Capt. B’s Earthship Log: Gatherings for Artists, Poets, & Fungophiles

Header image courtesy of the Telluride Mushroom Festival.

CCI SUMMIT … The arts in Colorado had their annual statewide get-together in Trinidad last month, under the auspices of Colorado Creative Industries – artists, writers, poets, dancers, administrators, state bureaucrats. Everyone talking, brainstorming, listening. Workshops, talks, parties, but most of all networking. For those of us in rural Colorado, far from the urban centers, and most of the groups involved in hosting the arts, it was an important gathering.

I felt honored to be chosen to give a Talking Gourds sharing circle at the summit. They were going to call it a workshop. But that’s a term I take issue with. And here’s why:

Workshops

Enough of workshops
That’s a bloody bad handle
for a dandy wisdom exchange

Truth is, as a poet worldling
I only work
in the service of play

& I only shop
when I’m depressed

Or
when there’s a sale
After all, I am American

Better to
call them playgrounds
where the imagination can run wild

where strangers can
act out stories or poems
heartsongs or rants

Passing a talking gourd
a phallic stick
or feminine basket

silently
hand to hand

as if what was spoken
came through what the speaker
held on to

A discipline of listening
just as much as
performing

Sharing dreams, visions,
lyrics or maybe even elegant lies
in a circle peer-to-peer

There’s only slack supervision
on this playground
But if you have super vision

you’re more than
welcome to leap deep
& ferry us far

TAMI GRAHAM … Those of us in the Four Corners region of Colorado were delighted when Tami Graham of Mancos was one of four Coloradans given the Governor’s Creative Leadership Award at the Summit. Hers for the Arts and Community Action. She just finished her first decade as KSUT’s Executive Director on July 18. KSUT is a community radio station based in Ignacio, Colorado, offering two distinct signals: Southern Ute Tribal Radio, which focuses on Indigenous music and news, and Four Corners Public Radio, which features NPR programming and a variety of music.

Graham led KSUT’s capital campaign to build the Eddie Box, Jr., Media Center which opened its doors in 2020. In addition, she is an ex-officio board member with the Mancos Common Press; a board member for the Durango Mesa Park Foundation; is active with Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a coalition of 21 non-commercial radio stations in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming; and served for six years as a Polis-appointee on the CCI board, representing Southwest Colorado. She has produced dozens of special events including concerts by Michael Franti, Bruce Cockburn, Zap Mama as well as many others.

She also co-founded the Armida Huerta Adventure Fund, which raises money to increase accessibility to pack-rafting to LGBTQ individuals and BIPOC women. In 1996 she was awarded Woman of the Year at Fort Lewis College. A fifth-generation Coloradan, she lives just north of Mancos.

TELLURIDE MUSHROOM FESTIVAL … Aug. 12-16… The monsoons have returned to the San Juan Mountain this summer after a record drought and unprecedented fires. Many of us fungophiles are hoping for a super fruiting of buried mycelia after a meager year last year.

But this event isn’t just a foray. This is a gathering of some of the luminaries of the 21st Century mushroom renaissance, from cutting-edge mycelia innovations to merch and medicine to entheogenic explorations and beyond. And it’s a party. On Saturday we dress up like fungi of every imaginable shape & color and parade down Telluride’s Colorado Avenue. With a costume Puff Ball in the Sheridan Opera House that evening.

Oh, yeah, it’s pricey. (For dirtbags like me they always were. I tend toward Rainbow Gathering events.) But a third or more of the festival’s offerings are free. High end. Low end. It’s a wilding that you won’t want to miss.

Spores

That’s us
working while at play
in the interpenetrable nooks
& niches of Gaia’s Spaceship Earth
hoping in our trickster way
to fertilize this disturbed
worlding with love’s
healing hyphae

FOUR CORNERS POETRY FESTIVAL … Poetry festivals are springing up all over Colorado. Out here on the Western Slope we have literary big times in Crestone, Crested Butte, Cortez, Mancos and Grand Junction. Not to be outdone, Durango’s Poet Laureate Esther Belin with help from poet Ellen Toland organized the Four Corners Poetry Festival in June at the public library in this college town on the Animas River. What was most unusual was that three of the four headliners were Indigenous poets and all four were poet laureates.

Cristoso Apache had just been named Colorado’s Poet Laureate, Tommy Archuleta is Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate, Jake Skeets is Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and Laura Tohe was a former Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and current Arizona Poet Laureate.

Laura’s poem can be found online here.

TALKING GOURD … Found poems are fun poems. Here’s the last line from an email sent me by my good friend, meteorologist and retired C.U. professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences, Bob Grossman of Wrights Mesa (just a couple miles from me). Turns out it’s exactly 17 syllables.

Bob’s

ZEN Death
High[un]Cou[th]

The elevator doors
are opening

I’ve said
all I had time for