Laurie James

A barefoot Laurie James reading at Lithic Bookstore in Fruita 
(photo by Art Goodtimes)

Back in mid-November family and friends held a Life Celebration for a poet friend and Sparrows poetry festival organizer Laurie Violet James in Salida -- a woman who has touched many artists in Colorado, particularly on the Western Slope. 

A number of poets were involved including Barbara Ford, Rachel Kellum, Wendy Videlock, Pete Anderson, Lawton Eddy, Lynda LaRocca , Craig Nielson, aaron abeyta, SETH, Eduardo Brummel, Danny Rosen, Uche Ogbuji, Daiva Chesonis, Deborah Kelly,  Jc Cummins, Kiersten Bridger and many others from around the region. 

Laurie, Pete, Lawton, Lynda and Craig made up the River City Nomads, a performance troupe that started in 2004 and played all over Colorado.

Danny's Lithic Press in Fruita even put out a little James chapbook in honor of the memorial: First Thought, Last Thought (2022/13022). This was the chapbook we all wanted Laurie to publish in her lifetime. One of her few published poems "Conversation" appears in the Sage Green Journal, an on-line anthology of Western poets HERE 

The Life Celebration in mid-November was held in the Salida United Methodist Church led by Laurie's family, and Wendy led A Crescendo of Poetry later that evening with readings and music.

The next morning a Gourd Circle was held at the Salida Community Center that I was honored to facilitate. 

Salida poet & poetry host of radio and readings Barbara Ford wrote a most amazing, moving elegy for Laurie that she read at the Gourd Circle:

An Old Soul Enters the Spirit World

In the back forty of her closet
hung a prophet's velvet coat,
seldom worn but we knew it was there,
beyond the scarves she wrapped
twice around her throat,
crowned by a mist of long silver hair.

A blizzard, she recalled,
came to her christening,
where seven wizards conferred
about her upbringing,
Montana was often heard whispering
in her train case of mysteries.
Black widows convened
in her medicine bag garage,
mountain raspberries sweetened
her memory's tongue,
a lighter clicked,
an inch of ash flicked.
her kookaburra laugh
pinballed deep in her lungs.

Her left ankle was tattoed
with the clank of shackles
hooked to past lives towing
the usual regrets,
she was regularly seen with 
her entourage of grackles,
wreathed in the smoke
of nine thousand cigarettes.
I saw them levitate in feathered
respect when they gazed
in her blue-eyed prescient stare,
they understood her consecrated
fear of the shamanic grizzly bear.

Befriended by every goose
and squirrel, she swirled
in a collage of corvine chuckle,
fox slink, mouse wink
and the confederacy of birds
in her Jamesian world.

Her heart she kept close,
forged from miner's gold,
steel-cased in a pearlescent
shell, camouflaged most days
by a fortress of twigs,
bound tightly by hand 
to fortify the maze
that concealed the depth
of her wisdom well.

Folded in the niches
of her soul's sacred wishes
were the lines she wrote
for few to see, on pages scribed
in hieroglyphic black ink.
She claimed she lost them,
or misplaced them,
or dropped them
under the laundry sink.

Our Rachel found them,
dried and ironed them,
gave us solace in a river
of poems from which we drink
and drink and drink.

Countless poets have tried
to set their nets to catch the words
that flew wild when she died,
in ceremonies of trance and chant,
in rituals of dervish dance,
on thresholds of holy happenstance.

In supplication to the universe,
I offer this attempt to honor her
in verse, to exalt in glory
of one who lived and rhymed
with Story, possessed of her share
of alternative names, But I
just called her Laurie James.