Denver

I’m a bit late getting this week’s blog in because of travel. Cindy Lou was good enough to gift me with registration to the American Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference which is being held this week in Denver. The event is an annual gathering of university types, both faculty and student wanna’ be PhDs. The event lasts three days with many, many sessions on everything literary from poetry readings to fiction discussions to tributes to writers with impressive publishing credentials. It’s currently late afternoon on day two. It’s been good so far.

My hope this week was to sit in on some sessions that might help me with my own writing. Yesterday I went to a reading of Anhinga Press’s The Poet’s Guide to Birds and another session on putting together a writer’s first book of poetry. Today was a session on writing with a sense of place and another on a writer’s voice in middle school and young adult literature. I ended my morning thinking how cool it would be if Cindy Lou and I could write a YA novel celebrating our grandkids. A guy can dream.

I also hoped to see some important writers in the flesh. This morning I got to see, hear, and greet Pattiann Rogers, a poet I first heard at another literary conference in Montana years ago. She was as good as ever, and I think she was really pleased to hear how her work has informed my own. Tonight we hear environmental poet Gary Snyder and tomorrow former national poet laureate Robert Hass. There appears to be a heavy hitter around every corner.

I’ve been through Denver plenty of times on I-70, but never stayed here. Well, one night years ago out in a distant suburb, but that hardly counts. This time I’m just south of downtown for a five-night stay -- within walking distance of the convention center where the AWP event is being held. Such a town this is.

I suppose John Denver hooked me on both the mountains and Colorado years ago when I was a young dad. I was, in fact, in my 27th year when I first came to the high plains and the mountains just beyond, as was he wrote and sang about in Rocky Mountain High.

As was the case with many red-blooded Americans, during that trip I touched upon some chord within that lit up when I came West. Historians and philosophers have opined for years that the idea of the West is part of a unique American character. A couple centuries ago, the West was the Ohio frontier. After that was settled and Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, the West moved, well, further west. Denver celebrates so much of that unique character in its art and architecture.

But Denver is really just the foothills of the Rockies. From our hotel window, just beyond the hospital, I can see snow capped peaks. That’s where I need to go before heading back to my safe and sound home in the East. And that’s where we’re headed Sunday morning: north to Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, for our last two days in Colorado.

Cindy’s never been. Boy, am I looking forward to showing it to her.

Today’s elder idea: from ‘This Little Glade, Remember’

When lying beneath a ponderosa

pine, looking up through layers

of branches, mazes of leaf-spikes

and cones—contemplation grows

receptive to complexity,

the pleasant temptation of pine-

scented tangle. Sky as proposition

is willingly divided and spliced

into a thesis of weaves and hallows.

Name them something else

if you wish, but needled shadow

and substance are, in this hour,

an architecture of philosophy.

Pattiann Rogers