21 Jan The Colorado Sun Features Telluride’s Word Woman
Telluride’s Word Woman and one of the region’s most beloved and honored poets and teachers, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer was featured in The Colorado Sun. The focus of the interview was her latest book, “Naked for Tea,” which is available at Between the Covers bookstore (where co-owner Daiva Chesonis is San Miguel County’s latest poet laureate.)
Rosemerry Trommer, credit, Real Life Photographs
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer served as the third Colorado Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017), co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), is the co-founder of Secret Agents of Change and co-directs Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club.
Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion, in Rattle.com, and on river rocks. Her most recent collection is “Naked for Tea,” a finalist for the Able Muse book award in 2018.
She teaches poetry for 12-step recovery programs, hospice, mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, scientists and more.
Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day. You can find them on her blog, www.ahundredfallingveils.com Mantra: Adjust. www.wordwoman.com
The following is an interview with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.
What inspired you to write this book?
Small beets. Cactus spines. Blackberry jam. Donkeys. It never ceases to amaze me how everything offers itself as inspiration. And as a poet, the medium is short enough that every day I can write a poem about what inspires me that particular day.
But the poems that made it into this most recent collection do have some things in common beyond their everydayness. As the title, “Naked for Tea,” would suggest, they deal with vulnerability and a willingness to show up. And, as the title also suggests, they deal with failure—with the ways that things often don’t turn out as we might expect—and then the invitation to say yes to the world as it is.
Who are your favorite authors and/or characters?
Favorite poets? I love contemporary writers, especially Naomi Shihab Nye, Faith Shearin, Ellen Bass, George Bilgere, Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirshfield. All of these writers are able to find meaning in the mundane, to make language sing. So often I read a poem and think, huh. But poems by these writers will almost always elicit shivers, or at least a mmmmm of recognition in which I find myself resonating and falling in love with the art of poetry and with the world.
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