04 Jan Talking Gourds: Bardic Trails Zoom Series Kicks Off with Danny Rosen, Tuesday, January 7!
Talking Gourds announces the Bardic Trails virtual poetry series kicks off 2025 with Danny Rosen of Fruita’s Lithic Press. Event takes place Tuesday, January 7 pm MT.
No longer needing to register with the library, participants are encouraged to visit here to get the zoom link each month, if they aren’t already on the mailing list.
Bardic Trails is a project of the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program, in collaboration with Telluride’s Wilkinson Public Library.
Go here for more about Talking Gourds.
For over a decade, Danny Rosen has been publishing regional and national poets from the southwest and both coasts, with a recent focus on Beat writers, dead and alive. His own poetry has been on fire ever since, particularly with the publication of his latest book, “Suspending Erosion” (Lithic Press, 2024).
“Danny read at the MycoLicious MycoLuscious MycoLogical Poetry Show at this past year’s Telluride Mushroom Festival,” recalls Talking Gourds Director Art Goodtimes, “He knocked folks socks off.”
This coming Tuesday, January 7th Rosen kicks off the Bardic Trails zoom series for 2025 from 7 to 8:30 pm, performing a sampling of his poems, followed by a Gourd Circle reading of those poets attending online.
Graduating from Harvard and the University of Wyoming, Rosen started life as a rock-climber, geologist, amateur astronomer, also a regional teacher of earth and space science. “Lithic means, pertaining to stone,” he explains. But his dad had written poetry. The discipline was something he was familiar with, but not focused on.
Then he met up with North Beach legendary bard Jack Mueller who moved out to Ridgway from San Francisco over a decade ago. And for Rosen everything changed:
“Jack was a fixture in San Francisco in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, with Ginsberg, Corso, Doyle, Hirschman, Cherkovski, and the ongoing gang,” says Rosen. “[Jack made] thousands of 3×5 cards and bar napkins with rapidly sketched cartoons, sharpened by fast comment, piled on the dining room table. They captivated me. ‘Let’s make a book of these napkins!’ That became, Whacking the Punch Line, and that was the beginning of the Lith.”
It was not only the beginning of a press but of a landmark bookstore, art gallery, and performance space on the second floor of a prominent old building in downtown Fruita, northwest of Grand Junction. Over the last decade it’s become a center of poetry for the entire Western Slope.
The Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program hosts the Bardic Trails virtual zoom series on the first Tuesday of each month. The Wilkinson Public Library continues as our collaboration partner and fiscal agent, with town support from Commission for Community Assistance, Arts & Special Events. There are not themes to the readings.Poets are free to share whatever poem they want for 3 minutes during the Gourd Circle. But for those that like prompts, January’s will be “Rocks.”
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