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.

A Sixties San Francisco Love Poem

 

Inspired by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poem-a-day practice, I've made a New Year's resolution, as we Americans are wont to do. For 50+ years I've been writing poems, hundreds and hundreds of them, and tossing them into piles.  My archives are voluminous. Having written a history column in Telluride for 10+ years (Mining the Gold), I know how important saved papers can be. Losing years worth of  journals (and most everything else) in a Placerville fire  in the early '80's didn't help. 

So, in the years-long process of moving out of Cloud Acre in Norwood, I've stumbled on a bin of old poems going back to  the mid-Sixties when I returned from my VISTA year on the Crow Reservation in Lodgegrass, Montana, to Herb Caen's Baghdad-by-the-Bay -- just in time for the Summer of Love. 

I plan on reviewing at least one a day.  Revising. Reshaping. Recreating as I love to do. Poetry is my meditation. My free play time. I'm starting from the top of loose-leaf congeries two feet deep with only occasional dates. Here's the first one I've found where I didn't want to change much of anything. 

MONA

riding a motorcycle

isn't the only way to 

see San Francisco

unless you're circling the block

to pick up a young lady

who says yes

& smiles like a farm in

Santa Cruz where the apples

aren't waxed

delight twists the throttle

hugging our way

through traffic

when we stop she climbs

the stairs to do her dishes

the sky a soapy gray

gliding back down Market St.

her telephone number

whistles  in my wallet

like kids running to school

in the rain

without their umbrellas

Homage to Dave Foreman

 

At the Earth First! Round River Rendezvous in 1987 

R-L: Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke

Art Goodtimes in foreground

(Photo from the Earth First! Journal)

Foreman

On the Front Lines

He clung to the hood of the pickup

when the logger tried to run him down

Putting his wild life on the line

Standing in the path of the Machine

No small lawns of hope his vision

Nor bottom line profits über alles

But an interwoven braid of all creation

Putting Earth’s flora fauna & funga first

Protests, demos, monkeywrenching work

His was a Neo-Luddite path to change

Unfurling cracks in a dam, campfire songs

Blocking roads to the tallest redwoods

Hoping to turn our Titantic hubris away

from the looming icebergs of collapse

To show the titans of industry what radical

really meant in defense of the Mother nest

Inspiring a generation to rewild this blue planet

using seeds of big ideas & brave symbolic deeds

Risqué for a Reason

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer of Placerville (CO) is a wisdom woman who keeps writing educational poems that enlighten, empower and instruct.  I found this one particularly useful. 

Having been taught the sin of "masturbation" as a young Catholic child, the very word sounded dirty (mass perturbation?). I was bamboozled into thinking that even my "wet dreams" were a violation of the sacred. When in truth, our bodies are sacred and self-love is a natural expression of that sacredness.

If you don't already know this amazing poet-teacher-storyteller, learn more about her HERE

No Longer Empty Handed

            after a poet pointed out there are dozens of well-known euphemisms for male masturbation and none for women

 

 

How could I not start to think

of circling the black hole,

polishing the pearl,

rubbing the rose bud,

loosening the tight knot,

spreading the soft butter,

frosting the sweet cake,

stirring the soup till it’s hot,

dancing on the vortex,

getting sucked into the eddy,

diving into the deep end.

What does it mean

that we don’t have language

for a woman who pleases herself?

Consider the tectonic shift,

the solitary wiggle,

the single squirm,

the one-handed time warp,

churning the cream

climbing pink mountain,

traveling to the temple,

spinning the dark silk.

No choking chickens,

no spanking monkeys,

no beating meat,

no wanking.

More like swirling the universe,

mining for diamonds,

finding hidden treasure

wading in the whirlpool,

the reason I can’t answer the phone.

 

Headwaters 33

 Headwaters has been around a long time. 

Gunnison Country elder George Sibley founded the conference 33 years ago as a way to help Western State College (formerly Colorado State Normal School) better collaborate with the community. 

His was a big Four Corners vision of community -- including the region and beyond, not just the Town or County of Gunnison. Though that was always a core focus. Particularly as many Western students stayed around, got involved, made itki* their Rocky Mountain home.

Sibley wanted a three-way gathering of liberal minds from the wider region to come together as European-Americans, Estadounidenses hispanos y latinos, and the diverse peoples of Turtle Island we call American Indians, Native Americans, Indigenous. 

The intent was to share, cross-fertilize, brainstorm and wrestle with provocative issues, like Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration of the End of the Frontier. Over the decades, Headwaters has fulfilled that vision, brought to town wonderful speakers from all three of these traditions and given those of us politically minded citizens on the Western Slope a safe haven for radical  [Latin> “to the root”] ideas.

But this year was different. 

Dr. John [Hausdoerffer] of Western’s Clark Family School of Environment and Sustainability chose not to line up speakers to discuss “Land Back” – the latest political rallying cry for our Indigenous neighbors locally and nationally.

Headwaters dove even deeper into this “trouble,” as ecofeminist philosopher Dr. Donna Haraway would call it (Staying with the Trouble). How do we as American citizens come to terms with our nation’s colonizing past, our imperfect union, and the issue of Indigenous genocide that’s never been reconciled properly in our history, or in our lives.

Western’s Doctor John walked the talk. He consulted with Indigenous advisors, and together they crafted an Indigenous-led event to deconstruct the unsettling “Land Back” slogan for us climate-liberals, fiscal hawks & neo-colonials: 

“Right, dude. Give Manhattan back to the Indians? No way!”

As I learned this past Headwaters, that is and isn’t what’s meant. Yes, reconciliation is absolutely needed for the peoples of this continent, many of whose lands were illegally taken away under the racist slogan “Manifest Destiny.” But “Land Back” is less about their ownership -- a Western Civilization concept unknown among most Indigenous societies -- and more about all of us as peoples bringing land back into our lives: immigrant and native, settler and indigenous.

At this Anthropoic point in our history as five-fingered hominids, on a planet with cascading collapse systems of overshoot and climate change, our Indigenous fellow Americans are telling us to breathe in the land, to take the land back into our decisions and choices, to treat itki* with respect –- and not just humans of the land but all the land’s biota: fauna, flora and funga.

Headwaters gave our local, state and national Indigenous voices a platform. Not for our History or Herstory, but for the peoples of Native America, speaking for themselves.

The keynoter was Dr. Melissa Nelson (professor of Indigenous Sustainability at Arizona State University, and the editor of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future) touching on displacement impacts, co-management of public lands and Traditional Ecological Knowledge [TEK].

Indigenous guests included poet Jarrett Ziemer; historians Rick Waters and Richard Williams; Ute leader Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk; Nimiipuu educator Ciarra S. Greene; artist Marten Pinnecoose; graduate student Keeley Jock; tribal worker Dorsey Dick; filmmaker Conner Ryan and his beautifully important film, “The Spirit of the Peaks;” Rick Chavolla of New York City and California; university vice-president Leslie Taylor; Utah’s Samantha Eldridge; Asian-American urban research fellow Evelyn Mayo; and just a sprinkle of Euro-American voices: Montezuma Land Conservancy’s Molly Maizel and Western’s Dr. Melanie Armstrong, Dr. Matthew Aronson, and Doctor John.

Western’s Indigenous director of poetry, CMarie Fuhrman’s poem on land acknowledgements brought the entire conference home to “Land Back” and what we truly ought to be acknowledging as universities, as nations, as peoples.

Okay, I’m embedded in capitalism like the rest of us. I get itki*.

“Land Back” means a helluva lot more than just property rights or the social injustices of genocide, slavery “Black Lives Matter,” or environmental ecocide “Earth First!.” 

Itki* means everything.

________________________________________________________________________

*“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena when speaking of objects in the natural world. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” ... As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, 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 ... Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even what English sees as gender-neutral objects are in some sense alive.

________________________________________________________________________

Indigenous Headwaters Voices: (L-R), Rick Chavolla, Keely Jock, Connor Ryan 

and Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk

(photo by Art Goodtimes)

The Price of Gas

$2.97 a Gallon In the Rockies

Money’s moving

against Citizen Trump

the RIGHT’s outrageous showman

& hisher Musk-a-twitter wizard

Jobs up

Fuel’s down

Delaware’s white hair

has got

feet on both pedals

Brake & gas

Gas & brake

Strike averted

if unions shafted 

in Manchin's Senate

“Hold that thought”

Capt. Barefoot testifies

to the Ministry of the Future

Let’s do what Alaska did

Let’s open up the primaries 

Dem, Repub, Green

Who cares?

With an open primary & ranked voting

anyone can run -- with or without a party

We could give every American a pro-life choice

Make their votes count more

Not less

 Just a small electoral tweak

Done, Fed free, state by state

Ranking ‘em

first second third

& then a runoff

Let the last one standing

with the most votes

win

Enough

anointed ones

Let's retire sacred two party

big tent big roller poli-morticians

whose price at the pump’s

always cheaper than

hisher tanks of

hot air 

The Ionisphere

Photo found online at Storybook.com

New Verse News is a great source of political poetry, a dangerous beast at best. But also an important way to get independent perspectives on current events. On Dec. 4 editor James Penha featured this poem of mine. Poems change each day. If you scroll down after they've appeared, you can find them posted by date in the stack. You can also click on a name to catch all the poems a poet has had posted there. I'm proud to have a half-dozen or so. To check out the site, go HERE.

CLIMATE CHANGE 

The petro-geomorphic freight 

train keeps chugging along

 

dragging

the ionosphere behind itki

like a superhero cape

caught on a junkyard Edsel

Author’s Note: “Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena when speaking of objects in the natural world. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” 

     As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, 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. 

     Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even what English sees as gender-neutral objects are in some sense alive.