Talking Gourds: John Macker of Santa Fe featured at Bardic Trails, 6/2

31 May Talking Gourds: John Macker of Santa Fe featured at Bardic Trails, 6/2

Poet, playwright and essayist John Macker of Santa Fe will be the featured performer for the Telluride Institute’s first Tuesday Talking Gourds Bardic Trails virtual reading series June 2^nd at 7 pm MDT.

The Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program hosts the free Bardic Trails virtual zoom series on the first Tuesday of each month. The Wilkinson Public Library continues as a  collaboration partner, with town support from Commission for Community Assistance, Arts & Special Events.

Participants are encouraged to visit https://www.tellurideinstitute.org/western-slope-calendar to get the zoom link each month, if they aren’t already on our mailing list. Or email Art Goodtimes directly.

For more information, visit the Telluride Institute Talking Gourds website, tellurideinstitute.org/talking-gourds

John Macker, courtesy Talking Gourds

John  Macker grew up in in Colorado (Denver and Glenwood Springs) and has lived in northern New Mexico for 30 years. He attended the University of Missouri where he studied journalism and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. There he survived being Gregory Corso’s teaching assistant. While in Denver, John wrote for community newspapers and published his first broadside of poetry.

In the 90’s John edited the HARP arts journal. He has published 14 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry, 2 audio recordings, an anthology of fiction and essays, and several broadsides over 35 years.

His most recent are Alchemy of Headwinds, Belated Mornings, Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist), Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction, (winner of the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards fiction anthology prize). 

John won a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist award in 2019, judged by Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, the first Mad Blood Magazine Literary Arts Award and the James Ryan Morris Memorial “Tombstone” Award for poetry in 2000.

For several years, John was contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review and edited the Desert Shovel Review from his home near Bernal, New Mexico. His most recent work can be found in Main Street Rag, New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, Solstice, Cholla Needles, The Midwest Quarterly, Chiron Review and Contemporary Haibun Online.  His trilogy of one-acts, “Black Range,” was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in 2023. His full-length play, “Blue Desert” was produced by Teatro Paraguas in 2025.

John lives in Santa Fe with his artist wife, Anne and two rescue mutt.

Here’s an excerpt from “Sixteen Directions to my House” from Alchemy of Headwinds.

“15. Pass the incandescence of youth: every bar a star, every entrance an event, every sentence a chorale, every word gospel, there’s always a somewhere ruptured by war, if you have to be sure don’t write, Berryman told Merwin one day in the dry heat of eternity.”

For those that like prompts, we are suggesting “Headwinds,” although poems on any subject are welcome. Virtual attendees are encouraged to bring a story or poem to share each month after the featured reader, their own work or someone else’s.