western eye press
BRAVE NEW PUBLISHING FOR A MULTI-MEDIA WORLD
BLACK BIRDS
Uncompaghre crow takes in
the sun’s first rays
atop her fencepost perch
& a highway magpie
flies up from the snow to
the barbed wire beside her
What point of light
& dark do we not
understand?
The morning makes
no judgment
Under blue skies
everything shines
POEMS by Art Goodtimes
Looking South to Lone Cone
by Art Goodtimes, 60 pages, $5.95 softbound, plus shipping.
Currently available at amazon.com
In Looking South to Lone Cone, Art Goodtimes shares his deep connection with the Western Slope of the Rockies, the high mesa country where Colorado slopes off toward Utah, the rhythms and the seasons of Cloud Acre, that acre of irrigated wetlands he’s called home for 20 years. Reading these poems we walk Art’s home turf with him, looking south to Lone Cone . . .
I’ve heard it said that in our modern, transient times, a ‘poet of place’ has come to mean a poet who goes on vacation and writes a poem about it. Not so Art Goodtimes, who digs into the history and mystery of his local soil and pulls up poetry by the roots.
—Wendy Videlock
This is an exceptional collection of "place-based poetry" penned by a true guru of the Colorado Mountain West, Art Goodtimes. While the hidden dimensions of specific places shine in every poem, the body of work as a whole proves how words and experiences can, in the work of select artists, become intimately and inexorably linked.
—Dan Collins
About the poet
Art Goodtimes is a member of the San Francisco-based Union of Street Poets and a student of Way-of-the-Mountain guru Dolores LaChapelle. Art was the founding poetry editor of Earth First! Journal (1981–1991) and poetry co-editor of Wild Earth (1991–2000). He served as the first Poet Laureate of the Western Slope (2011–12), poetry editor for Mountain Gazette, and currently poetry editor for Fungi magazine. Host of Talking Gourds poetry events since 1989, he currently leads a poetry club in Telluride, performs widely in Colorado, and has taken his Gourds Circle workshops to poetry festivals and conferences around the Four Corners region. His first book was Embracing the Earth (HomewardPress, Berkeley, 1984) and his most recent book, still in print, was As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007). Art's electronic
broadside, Mushroom Cloud Redeye, a Rant, is available as a free download on the electronic Chapbook area of this web site.
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