Former Taos, N.M., poet laureate Sawnie Morris says as a young girl poetry showed her how events and objects were connected in curious ways. According to Morris her leap into creating her own prose came when she took an especially empowering women writer’s course at the University of Colorado. She reads her piece called “After the Late-Winter Car Trip.”
Sawnie Morris: I was spending the night at my grandmother’s house, and she had twin beds in her room, and it was right next to the window screens. I think I must have woken up, maybe I’d had a dream. But I had earlier in the day bought some sheets of paper that were this very pale pink color. Suddenly as I was writing, just writing like, almost like a journal or something, I suddenly realized that the sheets I was sleeping on were that same pale pink. There was something about the air moving in and out of the screens, just a little breeze, and I just suddenly realized that everything was magically connected, and that this was, as I wrote, that was what was coming out of me was that connection. And it was something that was happening at night, it was of that world. I think that was really the beginning. It felt magical, to realize that things were related in that way, and that my awareness of that was coming through writing. My feeling about poetry is it opens us to the world that lives side-by-side with the logical world. It’s a nether world, it’s a world that’s inside of the world we live in that’s the logical, causal world. It’s a world where objects come alive and are alive and the imagination, you know the imagination has power, it has intrinsic power.
AFTER THE LATE-WINTER CAR TRIP
the greater cooler & the lesser cooler
are airing out their insides. The little red snow-shovel,
who didn’t have to work at all, recalls feeling
claustrophobic in the back of the car & leans
against the lesser cooler in relief, mixed with
the easy affection of equals.
The greater cooler is thinking
sans bitterness, what a waste of his abilities
& enthusiasms the trip was. He reminisces about the river
over lunch on the return drive. Recalls
the blue heron looking brown
as it flew up the center of the muddy water
called Green. An event that was – to the greater cooler –
a sign via wing-flapping of spring & the delights of
the put-in. The lesser cooler,
its head in the grass,
is doing a cooler form of
the downward dog. It likes the feeling
of the little shovel leaning against its shoulder
in the sun. That shovel is sweet, actually,
the color of ripe Bing cherries,
with considerable reflective capacity
& an optimistic handle on life – forward thinking
& demonstrating – just by being itself –
the art of nuzzling earth
in a spring orchard.
About the author:
Sawnie Morris served as the inaugural poet laureate of Taos, New Mexico, and is the author of Her, Infinite, which won the 2016 New Issues Poetry Prize. She was also the founding director of Amigos Bravos, a New Mexico water advocacy organization.
About the host:
Steven Law is the co-producer of KNAU’s series PoetrySnaps! He is a poet, essayist, storyteller, and the author of Polished, a collection of poems about exploring the Colorado Plateau by foot and by raft.
About the music:
Original music by Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
Poetry Snaps is produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and airs the first and third Friday of each month.
