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.

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

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.” 

Western Slope Jueju

 Here's a new poem in a new style "Western Slope Jueju" loosely based on the traditional Chinese jueju and the  Sinophonic poetics/Yingelishi of Jonathan Stallings  at the University of Oklahoma. 

The abstract painting, "Backcountry Winter" by Karen Scharer of Pueblo (used with her permission) is one of the featured works at  the Slate Gray Gallery at 209 E. Colorado Ave., Suite B, in Telluride, Colorado. The show runs from January 6th through January 31st. For more info, call  970.728.3777

Calderazzo: The One Year Anniversary

of the Trump Insurrection deserves this telling poem 

by my good friend & professor emeritus  John Calderazzo

of the Fort Collins area here in Colorado:

POETREE is the heART at LIBER TEA

I'M  BACK 

& HAVING A GREAT TIME DYING

or itki felt like  dying 13020-13022 [Western Slope Calendar]

after throat cancer, surgery, chemo, radiation  hell-in-a-handbasket

hernia, mild 1-day Covid, nasty 3-week Front Range cold, prostate surgery

& then two weeks  purgatory tethered  by my shrunken urethra to  a urine bag

now itki's back to feeling like a great time  again

'cuz I got that goddam'  catheter out in spite of the morning's crystogram scare

where a leaky bladder showed up  again & I expected -- going cross town from Grand

Junkyard's St. Mary's to the Urological Associates  of Western Colorado by the Mall

I expected to be sent down  hell's escalator into the self-swamp of (at last) depression

but where instead hell's bells  a swarm of good docs conferred & gave the good nurse 

the greenlight to pull the fucker out.  Or the fuck-stopper.  Or whatever 

was left of my onceuponatime major pleasure center

Now itki's back to having a  great time again

 

until the next inferno disaster mass killing catastrophe brings me

bring us

face-to-face with DEATH that for some lucky few 

sits on our left shoulder like an angel

EXPECTED NON-EXEMPT NINTH LIFE  DEMISE 

RESURRECTED

I've re-energized this  dormant sleepingbear Art Goodtimes blogspot 

with itki's cache of  old Telluride UP BEAR CREEK columns from years past

that have outlasted the vagaries of  shape-shifting hometown newspapers

cutthroat  corporate publishers, a challenging Job-esque Scylla&Charybdus two-years

& my deep-rooted, pre-scholastic procilivity for an archive of congeries

The idea? 

To start sharing with friends & family what's most important to me

POETREE

which as my good bardic  condor compadre Kush might say

Is the Heart at LIBER TEA

Here's a  new performance work-in-progress that plays off of 

the etymological explorations of the late Tom Jay of the Pacific Northwest 

& my big stage run-on rant style, with repetitive structural tropes scattered about.

Itki goes after Christianity 

& our American obsession with comfort & "happy" endings

as if there was nothing we couldn't fix

HAPPY NEW YEAR'S

Folks
I'm not longer Poet Laureate of the Western Slope.
That lasted from 13011 to 13013 (2011-13 CE).
Been too busy to blog, but my column Up Bear Creek appears in the MontroseMirror.com weekly and my column Looking South from Lone Cone appears in the Four Corners Free Press monthly
Come check out our Talking Gourds poetry program under the umbrella of the Telluride Institute
www.tellurideinstitute.org
The many projects there -- Ute Reconciliation, Fen Advisory, the Telluride Mushroom Festival and Talking Gourds -- keep me plenty busy...
Thanks, Art Goodtimes
pictured here in SF with with AmanitaScoot out at Fort Point near the Golden Gate