How poetry helped Fort Collins' poet laureate overcome grief
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FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Melissa Mitchell buzzed through the halls of the Museum of Art arranging chairs, an easel and writing supplies for a poetry workshop she facilitates. Mitchell, the Fort Collins Poet Laureate, never would’ve dared to attend such an event just a few years ago.
“I was always really afraid to get involved in the writing community in Fort Collins. I came up with any number of excuses,” she said.
Despite her initial fear, Mitchell credits poetry with helping her to work through grief, forge community and build a life worth living. Today, Mitchell hopes to foster the same love for the form by making poetry approachable.
“Poetry can be really intimidating to people. Part of my role is to show people how exciting it can be to use your voice and put it down on paper,” she said.
Mandatory silliness
As the BNSF train clattered through town, a gaggle of poets joined the workshop.
“Today we're going to be dialoguing with the art in the true spirit of ekphrastic poetry,” explained Ally Eden, a fellow poet and the event’s co-facilitator. “This is a type of collaborative poem that involves a sense of mystery.”
The eight poets who signed up for the event through the Museum of Art broke into pairs and wandered through the galleries. Each writer jotted three philosophical questions and answers in response to works of art displayed in the museum. Then, using both partners’ responses, the teams created an amalgam — think Mad Libs, but for adults. The results are equally silly and revealing.
“How do seeds emerge so gracefully when the fire is lit? Because in darkness, the faintest vestige of light is singular and all revealing,” Mitchell read to the group from her and Eden’s ekphrastic exercise.
“When does a shark know it's too late? When beyond the foot of the bed is a rolling but hostile landscape.”
Becoming a writer
Mitchell’s family moved from California to Evergreen, CO in 1988. She remembers her childhood fondly.
“I loved running around in the trees, pretending to live in the woods and building little houses out of tree branches that had fallen down,” she said.
Her love for writing came later.
“I was always a slow reader. My grandma was an English teacher, and she was always really worried about me,” said Mitchell. “Whenever I would go over to her house, she would always get the Scrabble tiles out and try to teach me Latin. And I was like, 'oh, can’t we just play Scrabble?'”
“It wasn't until third grade; I think that I started to discover writing and would write little, short stories.”
Stories allowed her to escape to the dream worlds of her imagination. It wasn’t until college, however, that she discovered poetry.
“Something that I really love about poetry that's different from other forms of art is the expediency of it,” Mitchell said. “There was a little bit of impatience that made me lean towards poetry at first, like this sort of hunger, to express. It's like, I have to get it done fast enough before my thought moves to the next thing.”
Mitchell studied creative writing at Colorado State University where she found herself surrounded by curious, passionate people.
But as soon as she graduated, Mitchell’s writing voice softened to a whisper.
“I got nervous. ‘How am I going to get a job? How am I going to make money? What am I doing? What have I done?’” she said.
Mitchell stepped away from creative writing. She worked as a technical writer for seven years then as an office manager.
“I wasn’t taking care of my physical or mental health. I felt stagnant,” she said.
The walls came tumbling down in 2021 when Mitchell’s mom died of COVID-19.
“It was a big turning point for me. There were so many things that my mom and I had talked about doing,” she said. “Things change so quickly, what was I waiting for?”
Mitchell began writing again. This time, she decided to share her work with others and began attending poetry events at Wolverine Farm, a creative gathering space in Fort Collins.
By connecting with other artists and poets, Mitchell began to realize she wasn’t alone.
At her kitchen table, Mitchell looks through a stack of family photos and a diary she found while cleaning out her mom’s house.
“I realized when I was looking through it was my grandpa's.”
Inside she found an odd assortment of addresses and notes. In the back, however, she discovered a series of sonnets her grandfather wrote aboard the USS Bergen in 1946.
“It’s just cool to think of him writing it,” said Mitchell
"I think writing and art are good at letting people know that other people are going through the same stuff," she said.
“Poetry for me scratches an itch. It speaks to my shyness, lets me relate to people in ways that maybe I couldn’t otherwise,” said Mitchell.
Back at the workshop, Eden and Mitchell closed out the night with an exercise in narrative poetry. The group listened to two cowboy poems — “Pappy and his pipe,” by Al Albertson and “Wolf” by Jane Candia Coleman — then wrote their own poems based on memory.The memories included trespassing in dad’s tool room, a sweaty palmed-prom dance and the first sniff of pepper. Writers snapped in approval for every poet brave enough to share.
“Sometimes we can get so isolated. I think that part of that isolation comes because you feel like you don’t have a voice,” said Mitchell. “There’s something really powerful about regaining that.”
Between My Ear & the Earth
By Melissa Mitchell
H
My mom, a penny, dropped into a deep well of bone-in darkness. Wrapped around myself, arms maternal just slipped out from my open side, our qualms now wide and spread over realms of tiny, of small; most versions I tried to zip closed, falcon-eyed, friend, but no bird can gain lift from a long-gone kind of tired.
E
My arms don’t fold tight so I can’t slip into liquid sky–as much as I would follow, to wish for that–but I hold back, full, shifting mystical, watching dirt go to work, to pull our hands out of viscous sink and dig into sound mind body juxtaposition: your body atomic, your body zirconic, your slow falling body down porous and wound.
A
I lie on the ground to be ground, to listen to the sound of the wind between my cheek, the dirt. To drown out the exposition to beyond, the why, the better, the quixotic, the lemon zester. How do I see feelings but only feel thoughts? The roots blister, pop, they use brimstone to fix toxic into ripe fruit bowls set out on the counter. Why do I see feelings but only feel thoughts? We sit down together to go on vision quests for some vision of one jester. How do we get there? I tell you, I don’t know how to write how I used to, where it lived before the ink sunk much more blue. Now we sink to find words to bless her.
L
I remember she said to say thank you for supper. To offer gratitude for nature, the just breeze of our existence. To understand the hushed chaos of eroding into canyons; to be water rocking against motive; to permeate cracks where granite sings and guns the waves; to be an unknowing participant in our own transmutation; to somehow remember the awe we sense for something we haven’t yet experienced…the quiet trick of steady magic. And every day I ask her, “How?”