Jack Collom was known for pulling out pads of paper and pens whenever he got together with friends, trading lines to write spontaneous, collaborative poems.
“You couldn’t sit and have breakfast with him at Dot’s Diner without collaborating on a poem with him,” said Anne Waldman, co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Boulder’s Naropa University.
Collom, a prolific Boulder poet and a poetry teacher at both local K-12 schools and Naropa, died Sunday at his home in Boulder. He was 85.
“He was so beloved,” Waldman said. “I can’t tell you how many students over the years that he touched. What a great run of a life.”
A memorial at Naropa, where he had taught as an adjunct professor since 1986, is being planned for later this summer.
Collom, who published 26 books of prose and poetry, was a pioneer in eco-poetry, teaching the first eco-poetics class in the country at Naropa.
Collom’s “Second Nature,” a diverse collection of prose and poetry focusing on nature, was awarded the 2013 Colorado Book Award. He had described the book as his “crowning work.”
Along with the Colorado Book Award, he received two Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, one in 1980 and one in 1990.
“He was a very musical poet, and a poet of the every day,” Waldman said.
He was as well known for teaching as he was as a poet.
In 1974, he began working in Poetry in the Schools programs in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. He also worked as a full-time poet in the public schools of New York City.
More recently, he taught in Boulder Valley schools, including making regular appearances at Boulder’s Casey Middle School for more than 25 years.
His early teaching approaches are presented in his 1985 book “Moving Windows,” while a variety of writing experiments are included in 1994’s “Poetry Everywhere.”
Friend Joe Richey said he changed the way poetry is taught in America, insisting that “we stop making sense and just have fun.”
He didn’t tell students to conform to specific conventions or include “x” number of poetic devices. There were no word lengths. No admonitions about correct spelling and proper grammar.
“He liked to talk about that ‘tee-hee’ moment in a poem when you get to giggle a little bit,” Richey said. “He had this boyish delight with wordplay from a very young age and it carried through from his whole life.”
While Collom was playful, Richey said, he also was a “serious thinker.”
“He was fascinated with contradictions and opposed to binarism,” he said. “He didn’t want yes or no, he wanted yes and no.”
Collom was born in Chicago, moving with his family at 16 to the small Colorado mining town of Fraser. He graduated from high school in a class of four and went to forestry school at what’s now Colorado State University.
He began writing poetry while serving a stint in the U.S. Air Force in Germany and North Africa. He spent the late 1950s and early 1960s writing in and around New York, working in factories to support his family.
Longtime friend Reed Bye, who met Collom in 1969, said Collom “was a very significant hub for advice on post-modern poetry for us young poets and writers” in the 1970s in Boulder.
Bye said Collom was open and curious, was generous with his time and had a “very stable, earthy humor.” An avid birdwatcher from a young age, he loved to hike and was a keen observer, he said.
“He was very tuned into the natural world and how that might work with language,” he said.
Teaching poetry to children “in its wild form, without any boundaries,” was his life’s mission, Bye added.
“It was all what he could inspire from children’s imaginations,” he said.
Collom is survived by his wife Jennifer Heath, his sons Nat, Chris and Franz from his first wife Edeltraud, his daughter Sierra from his second wife Mara, and his grandson Joshua.
Amy Bounds: 303-473-1341, boundsa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/boundsa
