Skip to main content

Telluride, CO




After driving until midnight, we pull into Rosemerry's house. Rosemerry's house is stunning, on the San Miguel river down the valley from Telluride. After missing the turnoff to bypass the road closure, we hit the construction and have to turnaround and find the Ilium road to get past it.

We do and I sleep rather poorly and wake up before the alarm at 6:30 AM. Oh, yes, my mother's genes. Why must my brain click on before my body is ready?

I hit Telluride Middle School and must admit connect with this group. They're a good group in a good public school and respond to everything and take part in laughing at my poems, creating tongue twisters, and delivering them as if they were at an Open Mike.

Am actually hosting Telluride's first ever slam tomorrow at the Library, so I drift over there and check in. The library is actually paying me to host a slam and putting me up at the Ice House Lodge. Pictured below.

It's at times like this when I'm away from the petty politics of ABQ poetry, in a beautiful city, beautiful house, surrounded by supportive and kind people that I am thankful that I started pursuing poetry. It's also nice to be seeing posters about the slam with "and Nat'l Slam Champion, Don McIver."

Will let you know how tomorrow goes.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque

  The Map. Overview: Starting in the San Juans in Colorado, the Rio Grande "is the twenty-second longest river in the world and the fourth or fifth longest in North America" ( Texas State Historical Society ).  While the river is characterized by the area it flows through, the river from Elephant Butte Dam to the south to Cochiti Dam in the north is called the Middle Rio Grande.  And in the middle of the middle Rio Grande is the roughly 20 plus miles that flows through Albuquerque.  From an airplane, the Rio Grande is a brown ribbon bordered a green ribbon.  That green ribbon is the Bosque .  I've always been fascinated really exploring an area, getting a sort of overview of an area then drilling down to really get it.  It's led to me hiking the Sandias from end to end and then hiking outlying trails multiple times, biking all the trails in the Cedro Peak area because someone put them on a map, trying different routes to get to ...
3 comments
Read more

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Year of Thursdays in the Bosque.

 Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it." She said, "Yeah.  That'd be interesting." As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that."   With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning.  And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street). My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time.   I understand a lot about this caged and managed river.  Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read.  That's not a genre I usually read. ...
1 comment
Read more