45 January 28 - February 10, 2022
FUN
Explore Big Sky
American Life in Poetry BY KWAME DAWES More and more, poets, like everyone else, are confronted with the news and physical evidence of change in our weather patterns and landscapes, and we find ourselves trying to find language for this unsettling sense that the world is changing rapidly. Khadijah Queen, in her poem, “Undoing,” has a haunting sense while driving through a snowstorm, that somehow our machines and our voracious appetite for fuel have something to do with this “undoing” of our world. Like many of us, she is arrested by this knowing. Poetry does not always give us answers, instead, it helps us meditate on the questions, and this, sometimes, is enough.
Undoing BY KHADIJAH QUEEN In winter traffic, fog of midday shoves toward our machines—snow eclipses the mountainscapes I drive toward, keeping time against the urge to quit moving. I refuse to not know how not to, wrestling out loud to music, as hovering me—automatic engine, watching miles of sky on the fall—loves such undoing, secretly, adding fuel to what undoes the ozone, the endless nothing manifested as sinkholes under permafrost. Refusal, indecision—an arctic undoing of us, interrupting cascades— icy existences. I cannot drive through.
Corner Quote
BIG SKY
BEATS
Songs of Resilience BY TUCKER HARRIS
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus
The sixth annual Big Sky Ideas Festival will feature a live performance by musicians Bruce Anfinson and Monique Benabou on Friday, Jan. 28 at The Independent at 6 p.m. The two musicians will also perform at the TEDxBigSky event on Jan. 29 and 30, closing out two nights of moving talks centered around this year’s theme, resilience. Anfinson’s music paints intimate pictures of the Montana way of life; the people, landscapes and history we love so much. Benabou describes her music as transformational, powerful and vulnerable, and a culmination of her own breakthroughs and rock bottoms. Explore Big Sky has put together a playlist featuring both of the artists’ music for you to enjoy before heading over to the Independent on Friday, Jan. 28 or to the TEDx event at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center on Saturday, Jan. 29 and Sunday, Jan. 30 to hear them perform live. 1. “Home is where Montana is” by Bruce Anfinson 2. “Under Pressure” by Monique Benabou 3. "Throwing Horseshoes at the Moon” by Bruce Anfinson 4. “Mr. Know it All – The Voice Performance” by Monique Benabou 5. “Handmade Saddle” by Bruce Anfinson 6. “Just Breathe” by Monique Benabou 7. “Fresh Bread” by Bruce Anfinson 8. “Goin’ nowhere” by Monique Benabou 9. “Ballad of Minnie and Pearl” by Bruce Anfinson 10. “Is That Too Much” by Monique Benabou
