poems by rachel kellum
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Crestone Poetry Festival is around the corner…
The Poemfest 2024 schedule and registration is live! Get ready for an unforgettable weekend packed with featured readers, live music open mics, poetry playshops, probing panels and unique, immersive experiences. We're pulling out all the stops to deliver a fun, creative, and magical time: a true party of poets! Best of all, registration is free to all events except for poetry playshops. Register for them here.
Reading “Walk” with Leo
In 2019, to advertise the Crestone Poetry Festival, our posse of poet planners enjoyed being recorded reading by a local videographer, Bennie, for his series Crestone Now. This one captures a reading I did with our late dog, Leo, who very much stole the show.
Scoot to 6:52 in the video to see me reading “Walk” and Leo at his best.
Here’s another reading leading up to 2019’s Poemfest, outside Bob’s Diner, which we all wish would open again soon.
“Christmas Soup” starts at the 9:20 mark. Apologies to my vegetarian friends. You’ve been warned.
Upcoming June Readings
Ridgway Chautauqua presents:
Literary Living Room at The Sherbino Featuring Rachel Kellum
June 25 @ 7:30 pm
Doors: 7 || Show: 7:30 || $10
Part literary reading, part author interview, part open mic…Literary Living Room is the Sherbino’s dynamic year-round series featuring local and national literary artists of all persuasions. This June we’re excited to bring you decorated poet Rachel Kellum.
Rachel Kellum lives with her family at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains where she teaches art to valley children, writing for Adams State University, and humanities and literature courses for Trinidad State College. Additionally, she has co-organized the Crestone Poetry Festival with local poets for seven consecutive years. Rachel previously taught at Morgan Community College, where she directed the MCC CACE Gallery of Fine Art and hosted Open Mic Poetry Nights. Recognized as a Pushcart Prize nominee and NFSPS award recipient, her poetry is featured in various online platforms and printed anthologies. She conducts writing workshops, presents her poetry across Colorado, and maintains a blog at wordweeds.com. Her debut book, ah, was published by Liquid Light Press in 2012, and she anticipates the release of her next full-length collection, Inheritance, from Middle Creek Publishing later this year.
Former Western Slope Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer notes, “With an artist’s eye, a mother’s intuition, a Sufi’s abandon and a professor’s discernment, Rachel Kellum is a rare poet. Her work is both finely crafted and emotionally risky–and she brings us with her in her willingness to explorecwhat it means to be alive, to be in love, to hurt, to be hurt, to surrender. Some poets are better on the page. Some better in person. Rachel Kellum is better in both.”
The Sherbino
604 Clinton St
Ridgway, Colorado 81432
Crestone Poetry Festival
Crestone Poemfest 6.0, our first in-person fest since Covid hit, was an incredible comeback lovefest of intergenerational rural and urban poets from across Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. We brought in water from all directions, in hexagonal formation.
It’s been only five days since everyone dispersed. I still haven’t caught up on my sleep, already jonesing for more creative exhaustion with the poetribe.
We cheered for child-poets, birthed an exquisite corpse, bonded over botanical elixirs and scrumptious curries. We composted jazz and poetry with SETH and the Word Mechanics at T-Road Brewery. We soul-collaged, paraded and bathed in eclipse light casting crescent shaped shadows through our fingers, hair and wicker chairs. We wrote rambling Renga and fairy tales of narrowly escaped disasters. We harvested permaculture-principled poetry from Atwoodian bread and played poetry games in the magic circles of Fluxus instructions.
We brought our favorite books to the deserted island, wandered queerly along a creek dressed in gold and sage-woven tumbleweeds and spiraled bark. We hand bound books, reimagined word-nature and danced in quantum-entangled playgrounds of mycopoetry. We ate balsamic beet poems for lunch, put people first, poetry second, and found poems everywhere anyway.
We grooved with, jarred against, jam band Black Market Translation’s joyful Punketry accompaniment, unstopped our ears with righteous fire of the Beyond Academia Free Skool of Poetry, roared with Talking Gourds elder Art Goodtimes whose bellowing mantra NO… MORE… KINGDOMS! LET… THERE… BE KINDOMS! still whisper-shouts in my mind stream while I teach valley kids how to hand-build clay pumpkins, alliterate, or stop-motion-animate charcoal drawings of women emerging from tree roots.
That final morning, we nibbled scones and jazzed grief. We crossed out our names and scribbled love notes in margins. We passed the gourd, we passed the gourd, we passed the gourd. It spiraled outward.
I’m not sure how poets save the world, but they save me—trying, re-wiring, de-commodifying—one poem at a time.
Long live the Crestone Poetry Festival.
Crestone Poetry Festival
A free virtual Poemfest!
From the Sangre de Cristo mountains and beyond, the fifth annual Poemfest will be a virtual revival that celebrates poetry and friendship in Colorado and New Mexico.
With readings and open mics, you'll have an opportunity to inspire and be inspired. And explore the website for the rest of the fest: do some shopping at the bookstore, and be a part of the Ekphrastic experience with local Crestone Artists.
While we are looking forward to the return of the in-person fest, we learned in 2021 that the poets can still party online!
Crestone Poetry Festival:Feb. 27 -28
Please join us for a FREE virtual Poemfest with your favorite poets...
from the Sangre de Cristo mountains and beyond. Our virtual festival this year will be a reunion of the community we’ve enjoyed the past three years. The fourth annual Poemfest will be different from those in years past, but we will feature some of the best writers in Colorado and New Mexico, and we will pass the gourd.
Visit Poemfest.com to register!
Midnight Transmission Reading
Here are four poems from my recent reading with hosts Jesse Maloney and Orlando White. With the help of a vile vial of liquid ginseng, this old girl managed to stay awake past midnight!
For more videos of this and other Midnight Transmission readings, please visit Jesse 5-0 Productions.
Blue Daughters
Minefields
Sutra for Letting Go of Aversion
Midnight Transmission Promo
Enjoy this new late night reading series hosted by Diné Nation poets Jesse T. Maloney and Orlando White, transmitting the Word from the Rez. It was an unforgettable experience for me--an honor to read with such powerful women and be buoyed up by that smart, gentle audience in the digital realm. Jesse and Orlando are everything you want in a host: gracious, kind, humble and humorous AF. Clips from the evening will be posted soon.
The crumble on the muffin was connecting with an audience member who is the daughter of my most beloved college mentor, Dr. Joellen Jacobs, the woman who, nearly thirty years ago, walked me into the house of poetry, holding my hand through every image and cadence of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, later, Stevens' "The Snow Man." I found a home. The sonic, imagistic and philosophical joy I experienced in these two poems have guided my aesthetic choices for decades.
I hate to say it, but what a trip when it's true: it's a small, small world.