Vaudeville at the Transfer Warehouse

Telluride Arts, Telluride Theatre and the Wilkinson Public Library hosted a wonderful community Vaudeville event  at the Transfer Warehouse again Thursday, June 23rd, that drew a full house.  

Marko & Sally (Ryan & Meaghan?) were emcees, and did a lot of playful sketches and intros, especially a song skit called Stud & Babe. A bellydancer, my neighbor Tia performed a wild masked dance  and used twirling ribbons very impressively.  The We 3 a cappela choir of Amy, Leah and Joana did sumptuous harmonies. 

 A lovely fellow whose name I didn't catch had a  rollicking Lift Ticket song that had everybody singing along. Tim and Ek of Ragged Soles performed original music, as well as Ethan (solo) and For My Family (guitars, violin and singer).  Audience members competed for a demonstration of "Stupid Human Tricks" and Penelope Gleason won the prize for her facial movements.

The finale 

was Logan  & Nicko 

doing a burlesque skit

Logan was a 

wild dancer

The audience 

ate it up

Joanna Spindler did a wonderful piece that she premiered at the Telluride Mushroom Festival last year. I performed my Forever Wild piece about the town's saving of the Valley Floor

Forever Wild

The revolution's 

in the evolutions of the DNA solutions

Not the human convolutions of political pollutions

No bloke should have to choke 

to breathe the bloody smoke

& endure all the dope our dis-urban folk 

are force-fed & white-bred to buy buy buy buy

Rednecks know how the cattle go

& the sheep & the pigs at the rodeo

where the 4H ranch kids show & sell

their darling pets to the slaughterhouse vets

Hell, yes!

for grand prize ribbons & barbequed ribs

You better bet 

Daddy 

keeps a rifle loaded in his pickup

& if you’re a predator

he ain’t no host

As for Mama

she’s kicking up her heels at the Hitchin’ Post

so she can catch a little living

before the oven turns to toast

If we fast-food forward

where we seem to be headed

even the best will be bedded

in a sunset Sony big screen faux-dream

Mad Max Halloween

where they’ve stolen all the treats

in streets stripped of stars

chockfull of cars

on their way to the bars

The trick for the tramp

will be holding the lamp

so’s to be half slick enough

to slip past the thick stuff

they pour in our path

Fame. Fortune. The amenity math

whose sum shines so bright

there’s no time for fright

‘Cuz if you fall on your face

you’re out of the race

Look, you can't kick the habit 

if you can’t take the heat

So let's eat, McRedeye sez

the sweet meat of anger

that feeds into action

to halt the reaction of corporate factions

Fleecing the flocks & shaking their fists

Unleashing their chickenhawks

for pre-emptive hits

Time to call “Bullshit”

& Seattle their trade talks

Like Telluride did to that Blues & bruised

fat cat plan

to supersize & infill

the glacial till of the Valley Floor

No way said the townsfolk

who scraped, borrowed, begged 

& bought the sucker

An owner’s weighted bait

we refused to swallow 

or follow hook, line and sinker

to the gondola mandala big pond stinker

No, we realized right from the start

what shaded our eyes

& kept people apart

And you could too

You could dare to dream

To band together senior and teen

for the good of the land

Take an Earth First! stand

Toss a wrench in the machine

Let’s cut to the heart

with a smart green blade

& come to the aid of those who oppose

greed’s bottom line charade

Let’s embrace what’s wild

Pray for open space’s saving grace

Surround your town like we did our town

Where seven generations from now

we will enjoy free-roaming elk

Not a docile herd of cow

No jerkoff forest slum

No white boy trophy rum

Just the mountains’ mother

HUMMMMMMMMM

Jack Miller RIP

 

Jack Miller's Shrine at his place on Hastings Mesa.

Friends held a marvelous memorial for an amazing man -- climber, adventurer, explorer, maker and friend to many. Many of us got to tell stories about this gentle giant who was not only a bonafide hero for saving the life of a friend stuck on the cliffs at Yosemite with a broken bone, unable to move.

For me he was the best Green I knew, backing me up when I needed political support. A man of deep beliefs, integrity and action. 

But a wild fellow who led me on an adventure at the legendary kickass cowboy bar in Ridgway called the Little Chef, where we "prosted" with a German fellow late into the day and then made it back to his digs on the Mesa, three of us on a snowmobile, so drunk we fell over every 20 feet, laughing with each tumble.

Lots of stories. Lots of memories. A friend for all seasons.

Jack Miller

Bardic Trails: Madison Gill

 

Madison Gill was our Bardic Trails featured reader for June.  

She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Colorado State University-Pueblo. As a student there, she was involved with and first published in the university’s student-run literary magazine, Tempered Steel. 

Following her graduation, Madison worked for a short time as a freelance reporter and then Assistant Editor of an independent news publication in Pueblo. In that role, she founded and independently managed the publication’s first ever poetry submission column where members of the community could submit their work for publication -- often for the first time.

Her first acceptance outside of an academic platform came in 2019 from a Denver-based journal called From Whispers to Roars. Since then, she has gone on to build her publication history both in print and online with such local, national and even international publications as: The Write Launch, Tiny Spoon, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Sledgehammer Lit, and Pocket Lint among others. She continues to submit her work for publication and share her poetry in person at local readings and open mics. Most recently, her work is forthcoming in a mental health anthology entitled Tea With My Monster published by Beyond the Veil Press.

In 2021, Madison was named the winner of the Cantor Prize awarded through the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program -- judged by Donald Levering of New Mexico -- with her poem, Urraca (magpie in Spanish):

Urraca

In the yard, two magpies

fight over the still-warm carcass

of a less fortunate and nameless

bird. Their shrieking uncoils

like barbwire from my mother’s flinching ear. Meanwhile my lover’s

eye glazes over, no longer here

but far from here on one of many custody-arranged road trips

back and forth from Wichita

in the backseat of his grandfather’s car with his brother

scouring the skies and splintered fence

posts for a flash of yin and yang tail feathers. “Urraca!” they’d cry, and grandfather would award them both a quarter

for their retained Spanish – grandma laugh- sighing on the passenger side.

Now my lover and his brother

are older – his brow furrowed

in a wrinkle deep enough

to stick a coin in. And the quarters in his grandfather’s pockets,

if there were any, have long since dropped

onto the cold hospital floor

as a nurse folded them the morning after lightning struck in his chest and took him to the next world. Meanwhile the magpies

go about their brutal business –

softened in the memory of a child. Their long tail feathers like a bridge between worlds – my lover standing at one end, arms outstretched, crying: “Urraca! Urraca! Urraca!”

Light in the shape of his grandfather reaching back from the other, pulling a quarter like a silver tooth

from the mouth of the sun. 

Madison likes to reference William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech when describing the nature of her work as: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” She is a self-proclaimed love poet. Most of her work is deeply rooted in her personal life and includes themes of relationships, family, mental health, spirituality, social justice, and the natural world. A few poets whose work Madison feels has greatly influenced her own include Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Ken Arkind, Carrie Rudzinski, Andrea Gibson, and Buddy Wakefield among others. You can find Madison on instagram at @sweetmint_poet where she mostly celebration-posts her publication acceptances and occasionally shares excerpts of her recent work.

Here is A  VIDEO RECORDING of her Bardic Trails  zoom reading.

Broadside created by Daiva Chesonis

Poster by Joanna  Spindler

The Poetic Imaginarium

 

Featured at the stylish Sherbino Theater in Ridgway's trendy Arts District June 1st, Wendy Videlock of Palisade presented a lively, interactive discussion on how we might cultivate the creative process, life-long learning, and the love of sensual experience into our everyday lives. 

Wendy shared a number of thought-provoking excerpts from her recent book of essays,The Poetic Imaginarium: A Worthy Difficulty.  Unfortunately, that book wasn't available thanks to supply chain issues. But her newest book of poems, Wise to the West (Able Muse Press, 2022), was available and she read several poems from there. 

Here in the West

Here in the West, whatever

one's pain

one never complains

about the rain.

What's good for the plains

is bad for the harvest.

What freezes in spring

is sugar-beet borrowed.

The river depletes.

The groves expire.

What blooms

in summer is wildfire.

Afterwards, she opened the floor to questions. That prompted Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer to craft this poem, which she sent out to her followers today:

Fill in the Blank

for Wendy

 

Tonight, the poet with the tendrilled hair

asks us to fill in the blank.

The most important relationship

you cultivate in your life is with _________.

One person says, Love. Says another, Yourself.

And long after the question is gone

from the air, long after the conversation’s

moved on, I think about ways

to fill it in. With time. Mortality.

Uncertainty. Peace. And ultimately,

with nothing. How beautiful

to let what is blank stay blank,

a space holder for pure potential.

What if our relationship with nothing

is the most important relationship we have?

I notice how she never fills in the blank herself,

leaving the space for everything.

Nothing is the most generous of doorways.

Now everything is possible.