society humans back in touch with the natural world. “Find a sacred place and stay there,” she told us. The bard serves the social function of speaking for place, for all the human and more-than-human world around us (see Heidegger’s umwelt).

This chapbook, somewhat shamelessly in the final poem which I wrote after Lito had assembled the collection, means to emphasize the importance and influence of place, as well as its co-evolutionary aspect in our lives. Dolores would never say, “I discovered” something. She would insist that “Nature afforded her the opportunity to see.”

BK: In some of your other work there’s a strong sense of the political, of urban and industrial sites. In “Post Y2K E-clipse” you speak of “Wright’s Mesa’s keyboards still caught/ / in the predator claws of globalism” and go on to summon up “the shy ways of the Old Ones / reflected in the night sky / re-turning us on / like a universal switch.” Are these poems an escape from the exigencies of the contemporary political/ industrial world or is ‘escape’ the wrong word?

Art reading in Todos Santos,
Mexico, 13017 


AG: Escape is an interesting word. As a deep ecologist, I always look for the deep meaning in a word. Its etymology provides strong clues. As do its connotations and associations. Literally, “out of capture” or “out from under a cloak” from the original Latin through Old Northern French and Anglo-Norman (remember the Battle of Hastings in 1066 A.D.?). And connotatively there’s this buried sense of stealth and even deceit in the word.

So, no, I am a full participant in the 21st Century of what some would call the Christian Era. I do not want to “escape” back to some idyllic Rousseauian past. Although, to be fair, some would see LaChapelle’s insistence on outlining the suicidal problems of our society and by seeking answers in Taoism and Indigenous cultures (returning to what Snyder has called “Paleolithic values”) as an escape.

But ours is a time to look backwards as well as forwards. As a bioregionalist and follower of Peter Berg’s Planet Drum Foundation, I came to Colorado and settled in an old existing ramshackle home, rather than building a new one, as a conscious act of “reinhabitation.” Living with less new and lots of recycled old is intentional on my part—as an act of voluntary simplicity. And as a political statement about the kind of society I want to reinvent. These are things I choose to do.

By the same token, I want to find my way back to a sense of nature to recapture (not avoid capturing) the sense of harmony and balance we see in some select cultures around the world at certain times in their cyclic run. I believe our current post-modern Industrial Growth Society, as the Norwegian philosopher Kvaloy calls it, is koyaanisqatsi (“life out of balance”—a Hopi term and title of an excellent film on the matter by New Mexico’s Reggio Godfrey).

Finally, as a Green, my work is to give future focus to environmental wisdom, grassroots democracy and social justice. I am rooted in my place. I work for change. There is no escape.

BK: You have one poem entitled “After Basho” though you don’t mention him or Buddhism anywhere else. Maybe this is getting off track but what’s your take on a poet who lived in another culture almost four centuries ago and his relevance to us?

Art reading in Crestone, 13014

AG: Well, I’m not a Buddhist, although of course I admire that tradition and have drawn inspirations from it. I’ve always thought Naropa Institute’s School of Disembodied Poetics was the opposite view of what I seek, which is an embodied presence in the world. As a European transplant by ancestry but a Turtle Islander by birth, I find my spirituality in the natural world. In things. From the miracle of creation in a grain of sand or a leaf of grass, to the blazing hallucination of a rainbow or the Northern Lights.

Dolores, my teacher, wasn’t a Buddhist either. She had an aversion for any of the wisdom traditions of the last eight thousand years. We needed to go deeper, she’d tell us. To discover Snyder’s Paleolithic values. And she gave preference to direct experience of the natural world, not some sublimation of material things in an otherworldly no thing. Still, she did have a soft spot for what she called “Mountain Buddhists.”

Personally, I am most fascinated in this elder part of my life with the Chinese and Japanese mountain poets—those who took up monastic life or “escaped” from their culture to travel widely or spent their lives rooted in remote backcountry cabins writing bardic poetry.

BK: You seem to love the “centered” format for your poems. What does that form gain for you in writing or working with a poem?



AG: It arose from my work as a journalist, where I wanted to set off poetry from prose by giving it a different look. Now it’s my style. I like the way it looks. And it distinguishes the work from column left text – our prose bias.

BK: The first poem, “Piles,” seems like a kind of artist’s statement to me. You speak of the “piles” of stuff around you, “mismatched pieces / that stitched / together / make a whole.” Big ideas, you write, pile up and then spill and once again you’re “forced to refashion / what was fielded / unformed / & frame it. Refine it / Find for it some final figure.” Do you see this as an artist’s statement? What function do you want it to have as the first poem?

AG: Quite right. The first poems in a book can often set the tone for the reader on what is to be expected. As a pre-school teacher in my younger life, I studied epistemology and, notably, Vygotsky’s On Language and Thought. As he explains in his book, congeries are ‘heaps” of disparate objects, in groupings linked together by chance and the magical thinking of a child’s perception. That concept deeply influenced me. It’s kind of how I see myself operating as a poet. Letting Duchamp’s chance operations infuse my bardic practice.

It’s also my chaotic style of living that looks incredibly messy but allows one the opportunity serendipitously to discover incredible connections as unrelated objects come, by chance, to one’s attention. As Gregory Bateson says about what we know, and I would extend to poetic learning as well, “Knowledge is the pattern that connects.”


Art reading in Gunnison, 13014

Saturday, January 22, 2022

Arndt: Yab Yum

Thanks to the inimitable Robert Report  which I recommend as essential reading for all denizens of the San Juans 

https://therobertreport.net/2022/01/22/yab-yum

let me share this tiny gem from Aspenite Burnham Arndt:



End of the Day

the peaks drop into

deep blue shadow.

Yet desire remains

white hot


Photo by Jerry Roberts


Tuesday, January 18, 2022

REMEMBERING JACK PETERS

 


Jack, his daughter Pamela and granddaughter in the pack

A Passion for Learning & Mushrooms

Pamela  Peters

Dr. Jack Peters came to discover the magic of mushroom hunting relatively late, when he was in his 50s. It was 1988 when he flew us in a private, chartered Cessna prop plane into the infamous Telluride airfield for the Wild Mushrooms Telluride conference for the first time. We both fell in love -- with the town, the people, and naturally the mushrooms. 

We found Boletus edulis [B. rubiceps], chanterelles, Hydnum imbricatum [Sarcadon imbricatus], Amanita muscaria, and so many more that first year. Though, more than the wild mushrooms, it was returning Fungophiles, and the amazing, groundbreaking lectures that kept us coming back. Over the years we heard the most amazing (and often crazy sounding) ideas from Paul Stamets, Rick Doblin, Terence McKenna, Gary Lincoff, John Sir Jesse, Dr. Andrew Weil, Sasha and Ann Shulgin, and so many more!

Once in a while Jack and I would bring along someone else to join us: a romantic partner, a friend, a sibling, even a young child. Mostly though it was Jack and I who attended mushroom gatherings in Telluride. It was there that we both learned about, and tried, Psilocybe cubensis. Again, Jack was with me during this magical and transformational experience. Jack was a pioneer in many aspects of his life, and I am truly fortunate and honored to have lived part of my life alongside of him. It is with great reverence, joy and sadness that I bid him a last farewell.



Dr. Jack at Shroomfest24 in Elks Park with festival-goer & child 


Partying with Visionaries

Art Goodtimes

In the early days of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, I was the local hired man. Engaged to work logistics. Make arrangements for the conference, known back in those days as Wild Mushrooms Telluride. As such, I wasn't immediately invited to the faculty parties. But one year Jack reached out and I found myself entering the third-floor Main Street condo he'd rented, looking down on the resort town's night-life action. All the principals were there and many of the loyal attendees, whom event-founder Dr. Manny Salzman had named the Fungophiles. Like the conference-turned-festival, this party was an eclectic mix of mycologists, psychonauts, illicit growers, and mainstream professionals (even some ex-military), now peppered with us myco-crazies.

Dr. Jack was passing around trays of fresh Psilocybe cubensis, some as big as apples. As a counter-cultural poet & mycological society member from San Francisco, I was quite familiar with taking magic mushrooms in the Mt. Tam woods with fellow hippie drop-outs. But here we were in a condo facing down on Colorado Avenue on weekend high-season Telluride, rubbing shoulders with a well-dressed crowd of strait-laced-looking folks, many beyond middle age, openly ingesting entheogens -- with Jack as our host.

I think it was my initiation into entheogens as medicine -- not so much counter-cultural tripping  as therapeutic body healing, heart expansion and mind exploration. And here we are decades later, so many of us Fungophiles fascinated to see that mainstream culture has finally caught up with visionaries like Dr. Peters. Thank you, Jack.


Dr. Jack with grandkids (all photos courtesy of Pamela Peters)






Monday, January 17, 2022

Itki for It and We for HeShe?


PRONOMINAL NEOLOGISMS





Blessed Tu Bishvat. 

That religious feast that connects us 

to the trees  & all  Gaia's mysteries


As part of our Kinship Book Club network <https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/kinship-book-club-vol-1>, Western Colorado University professor John Hausdoerffer makes a proposal based upon a question by the Center for Humans and Nature's Gavin Von Horn, "If everything is connected, shouldn't we call everything we?"



This follows on the earlier proposal by Robin Wall Kimmerer to substitute "ki" -- a Potawatomi suffix indicating "of the earth" for the pronoun "it" in order to show  in English that all things are animate -- i.e., basically to do away with the neutral "it."  As a pre-school teacher and director in my early years, I've modified that slightly.  Studying how we learn at U.C. Berkeley night school, I discovered that we learn best, children and adults, when we are taken from the known into the unknown. Not when new words are sprung on us Jack-in-the-Box.  Instead of substitution -- in this transition to a new animate name for a former neuter -- I'm adding the Potawatomi (Bodéwadmi Zheshmowen) suffix  "-ki" to the familiar English pronoun "it." Which has led me to working on a poetry chapbook project I'm calling "Itki"

John's point in this piece below about the water cycle on a mountain demonstrates what this "we" change might look like in English. If everything is truly connected, why not make that fact audible in English by substituting the first person plural pronoun for all third person singular pronouns?



Roxanne Swentzell, Mud Woman Rolls On, 13011






Saturday, January 15, 2022

In Praise of Gay Cappis

For the last two years I've pretty much withdrawn from the world, and certainly the political and administrative world of county politics. Throat cancer, a hernia, Covid and now prostate cancer -- my focus has been on my own healing. In hiding. Thus, itki was only yesterday I learned of the passing of one of the most important women I've ever met. 

I can't begin to tell you how much Gay Cappis inspired me. Her philosophy of local government was with me for the entire 20 years I served as San Miguel County Commissioner. She taught me that as an elected official you worked to make the laws fit the citizens, not to force the citizens to fit laws -- particularly those that made no provision for reasonable exceptions. In some places that could have meant the "good old boy" system of favoring friends. But in San Miguel County Gay favored everyone. 

As a newcomer to the county forty years ago I experienced first-hand her ability to find a way to register a car with title problems or get an important license, even if a crucial piece of the requirements couldn't exactly be met. Little things in the perspective of government, but huge things for newcomers struggling to make ends meet. Gay found a way to help every person that came through the San Miguel County Clerk's door -- not to break the laws, but to bend them as far as reasonably possible. Her motto was: For the people. First!

I was so impressed I endeavored to follow her example for as long as I was in office. To serve the people and to uphold the law, in that order. But my mere two decades as a commissioner were no match for the number of years she gave to public service. Always with a smile and with infallible good humor. 

In my mind Gay Cappis will always be remembered as the very best model of a true public servant.






Thursday, January 13, 2022

In Praise of Robert Bly

 


One of the great American poets of my generation has passed. Those of us who came of age in the Sixties had a poetry hero in Robert Bly. By the time I was writing poetry in the San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, I'd found the Sixties lit mag of translations that had begun in the Fifties. And I was hooked. Leaping poetry. Itki made so much sense!



Then I went back and found old copies of The Fifties. I began to realize there was a vast world of poetry beyond our borders.  I had come from a seven-year seminary indoctrination. Thankfully, Brother Antoninus (William Everson) had led me into the sphere of influence of the San Francisco Renaissance poets: Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, Gary Snyder and later Jack Spicer -- to name the most prominent in my personal pantheon.




Snyder and Welch led me to the Beats -- Ginsberg, Kerouac, DiPrima. I was intrigued by Ginsberg performances. Loving his anti-war stance and incandescent presence. Kerouac in his poetry was a wild reservoir of jumping jive language. I was put off by DiPrima, though, who rolled her window up on Market St. when I tried to introduce myself, and I couldn't understand her poem in a Playboy knock-off, urging everyone to fill their bathtubs because the revolution was coming. There seemed to be a bit of the unexamined, self-destructive, self-inflated egotism among some of the Beats that rubbed my woo-woo skin the wrong way.
Bly introduced me to a very different style. I devoured Silence in a Snowy Field in the early Sixties. His deep image technique intrigued. That led me back to Pound and Williams and then George Oppen, who I had the good fortune to meet on Mt. Tamalpais. We became friends. His Imagist books made deep sense to me and imagery became central to my work. When Bly came out with The Light Around the Body with poems railing against the Vietnam War, I was on board. That the work won the National Book Award only cemented my admiration.


I fell completely in love with Bly's Tomas Tranströmer translations in 20 Poems. I carried that dog-eared chappie around everywhere. At an anti-nuclear conference in Chicago, I got to see him perform before students at Northwestern University. He used a dulcimer to accompany a poem or two -- endearing him to me as I was a closet aficionado of the dulcimer as well. And he demonstrated how simple hand movements accompanying a poem made for much more entrancing performance chops than merely reading the words on the page. Bly's brilliance had seeped into every pore of my lyric sensibilities -- opening distant worlds of poetry, teaching me to let poetry leap not just ride a set rhythm, exposing me to deep images and poems  of political activism that were more than mere cant. 


Finally, in the start of the Seventies Ferlinghetti's City Lights brought out The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, and itki blew my frigging head off. Here was a compendium of counter-cultural tropes I'd been embracing after years sequestered in the locked medieval tabernacle of a seminary. And itki was beautiful poetry, dazzling images, cultural anthropology. Christianity, America's democratic facade, the war that powered the economy -- everything lay exposed. "...the mad beast covered with European hair rushes / through the mesa bushes in Mendocino county..." and "...Let us drive cars / up / the light beams / to the stars..."

I wasn't so taken with Iron John. Itki was important.  But I had already embraced feminism by the time itki came out, and his trying to heal the wounded father in his life, in the life of so many men, while needed for the culture at large, wasn't what had me in itki's grip. But Bly's poetry and his earlier publications had taught me so much, I still held him in great reverence.  As life would have itki, my dear friend and brilliant poet Judyth Hill of New Mexico and now Colorado, had the wondrous fortune to actually study with him, to have him as mentor and friend. She has given me permission to share this marvelous poem of hers in praise of one of America's greatest poets of our times. 

 
Photo by Bruce Bisping of the Star Tribune


Ghazel Overheard
for Robert Bly

Ache of morning without you, ache
of the book I open seeking you, ache
of absence, ache of voice in my closest listening.

Snow falls in the fields of many grasses
where this October the fox hid, voyeur of pond.
Writing poems, you said, the same: a wild listening.

Odin slung from the Tree, Inanna, stripped of crown, jewels, dominion.
Falstaff and midnight's chimes, Jesu, Jesu, the green green of Ireland,
every loss and landscape play the music of listening.

Cezanne stood in one place, Mont Sainte-Chapelle in another,
connected by the portolan of seeing. We wrote every poem
because you were listening.

The elk herd is here today, wearing thick winter fur,
the small ones near their mothers. Nuthatches, chickadees,
flicker's flash of underwing orange, choral listening.

I only know to leave by losing everything.
I have a house, then I don't: words on the page, then
nothing. Do you hear me listening?

When the plaster cracked revealing the Golden Buddha,
we sat sesshin exactly the same as the day before.
This is our practice, over and over. We are listening.

Wagonload of hay, boxwood, Tranströmer, Antonio
Machado, Rilke. You left us so many gifts. I kept
your Giant mask, the beanstalk still (g)listening.

Yeats wrote Lake Isle of Innisfree on a London bus,
that's the secret, isn't it? Longing eclipses the distance from home to here,
you to us, poem to page. You just keep listening.


JUDYTH HILL

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Kinship Panel Tonight

Pt. Reyes Bookstore Zoom Session

Kinship Book Club #2 

Wednesday, Jan. 12, 13022 (Western Slope Calendar)



I know a number of people wanted to tune into to tonight's panel discussion but weren't sure how to register, so here's the URL to get you there (you might have to copy and insert in browser on some machines)


Here's what Gavin Van Horn, one of the co-editors of the Kinship series, has suggested will be our format. "After introductions, I will offer some framing. What's the kinship series all about? For volume 2, why did the series focus on 'Place' as critical for kinship/kinning? etc."

  • Lisa Maria Madera
  • Enrique Salmon
  • Lilian Pearce
  • Aaron Abeyta
  • Diane Wilson
  • Devon Pena
  • Art Goodtimes
  • Curt Meine 

The order of the evening zoom will be roughly as follows (times shown are PST -- those of you in MST (Denver) change 6 pm. times to 7 pm times):

1) 6:00-6:05pm – Stephen Sparks of Pt. Reyes Books welcomes

2) 6:05-6:15pm – Gavin offers some framing

3) 6:15-6:45pm – Book's writers and poets introductions and readings

4) 6:45-7:00pm+ – A conversation shaped by audience questions

Come join in and help shape the discussion.

Sunday, January 9, 2022

KINSHIP Book Club: PLACE

Gary Lincoff Memorial Tour at Chile's Torres del Paine National Park
 

The Center for Humans and Nature will team up with Pt. Reyes Books to host a zoom discussion among editors and contributors to the second volume of their 5-volume book, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations  this Wednesday, January 12th at  7 p.m. MST (Denver). 

https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/kinship-book-club-vol-2

 Participants in the first Kinship Book Club discussion Dec. 8th, 13021 (Western Slope Calendar)

Confirmed speakers for this second session are editor Gavin Van Horn of the Center, as well as participants Indigenous writer and executive director Diane Wilson of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance; Indigenous writer and anthropologist Dr. Enrique Salmon of California State University (East Bay); president of the Acequia Institute and writer Dr. Devon Pena of the University of Washington; writer and researcher Dr. Lilian Pearce of the Australian Research Council; writer and award-winning conservation biologist Dr. Curt Meine from Wisconsin; Ecuadorian-American writer, educator and storyteller Dr. Lisa María Madera who lives in Quito; poet, former professor and current mayor Aaron Abeyta of Antonito in the San Luis Valley; and poet & former Green county commissioner Art Goodtimes of the San Miguel Watershed in Colorado.

Registration required.

Lone Cone, the place where I live -- as in my book Looking South to Lone Cone 
(Photo by Chris Bonebrake)

I'll be reading a new performance version of my poem of place "Reinhabitation" which appears in the the second volume, Place, of Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations.


REINHABITATION

                                         -for Peter Berg & Judy Goldhaft


I spent the first night alone

in the abandoned house

dropping acid


to see what I could see

outside myself

And I've spent the past


forty years inside

this acre of irrigated wetlands

learning itki's quandaries


How poplars gnawed down

to the roots by deer

grow stronger


Survive the drought

that kills the cherrytree

How native lacewings


encouraged in their spidery nests

love to feed on Canada thistle

And how some weeds harvested


before flowering and soaked

in drums of pond water makes

the stinkiest best compost tea


Each spring. Each fall

Wind before the clouds

whipping at the roofs


tossing gusts and ghastly turns

A neighbor crushed in her truck cab

by a snapped cottonwood on the highway


I've even learned

the litany of locals who called

this place home


Mex Snyder. Caroline Young

Ed & Grandma Foster

Planting rhubarb. Tending goats


And now paid for twice

Cloud Acre's been mine to husband

Siberian elms. Coyote willow


Forty-nine varieties of

heirloom spuds grown to seed

Two once-small children


Two grown and long gone children

Flocks of geese. Red-winged blackbirds

The occasional Great Blue Heron


Listening to this one place

Itki's names, itki's moods, itki's whispers

Listening has taught me more


about earth kinning

& the land's deepening wisdoms

than any text




art goodtimes
union of mountain poets
vincent st. john local / colorado plateau /aztlan
cloud acre brigade (ret.) / san francisco
13022




Saturday, January 8, 2022

Another Western Slope jueju


TO VOTE



 Mount    Tam    just     a-memory

Lone    Cone    disappeared    in-clouds

"The-incredible    whiteness    of-winter" 


Is    amor-fati     just    code    for-acceptance

of-the-given  •  Could    neoliberalism    just    be

a-trickledown    symptom    of-Joycean    triune


rebellion-from    home    country    creed

The-scraped   ice   of-the-snowplows   echoes   

along-the-highway's    uncomfortable    truths


Why    extend    the-franchise    to-the-hoi-polloi

say    the-one    percent     born    of-privilege

We're    a-nation-state    where    privilege   changes


screens    like    bitcoin    anyway  •  A   free-for-all    capital

market    frenzy    where     class    is-bought    sold    

inherited    or     randomly    pre-selected    out-of-the-blue


Even    the-middle-class    apes     the-haves  •  Just

tolerates    the-have-nots  •  "Only    a-percentage

of-the-eligible    vote    anyway,"    sneers    McRedeye    


shoveling    their-driveway  •  "Let's

make    itki    a-privilege    of-the-few 

who    care"




NOTA BENE: 

“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of the world. As a pre-school teacher I learned that we learn by going through the known to the unknown. So instead of substituting “ki”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate, “itki.”  The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” That syllable, “ki”, is itkiself a Bodéwadmimwen suffix meaning “from the living earth.”