Though not a soapbox in sight, as the newspapers exclaimed there would be, we stood on 3 cinderblocks on First Street. On the first day, Saturday, we stood in the shadow of the Mountain People’s Co-op and competed with the Zimmerman’s (a local band that only covers Bob Dylan songs, fittingly) playing inside the Brain Freezer Tent. We had a list of 5 or 6 poets who offered to read from original poems or that of their favorite dead poet. Brownell beckoned to the people walking by:
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| Elyse Brownell |
“We call to thee, dead poets, we call to thee upon this mountain, sing with us, poets, sing!”
Earlier in the day, to stir up the words, two ghosts haunted the town, handing out flyers to patrons at local bars: flyers of blue sheets with quotes from dead writers printed on them with the time and place in the bottom corner. Sometimes we mentioned what the flyers meant, other times walking mute, feeling nothing but the openness of the room and the curiosity. As the flyers floated down on table tops landing near someone’s hand, word was getting out: the poets were ready.
The wind picked up and more people started surrounding our cinderblock stage: the dead poets had arrived. The crowd was small but attentive, and their willingness to stand on the stage and call to the writers of the past was astonishing. We stood back for a moment and said to each other: “This is beautiful; this is what poetry should be about.”
Shugrue stood up there and read “Father Reason” by Rumi, a phrase from which he has tattooed on his right forearm: “Humble living does not diminish. It fills. Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom.” When he reached that part in the poem, he lifted his arm, pulled down his sleeve, and called to Rumi. The audience stood in awe at a man who believed so deeply in what he was reading, in what someone wrote, Rumi, that he had it etched into his skin for his daughter, for it is what comes after that is already within him: “When a father makes up a story for his child, he becomes a father and a child together, listening.” The audience stood together with him, listening, and together we all understood again the depth of our connections to each other.
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| Chris Shugrue |
We ended the first day of FDPS with a young girl reading Shel Silverstein, after the loud hums of the crowd encouraged her to read it. It was a moment of pure innocence, reminding us that poetry should be the future; whether you write it or just stand up for it, poetry allows us to see the connections to our past, present, and future. Poetry sustains. What we witnessed reminded us again of the words of Anne Waldman: “Keep the world safe for poetry.”
On Sunday, just before 3PM, we decided to move the cinderblock stage further up First Street, in the sun, out in the open, and in the middle of the walkway, so there was no way to miss us. When forming FDPS, our primary mission was to bring poetry into a space where it would not be expected. In Nederland, and Colorado as a whole, poetry is very present, and while FDGD has something for everyone, what we felt was missing from the event was a performance space unique to poetry.
Before our final performance of the day, we sat at a picnic table at the Very Nice Brewing Company with piles of books by Kerouac, Rumi, Whitman, Lispector, Yeats, Ginsberg, Kabir, and Plath, the books that had been weighing down Shugrue’s backpack for days now. When asked what he was carrying on his back, Shugrue replied, “There’s thirty pounds of poetry in there.” When asked why we don’t get a Kindle, Brownell said, “You need to feel the weight of the poetry to truly appreciate it.”
We wrote exquisite corpses with the dead poets, taking turns to pick a quote and write on it, two notebooks switching back and forth between hands, mugs of beer, the banter of before-noon locals, and background music from string bands. It was an exercise in collaboration, but not just collaboration between two living writers in the present penning phrases over beers: by plucking phrases from the pages of past poets, we were conjuring the dead, summoning ghosts from thin mountain air and spinning their words into a present patchwork quilt that continued the thread of our own writing.
This was collaboration at its finest and most pure. Our collaboration with the poets of past was set, and we would use this piece to kick off the Sunday edition of the FDPS.
So yes, back to our cinderblock stage, 3 PM, the middle of First Street, Nederland, CO, with the wind howling straight down from snow covered Divide, we poets gathered again. In that gusting wind, we began the proceedings by reading our exquisite frozen corpse, with the ghost of ol’ Jack rising in air:
“I’d better be a poet
or lay down dead.”
We took turns reading from those two notebooks passed until all the ghosts were swirling about. With our incantations done, we turned the stage and the mountain over to the poets who came to share their words. What followed was one of the more inspiring events we’ve ever witnessed. Our position in the very middle of the street meant people could not pass without hearing songs fill the air, and the poets who took turns standing atop our cinderblock stage did not disappoint. The gathered were blessed with readings of original work, of the work of poets known and newly introduced, of mash-ups of poetical presence that left all smiling and laughing in a Rocky Mountain gale. A crowd of writers and witnesses in turn became one, and the wind kept roaring and shaped all the words bellowed into one grand poem sent singing down First Street. We all knew something new had been born.
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| Mark Curci |
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| Phillip Bright |
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| Sandra Erwin |
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| Natalie Doerre |
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| Matthew Clifford |
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| James Steele |
And finally, as the sun headed towards the Divide, Brownell finally stepped upon them blocks to finish off the first-ever meeting of the FDPS. And the ghost she decided to conjure, the words she decided to roar against wind, couldn’t have been more perfect. With the ghost of Walt Whitman dancing around her feet, she blew the assembly away with a reading of “On Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, the perfect ending to a perfect collaboration between poets alive and poets dead:
It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow,
I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats,
I look'd.
Just like Whitman, we stood refreshed; we stood as one of the crowd: our thirst quenched by poetry, community, and good old-fashioned fun. We stood as one as we ended our first meeting of the Frozen Dead Poets. After all the words were spoken, all the songs were sung, we realized something greater about this collaboration, and the realization is humbling and equally inspiring in its simplicity: poetry never dies, and the poet who writes doesn’t either. On a couple of beautiful mountain days in March, a group of living performers communed with the words of poets past. In this act, a new voice had been created, and this new voice beckoned to the poetry of the future, and it also called back to our collective pasts. The dead poets conjured never die, for we are constantly in collaboration with them. Words still matter and poetry still has an important role in this world.
To all those who gathered with us: thank you. We couldn't have pulled this off without your presence and your words. In the end, we are all ghosts in search of words to make us whole.
-Elyse Brownell & Chris Shugrue
Tweet: @elysebrownell; @cpshugrue
Bouldering Poets
All photos by Jeffrey Spahr-Summers
I felt like there after reading this.
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