In 2007 Mary Crow, Colorado Poet Laureate from 1996–2010, wrote a “Poetic History of Colorado” suggesting five basic areas of Colorado poetry: “Western,” Chicano, Beat, performance, and experimental poetry. This essay leans on those themes she identified, with some additional thoughts.
Certainly, “Western” poetry often deals with the regional aspects of the state, whether the iconic mountains, or the lands of canyon and mesa, or small plains towns in eastern Colorado. But, as a recent state in the Interior West, Colorado's history is so mythically memorable that it too is a major theme of Western poetry, whether in the retelling of “Old West” stories or the modern imagining of the past. For example, Colorado's first laureate, Alice Polk Hill (1919–21) gained much of her popularity from her “Tales of the Colorado Pioneers,” and other cowboy poetry celebrates the life of that period.
Contemporary examples of this historic-narrative focus include Robert Cooperman’s In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, which won the Colorado Book Award (CBA) for Poetry in 2000; William Tremblay’s Shooting Script: Door of Fire, which follows events in Mexico in the last days of Leon Trotsky and won the award in 2004; David Mason’s 2008 CBA winner Ludlow, a treatment of the Ludlow Massacre; and Joseph Hutchison’s 2013 Marked Men, a dramatic/narrative account of the aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre.
Regarding poet laureates, many states struggle with a conflict between the best “literary” poet of the times and the more conventional or popular, and this is the case with Colorado. Two well-known visitors show this conflict. Walt Whitman traveled into the state in 1879 and wrote “Spirit that Form’d this Scene,” including realistic details such as “These tumbled rock-piles grim and red, ⁄ These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks, ⁄ These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness . . .” in his trademark long-lined free-verse.
But another way to present the Colorado landscape was in fairly conventional verse. In 1893 Katharine Lee Bates was inspired at the top of Pikes Peak to write the opening of “America”: “O beautiful for halcyon skies ⁄ For amber waves of grain, ⁄ For purple mountain majesties ⁄ Above the enameled plain.” Besides illustrating the value of revision (“halcyon” and “enameled” were replaced in the 1904 version with “spacious” and “fruited,” respectively), the poem/song shows a different poetic tendency than Whitman’s—the use of celebratory language in a traditional verse style (rhymed and metered) appreciated by many nineteenth-century readers.
A transitional approach is seen in the work of Nellie Burgett Miller, the state’s second laureate (1922–53). She often used the conventional style: “Land of the West, where dreams come true, ⁄ Lift up your voice and sing ⁄ From pine-clad hills and sage set plains ⁄ Let joyful anthems ring.” But she also showed the effect of a changing American poetry. An admirer of Carl Sandburg, Miller was also a regionalist, and her other poems deal with themes of loss and isolation on the plains. “If I contributed anything distinctive,” she wrote shortly before her death, “it will be found in these pictures of the dry farming eastern plains as I saw years ago.” Margaret Clyde Robinson, the third laureate (1952–54), wrote of the Old West in the historic-narrative mode in her book Pony Nelson and Other Western Ballads.
Milford Shields, the fourth laureate (1954–75), subscribed to the traditional view that a laureate’s work should celebrate official state events. The first two lines of “Colorado Day, 1954” show the type of energetic iambic pentameter that Shields was capable of: “Across this land a throbbing cavalcade ⁄ Of days and men forged flaming destiny . . .”
The offering of the laureateship to Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1979–88), one of the most famous Colorado poets, demonstrated the state’s poetic move from nineteenth-century styles to something closer to modernism. Ferril won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1926 and produced six volumes of poetry. Carl Sandburg hailed Ferril as “one of the great poets of America” and called him “the Poet of the Rockies.”
Colorado fully entered the modern age of literature with laureates Mary Crow (1996–2010), David Mason (2010–2014), and Joseph Hutchison (2014–2016). Although they are three very different writers, they each exemplify modern directions of contemporary literary poetry.
Hutchison has written that “Colorado is in a renaissance when it comes to poetry.” There was, he says, “an amazing explosion of activity in the 1970s and early ‘80s, and then things settled down for a while.” For Hutchison, part of this settling down involved poets going into academic institutions and thus becoming somewhat disconnected from each other. “But that's changing,” he wrote.
Certainly the universities of Colorado have been responsible for the growth of poetry readings, classes, and workshops, with the resulting effect that various programs take different perspectives on poetry, from the emphasis on forms at Western State, to “beat generation” Buddhist influences at Boulder’s Naropa University, to Colorado State University-Fort Collins’s (CSU) more experimental approach. There are now poetry programs, majors, or concentrations in at least seven higher education institutions: CSU, CSU-Pueblo, University of Colorado, University of Denver, Western State University, Colorado Mesa University, and Naropa University.
In 2015 there are almost twenty Colorado-based magazines and fifteen presses that feature poetry. Towns that offer reading series and/or regular writers’ gatherings include Pueblo, Telluride, Aspen, Montrose, Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Salida, Loveland, Longmont, Grand Junction, and Fruita. Groups have sprung up in several towns for writers to connect, learn, and perform; some are informal and unnamed while others are more official, such as the Columbine Poets, Poetry West, and the Western Colorado Writers’ Forum.
There are a number of well-known reading venues for all types of poetry in libraries, coffee shops, bars, and bookstores across the state (Boulder’s Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Cafe, Lithic Press in Fruita, Wolverine Press and Matter Bookstore in Ft. Collins). Denver sees a lot of poetry activity at Ziggie’s, the Mercury Cafe, and the BookBar, as well as the work of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, which sponsors readings and regular workshops.
At the start of the twenty-first century, Colorado is home to many types of poetry, including narrative, historical-cultural, the contemporary lyric, prose poetry, experimental poetry, and performance poetry, which is often called “spoken word” or “slam.” The subjects vary from cultural critiques, to nature, to the life of cities and of small towns, as well as the lyrical self of which much poetry is made. We have in Colorado a great diversity of poetic forms and approaches, and we should be proud of the increasing artistic activity.