Poetry to Open and Close Your Saturday: November 5

Two great events this weekend:  workshop with Joe Hutchison, emeritus poet laureate of Colorado, and reading honoring another great Colorado poet:  Chris Ransick.  Why not bracket your Saturday with poetry by attending both! 

Joe Hutchison opens the day of verse by looking more deeply at Robert Bly and guiding participants through some writing inspired by him.  This is the second in the Loveland Poet Laureate series “Encountering a Poet” in which local writers explore a favorite poet; two others are planned in the New Year.  The morning (10:00-12:30) event with Hutchison is at the Loveland Public Library and is FREE (thanks Loveland Poet Laureate!). Registration is requested:  https://www.lovelandpubliclibrary.org/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/100258/3251

Then you have the afternoon to rest up for the reading of Chris Ransick’s work at Wolverine Farm in Fort Collins beginning at 6:00.  (https://www.wolverinefarm.org/)

Chris Ransick (1962 – 2019) was a force in Denver’s literary world.  He published 8 books of poetry and fiction and was poet laureate for the City of Denver from 2006 to 2010. A professor at Arapahoe Community College, he was also a faculty member at Denver's highly regarded literary center, Lighthouse Writers Workshop and a classroom in their new space will be named for him (https://www.lighthousewriters.org/).

 

Saturday’s reading is one in a series across Colorado readings celebrating the publication of Ransick’s last two poetry collections: Temporary House and Joe the Ghost.  Colleagues, family, friends and students will be at the Saturday evening gathering to read his poetry and share stories about him.  This is a great way to encounter Chris Ransick even if you didn’t have the pleasure of meeting him in person. 

I was lucky to attend one of his last workshops, so I did not know him well, but wrote this tribute to him when I heard he had died.  I posted it on this blog at the time, but will reprint it here on the occasion of his reading. 

I almost didn’t go.  I almost didn’t meet him.  I certainly didn’t know him well enough to make this tribute, yet here I am.

At the late-summer workshop in Loveland, he gave us several printed pages of thoughts and prompts and reflections. I saw it just the other day and now cannot find it: another brick in the loss. 

But I do have some scrawled notes (I hope accurately captured):

“Go into a dark place you haven’t been before and turn a light on.”

“Put your ear forward.”

“Clarity is creating a window through which the world’s complexity can be viewed.”

“The poet’s job is to unhinge us into the uncomfortable need to know.”

“Keep writing through the doubt.” 

And the loss, I would add.

At one point he asked, “How would your life be different if you had done THAT instead.”

Then he mentioned knowing Richard Hugo, and I was suddenly back to 1982, one foot away from stepping into Montana and an MFA program with Hugo when he abruptly died. Instead I stayed put (mostly), married, had two kids and, now, four grandkids. 

How my life would have been different. 

How would my life have been different if I had not attended that workshop with Chris Ransick at the end of summer?

I left quickly during conversations and the signing of books.  Did I hurry away too soon?

He did.

--E.A. Lechleitner 2019