Words, Wine, Wonder & the Ancient Frame Drum
About this Event
With an opening invocation by local poet, Madison Silva, this promises to be a beautiful evening.
In the intimate beauty of a Montrose winery, acclaimed poets Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Wendy Videlock offer a performance that moves beyond the traditional poetry reading into something more communal, musical, and alive. Blending poetry, music, song, laughter, ceremony, and the ancient voice of the frame drum, the two poets invite the audience into an experience that celebrates language-- not simply as something written on a page, but as something spoken, sounded, sung, felt, and shared.
Rosemerry and Wendy are both known for poetry that pays close attention to the natural world and to the mysteries of ordinary life. Their work explores grief and joy, wildness and belonging, love and loss, the sacred and the everyday. Both poets bring warmth, humor, curiosity, and a sense of wonder to their readings. Together, their voices create a lively conversation—sometimes contemplative, sometimes playful, sometimes surprising—between poems, stories, rhythms, and songs.
Also featured is the frame drum, one of humanity’s oldest musical instruments. For thousands of years, the simple handheld drum has accompanied storytelling, ritual, dance, healing, celebration, and prayer. Its pulse echoes something elemental: heartbeat, footsteps, breath, the rhythms of work and weather, the cycles of the moon and seasons. Woven between poems, the drum becomes another kind of language, reminding us that poetry itself began as an oral and rhythmic art long before it found its way onto the printed page.
This is poetry returned to its oldest home: the human voice, the beat of the drum, and people gathered together.
This is an invitation to come, not merely to hear poems, but to enter an evening of rhythm and language, friendship and wildness, beauty and laughter—a celebration of the ancient human impulse to make meaning together.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has 15 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been used for choral works by composers Paul Fowler and Jeffrey Nytch and performed around America. Her 2020 collection, Hush, won the Halcyon prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Other books include Even Now, The Less I Hold and If You Listen, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2023 she released All the Honey; Beneath All Appearances an Unwavering Peace (a book for grieving parents with artist Rashani Réa); a book of writing prompts, Exploring Poetry of Presence II; and Dark Praise, a spoken word album with Steve Law.
Wendy Videlock lives on the edge of a canyon in western Colorado outside Palisade. Her poems and essays appear in Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Rattle, O Magazine and other venues. Wendy is the two time recipient of the Keats Soul Making Award, The Rattle Ekphrastic Prize three times and is the winner of the Cantor Poetry Prize, The Fischer Prize and the PbtS Sonnet Prize. Wendy is a syndicated newspaper columnist for newspapers across the Four Corner States. Her newest book, Speaking Animal in the American Southwest, Essays and Poems will appear in Sept,2026.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 14.64
