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

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