Poets from across the region gathered at the Durango Public Library Saturday for the Four Corners Poetry Festival, a day of workshops, readings and conversations about memory, language and place.
The festival was hosted by Durango Poet Laureate Esther Belin and featured poets laureate from Colorado, Arizona, Santa Fe, the Navajo Nation and the Talking Gourds.
The free event included writing workshops, a Talking Gourd Poetry Circle, a community reading and open mic, a poets laureate panel discussion, and evening readings and book signings.
The day’s workshops returned often to memory and the senses. In one morning session, Arizona Poet Laureate Laura Tohe asked participants to write about bread, tortillas and the family stories carried through food.
Later, Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets expanded on that idea in a workshop called “Re-sensing Home: Grounding Memories.”
Skeets asked participants to think about memories they could taste, smell, touch, hear or see. He described “grounding memories” as sensory memories that help people return to important parts of themselves.
For Skeets, those memories included watermelon on a summer night, music in the car, family members making tortillas in the kitchen and places on the landscape tied to stories.
Skeets said poetry can help people move beyond simply remembering an event and back into the sensory details of it. He described that process as “re-sensing,” or returning to a memory through its sights, sounds, textures, smells and tastes.
He also connected those memories to a broader understanding of land and home. Skeets told participants that people often separate domestic spaces from the landscape around them, but that a kitchen, a dirt road, a family recipe or a song can all be part of a person’s sense of place.
That gave the festival a broader theme: poetry not only as performance, but as a way of locating where people come from, what they remember and what they carry with them.
