Hyphae–and gifts

Highlights of the Telluride Mushroom Festival? What I’ll remember longest, I suspect, is a guided foray at Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan Mountains. The “guided” part came and went. The leader walked too quickly for me, both because I wanted to look around and because, at 10,000 feet, I’m easily winded. I wasn’t the only one in our large group taking it slow, though. There was so much to look at! Coral mushrooms, violet cortinarius, warty yellow amanitas, a billion LBMs (little brown mushrooms, often stymieing even the experts), tall plants I’d never seen before (bear grass, I was told), slightly worrisome elk and bear scat (enormous amounts!). My fellow ramblers were interesting people, sometimes knowledgeable foragers in their own right. Plus we all reconnected at the end, where the guide confirmed that Chris had found king boletes–porcini, essentially. Back at our rental I fried them in olive oil with salt and pepper until the pieces were golden and slightly crisped. They were GLORIOUS.

Also terrific: how much poetry was part of the gathering! The poetry events were organized by poet Art Goodtimes, a festival co-founder, who has a lot more energy than seems possible in a eighty-year-old. An “open myc” at the library had a lovely, inclusive, community vibe, alternating poetry and music. The big evening poetry show at the Sheridan Opera House was a wilder yet tightly choreographed mix that also featured hilariously shroomy raps, parodies, and more–Art presiding, this time, in a red sequined tailcoat. What a trip (although I was sober) to see SO many enthusiastic people desperate to snag seats in the audience! On the last day, Art and I signed a collaborative chapbook, Hyphae, designed for the occasion, which I’ll say more about below.

Our final walk through town was amazing, too. We trailed a festive parade down the main avenue, delighted by the costumes and drumming, then took the river walk to the free gondola. Telluride, from the ground as well as the mountains above, is breathtaking (although sometimes breathtakingly expensive, too). When I woke each morning, my first sensation was of being cradled by that box canyon. The gentleness of the feeling surprised me. Colorado seems like a place of dangerous extremes; the festival lost a key venue, in fact, after a July mudslide. I never knew how to dress: heat and chill, rain and sun followed each other in rapid succession. The landscape is certainly alive–but benevolent? For a few late-summer days, it seemed so.

The showers and rainbows in Telluride followed several days traveling in 100-degree smoky heat, with the region’s terrible drought visible everywhere. Rivers and streams were very low, and the air sucked the moisture from your pores. We took as many walks as we could anyway. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a lightly trafficked national park, was our best stop prior to the lusher towns of Ouray and Telluride. We drove along the south rim–the thread of river in the shadows below is difficult to reach–and took a parching, dramatic hike at the end of the road. It’s difficult to conjure how vertiginous it looked and felt. The Painted Wall, for example, rises vertically 2250 feet. According to the signage, “If New York’s Empire State Building stood on this canyon floor, it would reach only slightly more than halfway to the top of the cliff.”

And now for our co-authored chapbook, Hyphae! First, thanks to Scott Nicolay of Yoo-Hoo Press for the gorgeous design. It’s a second version of a giveaway he produced for our November Santa Fe reading in Scott’s Floating Words series (which is wonderful and continues to pick up steam). I wasn’t satisfied with my poems in version #1–I had to put it together fast, during a residency–and Art felt similarly, I guess, so Scott kindly updated it. Art funded a small, inexpensive print run and gave me twenty copies. The wonderful Telluride indie bookstore Between the Covers may still have some, and I know it still carries a few signed copies of Mycocosmic. Otherwise, you have to ask one of us for one! Hear that? No order page or sales pitch! We’re giving them away to friends!

I included three recently published poems but, otherwise, my eight pages in Hyphae are comprised of older work, re-envisioned. I went through my pre-Mycocosmic collections and found a number of poems within which a fungal world was almost visible. Some seemed happy as they were, so I left them alone. In four cases, though, I had always felt twinges of uncertainty about the work as it stood, so I revised to coax the mushrooms and mycelium into fruition. I like the poems better now, although you may disagree. I also found a poem published by Connotation Press as “Dirt Mermaid” but never collected. (The link doesn’t work anymore–hope it’s restored at some point.) Post-Hyphae, I think the new version, “Dirt Merfolk,” will join Spiral Hum, the ms I’m currently revising and pondering.

Art’s poems in Hyphae are replete with exuberant fungal life: chthonic, fruiting, wilder, and way more extroverted than mine. He tends to be Whitmanian-Ginsbergian-ecstatic-bardic in voice, though each piece is grounded in a markedly scientific vocabulary. I’d say he’s writing ecological and spiritual poetry built for performance at high altitudes. “Field Cleaning,” pictured below, is a current fave, but that’s suspect of me, because it feels more designed than the others for a quiet encounter via print.

I’m happy to send digital galleys to anyone, although I can spare just a few physical copies. For a taste, here are two versions of a poem about my mother giving her sugar ration to the fairies in Liverpool, accompanied by her Irish father. It was the ending of the original that didn’t right with me. Now, perhaps, the poem better highlights those long threads of connection nourishing us across generations. It’s a story I treasure about a grandfather I never met. More than before, I can feel how different versions of my mother haunt the poem, too–time gets circular.

gifts, 1946 (heterotopia version, 2010)

She spent her weekly ration on dolly mix
because the pieces were small. She counted them out
and walked with her sacrifice to a grove

in Princes Park where oak and ash and thorn
grew together. Instead of saving the sweetness
for his tea, her father did the same:

cubes of sugar broken into granules,
carried in a matchbox while church bells scolded
through the mist. Let’s not tell anyone.

Parents are inscrutable, their lives
all legend and anecdote. They start off as gods
but their power dwindles as fewer of us

believe in them. First you learn not to follow
the uncanny lights and soon you can’t even spy
them anymore. A small brown shoe crunching

the moldy leaves. One grubby hand in her dad’s,
the other clutching pastel-colored rolls,
jellies, foamy striped squares. Her nose

is leaking but she doesn’t notice. He is telling
her not to stare too boldly—the people
need their peace—but he has glimpsed them, and

his mother did too, little folk flying on stems
of ragwort. Watch them this way, he says,
lowering himself onto one knee in the damp

and plucking a green spear. Bend it like so,
into a circle, and hold it next to your eye.
She believes. She understands mysteries.

gifts, 1946 (hyphae version, 2026)

 
She spent her weekly sugar ration on dolly mix
because the pieces were small. She counted them out
and walked with her offering to a grove in Princes Park 

where roots of oak and ash and thorn whispered 
underground. Instead of saving the sweetness for his tea, 
her father, no longer scanning for incendiaries,

walked with her. In a matchbox he carried cubes
crumbled into granules. Church bells scolded 
through the mist. Let’s not tell anyone.

Parents are inscrutable, their lives
all legend and anecdote. They start off as gods
but their power dwindles as fewer of us

believe in them. First you learn not to follow
the uncanny lights and soon you can’t even spy
them anymore. A small brown shoe crunching

the moldy leaves. One grubby hand in her dad’s,
the other clutching pastel-colored rolls,
jellies, foamy striped squares. Her nose

is leaking but she doesn’t notice. He is warning
her not to stare too boldly—the people
need their peace—but he has glimpsed them

and his mother did too, little folk flying on stems
of ragwort. Watch them this way, he says,
lowering one knee onto the toadstools

and plucking a green spear. Bend it like so,
into a circle, and hold it next to your eye.
She sees, for one abundant instant, the web.