FAMILY-FRIENDLY PRIVATE COMPOUND the traditional Indian salutation. “Hello is the same as goodbye—doesn’t that make perfect sense?” Poet Danny Rosen is the featured guest. When he takes the stage, he wins over the room with his physical and emotional performance, including the “Ghost of Giant Kuda,” about his adventures through Africa, and his exploration of the universal and the personal in “Deep Field.” Danny is the quintessential poet, and as I watch him with Art and Rosemerry, it is clear that there is some kind of synergy and magic here. Danny tells Rosemerry, “You guys [the poets of San Miguel County] have been oxygen to me for a lot of years.”
It is clear that there is some kind of synergy and magic here. Talking Gourd nurtured the rise of another local poet, current San Miguel Poet Laureate Ellen Marie Metrick. Ellen published her latest collection, Teasing Out the Divine, this spring. Ellen attended her first Talking Gourd in 1998. It was “a huge thing for me—an indoctrination into this tribe of poets.” Now Ellen runs Talking Gourd in Norwood. “In the last two years, things have been picking up. There is a renaissance of poetry right now.” Verse is ubiquitous throughout the community. Local newspapers and online magazines print poems, Telluride’s bookstore has a poetry collection, there is an annual Mark Fischer poetry contest and Rosemerry’s monthly poetry series at the library is wildly popular. And of course there is the Talking Gourd, where fiction, songs and poems are shared. Art closes this Talking Gourd by delivering his poignant “Roadside Coyote” with Rosemerry singing backup. The two of them seem like they’re communicating through some deeper channel, and the experience is so visceral that all the hairs on my arms stand on end. “Poetry,” explains Ellen, “comes from the part of our soul that connects with everything else.”
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