Popination Annotation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: The Trident Café.
The Trident Cafe: a Writer's Manifesto piece of Popination
(Written in 2000; revised in 2006)
(published in 2020; annotations added today [2023])
"Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk." ~Raymond Carver
The first version of this piece was handed in to my main MFA poetry professor and head of department, one Anne Waldman, as a response to an assignment prompt. This was just after I joined that illustrious writing program (I first joined in June of 1999), and sometime within the following few semesters, we were all assigned to write a manifesto of what and how and why we write. At that time, I was still frequenting the Trident Café and Bookstore, for books and coffee and for just hanging out, but especially for writing, as I had been doing since the end of junior high in the ‘80s. It was still my go-to for any journaling or other writing work, and, as it was one of the only places that was friendly to us non-drinking teens, it was the place to be. Penny Lane was too scary, too crunchy and punk. Trident was my safe space and my 3rd place, and I kept it till I moved with my then-husband up to Gunbarrel in 20…er, 5? 6 maybe? Maybe it was 2003, when I quit the gymnastics center to adjunct as my only job for the first time (siiiggghhhhh…).
I revised this piece in 2006, for a class I was teaching at DU, called Writers on Writing. I felt the vibe of making people who were working towards a masters or above in creative writing, to compose a manifesto. So I dug this one up, told them all that I’d done it for my MFA, and from there guided them through their own manifestos with not only assignment requirements, but famous authors’ as well this one, my own, as examples of the genre.
What’s your favorite manifesto? I have a couple: I still have a fondness in my heart for Rilke’s Letter To a Young Poet, and I have mirthful memories of me and Christina discussing Kandinsky’s manifesto (I believe our conclusion was ‘Shut Up and Paint’), and my good friend JQM is still hacking away at his own; each section I’ve read of it is really good food for thought. Fun fact: he’s the first person I met at my MFA program at Naropa—my first grad school buddy, and he remains a friend to this day.*
*we co-host a podcast, because we’re total bros. Here.
Much much (much!) later, I got this manifesto-cum-ode-to-Trident piece published! The Trident has built up a press of their own, and they made, in 2020, a slim and artistic book that documents the 40 years that they have been in existence. It’s a beautiful birthday book of sorts, filled with all kinds of metatexts surrounding the place (like old newspaper reviews, flyers, etc.) and a series of short writings created by people for whom the Trident has been important through the years. Now that I know what a 3rd place is and means, I recognize this place as formative, just as conducive (if not much more) to my growth as a writer than any classroom.
So of course I needed to cover this pinnacle of a place (if not pub) in my Popinations series. But. Why am I annotating it and not revising or updating it or otherwise changing it directly? Well, I thought it would be a good idea to keep the central artifact intact, in this case. So you can see what it looked like back then. And the annotations? Well I’m partially inspired by Wil Wheaton’s recent memoir: Still Just A Geek. I read his old blog way back in the day and also was one of the few (we happy few) who got his book from same, Just a Geek, also back in the day. And so I had already read both artifacts from which he built his new version, and I loved the idea of footnoting the heck out of an old piece of writing, instead of just revising or changing it. Having the original artifact there so you can see what it was, along with the easy-to-read commentary and additions? I love the idea, and that’s what I wanted to do for this ancient manifesto of mine. And so.
What I’ve done is: I’ve used bullet points and wee black squares to denote where I’ve added text, and said text will also be in italics, so as to further separate my current commentary while hopefully not disrupting the flow too badly. Or at least, adding a new flow. That’s my aim.
And before you ask—oh my goodness what a different writer and a different person I am now from back when this artifact was made (and even revised). Wow. I mean, very cool to see this and remember what my life used to look like, to make me what I am today. Whew. What would my Writer’s Manifesto look like today? Hm. Maybe I should make a new one.
The Trident Café here in Boulder, Colorado has a number of spells that hover over it and in its interior air. Situated between a Tibetan gift shop and Jax Fish House, it serves both the best coffee in Boulder and used books and remainders of all kinds.
I think Jax is still there, as is, a couple doors down, the eminent whiskey and barbecue establishment, West End Tavern. Which I should make a point to Popinate to sometime soon—its fare is delicious, both drinks and nibbles, and I’d love an excuse to visit.
I think the Tibetan gift shop is still there, too, but I do remember that there’s a high-end antique jewelry shop and a boujie food hall on that row now that specializes in keto and paleo diet foods, so. I haven’t been that far West on the Pearl Street Mall the past couple times I’ve visited Boulder and so my memory may be out of date. In fact, judging from how quickly Boulder has been changing these days, I probably am.
Walk with me through the bright coolth of a Boulder Spring day (oops, hold your nose: a crew of dreadlocked wookiees (1) are walking by...whew okay that's over)...there's Rhumba, nope can't write anything in there. Why? Well, their rum list is the size of a fancy restaurant's wine list, so we'll wait till later for that.
Jeez, I’m pretty bitter about young wealthy white kids here aren’t I? I don’t feel nearly so grumpy about them anymore, and I am actually known for sometimes burning patchouli incense in my own home, but. Maybe it’s because I’m living far away from the place where I grew up poor and pissed? When I visit now, I’m much more distant from its bothersome bits in the bubble. Maybe it’s the distance of time and place that make me more able to embrace Boulder’s oddities instead of growl at them. Maybe it’s the humorous self-deprecation I’d use as ice breakers often in my Denver classes downtown: “I grew up in Boulder, but I do shave my armpits. And look, not a dreadlock in sight. Also not a trust fund in sight, but…” (pause for chuckles) I have been known to eat granola once in a while, and one time, in college, I owned a pair of Birkenstocks. But I’ve never ever been vegan (no shade to those of you who are, I’m just saying). And any bicycle I’ve ever owned has not, in fact, cost the same as a car. Or a house.”
Ahhh, Rhumba. Man that was a cool place. I’ve told you before, about how much I used to love rum—in my college years, it was mainly rum that I drank, when it wasn't Absolut Kurant. Rhumba was a bit later than those years, but I used to go and taste from their extensive rum list as often as I could manage to scrape up the doubloons to do so. The gimmick with Rhumba is that it was a Jamaican/otherwise Caribbean restaurant as well, and so the food offerings were all in that vein—exotic truly, tasty and unusual in a place where usually the cuisine of choice tends to slant Southwestern or Mexican. Now it’s one of those, called Centro, which is also delicious in all ways. It’s just that Rhumba was so unusual. I imagine the tourists that flock Boulder’s historic mall probably want the classic Colorado green chile thing, and not the Caribbean. But for us locals, it was a welcome refresher.
As we enter the Trident, we should keep our eyes vulture-peeled for an available seat. Notice the wood throughout: wood floors, wood and brick walls, wooden bar, wood-grain tables, dark wood and leather chairs...if there was ever a fire in here (God forbid), ▪️To be fair, there was a fire in there. It was in the form of a wood burning stove, though, and it was lovely and cozy and delightful and when it was lit in the middle of winter, it really completed the vibe of the place. But. Like, a fire-fire, an out of control one, is what I meant here.▪️ you could steep the ashes in water for espresso. Be thinking about what you want to drink as the artistically-dressed young bussers flutter around us. Searted, there are two Naropa students, one Pearl Street Mall employee with a list for her office, and two yuppies (2) in line ahead of us, so we have time to think about our beverage choice. Check out the wall of labeled exotic teas behind the tattooed barista. You bet your orange pekoe he can tell you about every one of them, never mind his apparent youth and bold ink. Go ahead, ask.
Good choice: that tea will literally bloom into little jasmine blossoms in the water as it steeps. I'll order my usual (I often don't even have to order anymore): a Florentine. Poor man's mocha. Strong bitter coffee and hot chocolate. Whole milk. Still can't make 'em like that at home.
Still can’t make it like this at home, today. Must be something about the chocolate they use. Then again, I prefer bitter black coffee these days, over the chocolatey and sweet. Most of the time.
All the best (and published) writing I have ever done has been at the Trident. Not without exception, but pretty much. I have been frequenting this place since teenager-hood with my blank books, and I feel after a good solid hour longhand there I have actually gotten more work done than I could at home with a parrot on my shoulder or at any computer. ▪️ Aw man I haven’t thought about my little parrot Monaco in a long time. His full name was Monaco Jalapeño Snack Cracker, and he was a smart, verbal Quaker parrot who liked to talk about all kinds of things. Though—and this is weird—every so often, I’ll find myself in a realistic dream where he’s hanging around. His cage will be dirty or something and it’ll make me think about it. These days, I’ll often remember in the dream that he’s dead, he died in 2010 and he couldn’t be here, and even more lately I’ll remember consciously enough that I’ll thank him for visiting me in the astral plane. You may have heard about how those advanced parrots will bond quite deeply with their humans? I actually believe his little green spirit is visiting me in my dreams. I mean, I don’t really, but I do. Does that make sense?▪️ I am a big believer in the benefits of caffeine as a ‘happy drug,’ conducive to my writing flow and brain waves. Maybe that's the only magic spell the Trident needs—the coffee seeped into the wood (and bricks) surrounding me. They also have art exhibits on the walls, which is always a good thing, even if the art is not. Writing and art go hand in hand, even in my journals, and it behooves me to have artwork around. ▪️I used to keep longhand journals only, and would make it a point to include visual aspects as well as textual. I think my sketchy skills have fallen by the wayside, because unused—I noticed this when I kept a notebook journal during my seven weeks in Olympia doing Shakespeare last summer. My sketches were there, they just. I dunno, maybe I’m too judgy or maybe I’m overthinking it.▪️ The bustle of people and music in the café doesn't distract me, in fact, if I ever hit a brick wall, I start Found Conversation until it goes away.
Found Conversation is a really fun writing exercise to do when in a public place, especially if you’re working on dialogue. All you do is you write down conversations you hear, word for word. It works much better when you’re writing longhand, though, because that way you have to perforce strain the real convo through your brain and your much slower hand. If you were to take dictation with shorthand, type, or use voice memo recording, you might capture the talk more accurately, but it’s harder to go back and look at it and it doesn’t go into and through your brain in the same way.
What does interrupt me is my own self (just count the number of parentheses in this informal piece of writing and you'll see what I mean). ▪️I discuss this quite a bit in my Ellipsis essay, and an email convo surrounding it made me wryly admit I could do a whole ‘nother essay on the em-dash. I still might. I should. But yeah, parentheses too. And now, annotations! And in my memoir, footnotes. My writing coach was like Omg stop! Interrupting! Yourself! Poor guy is probably losing his mind reading my Substack.▪️ If I decide to write at home, there are always a thousand things to do instead: play with the parrot or cat, grade papers, surf the 'Net, play a computer game, rotate laundry or dishes, watch the Food Network, drink a beer, hang out with my husband, do Tai Chi...not always necessarily bad for me, but certainly bad for my writing.
Did I really do tai chi outside of class (in grad school)? I don’t think so. Maybe I added that in to seem cool, or more serious and virtuous, since I mentioned video games and such. And…did anyone in ‘06 still call it ‘surfing the Net’? Jeez Jenn, get a grip, ya old codger. Though I do still do these: hang out with my partner, rotate laundry or dishes, and listen to podcasts (not TV these days, nor computer games, alas). Food Network, though. Remember Food Network?
Back in the day, I had an acting professor corner me and demand I do a theatrical production he'd been working on called A Room of One's Own, based on the Virginia Woolf piece and a performance by a well-known Dame of the RSC (3). I never ended up doing it, but researched and rehearsed it till it fell through (4). In the piece, Woolf says it's important to work in a room of one's own, precisely for the above reasons. That was the main lesson I got from that research: that you have to make writing the most important thing happening for a certain hour on a certain day, no matter how many checks have bounced or how many people are crying (or dying) in the world. For what work do I really have to do, besides write? ▪️Yeah, but how is this the same as going into a public café? I’ve written before here in popinations and elsewhere about how being in a busy pub is conducive to my work, but here it seems as though I’m talking about a private space, which I had never had at that point in my life. Maybe, since I’d never experienced a Room (truly) of My Own, that 3rd place experience was the closest thing to it? ▪️ Later, a well-known poetry prof (Linda Hogan, in fact) said the same thing: "Turn the phone off," she'd say, "because, you know, it may be somebody handsome calling." (5) No distraction is as important as the writing at hand. Doing it is so much more important than the quality of actual stuff produced.
Example: a poem that came out one day at the Trident was sent out with no revision whatsoever, I barely even remember having written it—that half-asleep state that comes with a caffeine crash—and it was my first published piece.
Okay, I'm not advocating non-revision, that's ridiculous, I'm just saying that there's something about dropping everything and going to the Trident for an hour or two that makes my writing what it is.
Still is. Not Trident, these days, but. Yep.
What is it? Sword-and-sorcery, or just sword, or just sorcery. Or Holmesian mystery. Or all three? ▪️I have long been an avid (if not rabid) fan of Fantasy, some sci-fi, and most Sword & Sorcery through my extensive world as a reader. I did write a lot of it, and tried to get some good complete stuff done as a young woman to send out. I was never successful with that—I’ve always gotten my non-fiction and my poetry published, never my Fantasy. The closest I’ve gotten was a very long and lovely rejection letter from Tor, after I sent my pirate stuff in to their yearly non-solicited novella call. They were great: gave me some good feedback and encouraged me to revise and continue. But that’s as close as I got in that genre.▪️ I have a terrible habit of dipping into the collective unconscious at the wrong time, without banking on it quickly enough. Examples? I wrote about young people going to a wizard school (inspired by LeGuin's Roke) back in the '80s when I was in junior high and then high school with a bad knee. My wizards' school was a gym class substitute (of course, LeGuin and McKinley did it before I was born, but). Now that Harry Potter has a worldwide following, I wonder why I never finished my own tale. I worked closely with Jenny Heath on my sprawling pirate epic: five long stories in a fantasy world resembling our own Golden Age of pirates (mid to late 1700s Europe), researched joyfully and diligently, reworked and reconsidered, and even begun transformation into a comic book script at the advice of an artist friend in the trade. And after a half-chapter was ready for the penciller, what comes out on the market? A comic series called El Cazador. With a spunky lady pirate, and a red-headed adversary/love interest...all beautifully drawn...a bestseller...oh and don't even get me started on the sexy vampires, I've got some sexy vampires (no they don't fucking sparkle. Please).
I have vampires and pirates and wizards (Oh My) and I also have a gnarly thief with a heart of gold. But that was way more directly fanfic, of legendary video game series Thief—I was enamored of the world, and couldn’t quite get it changed enough to make it my own, 50 Shades style. I would still love to compose novelizations of those games, though, if anyone knows how and/or who to talk to to do such a thing.
There is a character from old school Sesame Street named Don Music. He had nerdy glasses and a sloppy mop of grayish hair. He'd always be sitting at his piano, trying to compose nursery rhymes. He would never quite get them right ("Mary had a bicycle...") but he'd keep trying and trying until finally he'd exclaim: "I'll never get it, never, never!!!" And he'd whack his head onto the piano and sob. I seem to have Don Music moments often, when I'm nearly done with a second or third draft of something and am scouting around for potential markets. But oh well, I'll be at the next nursery rhyme in the next episode, without fail…
I find the Old Stories to be the most important--I force them upon any students I happen to have, no matter what the subject. Folks, especially younger folks, don't know the old tales well enough—I mean, put them in a mysterious forest and they wouldn't know to give that old weird beggar their food; or not to eat or drink anything a fairy gives them, or to offer to work to get into the magic palace...things any mortal should know well.
So my writing is recycled archetype? I think I'm okay with that.
My MFA advisor (the late, great Anselm Hollo) once wrote on the second page of one of my manuscripts, that my work was ‘determinedly derivative.’ I know for a fact he never read past page 5 of anything I ever gave him, and had no space or time of day to give for anything not poetry (or literary fiction). Of course, none of my MFA professors did. When I delivered a lecture to the school, entitled ‘Fantasy: the Misunderstood Genre,’ they were all amazed that Fantasy could actually have such high quality writing included in it. I guess, as much as Hollo honored his own Finnish heritage when it came to Old Story, he wasn’t able to recognize that sort of heritage and using reference and tradition in someone else’s writing. Particularly a young woman. But then I’ve talked about the corruption at the root of Naropa before. Speaking of:
Founder and longtime owner Mike (whom I remember well) got permission from Trungpa Rinpoche himself to use this trident to represent Trident the place. Which, whatever issues I have with Trungpa aside, is pretty gosh darn cool. I know exactly where this painting hangs—it’s right above where the newspapers are scattered on the old dresser, above the big round table which is right around the corner from the bathroom. Is it still there? Am I right?
ENDNOTES
(1) Wookiees are rich white young people who sport dreadlocks and a myriad other Hipster inclinations.
(2) Yuppies are hippies who grew up to be high financed businesspeople. ▪️Do we still talk about Yuppies? Or are they just too ubiquitous now, or are, like, billionaires?▪️
(3) one Eileen Atkins.
(4) my writing and my acting have always been trained in tandem, but not necessarily together until recently. My life of education has been tending the earth of two separate trees—now they've grown close enough together as to share vines and branches, if not roots. ▪️My latest revision of this was in 2006, so that means I’d been teaching as an adjunct at the college and university level for 5 years. Ah, you sweet sweet summer child… ▪️
(5) this was uttered during a graduate poetry class, it must have been in 1995? at CU Boulder.
*
I’m gonna add a 6th note to this: the book called Forty Years of Trident Booksellers and Café (2020, Trident Press. ISBN: 978-1-951226-08-4), not only because my original (well, the 2006 revised original) appeared in this book, but it’s got a lot of fascinating lore about the place that I couldn’t begin to compile myself. Newspaper snippets, history, old menus and flyers, and all the writings made by me and others like me, talking about the place and what it means to us. These days, Trident sells wine and beer as well as coffee and tea, but you still can’t find a seat, and its used book half is just the same as it ever was. I didn’t even frequent Trident anymore when I was still living in Boulder, but it will live with love in my heart for fostering my writing from high school through college literati and just post-college. And long it will indeed reign: just the other day, my partner had a business meeting with his colleague who lives in Boulder, and guess where they met? Yep.