Earlier tonight I attended Woodland Pattern’s first “Poetry in the Park” event of the year at Juneau Park in Milwaukee. It featured four poets from Racine and Milwaukee including my friends Nick Demske & Blue Lotus as well as Gina Cornejo & Kati Katchever (who I’ve had the opportunity to hear before at Linneman’s Poet’s Mondays as well.)

All the sets great! Everyone definitely had their own style, from Nick’s fiery poems to Blue Lotus’s healing words, Gina’s brilliant and touching storytelling to Kati’s folk-blues-inspired songs. Some of the heavier pieces were made that much more haunting by the fog that rolled in off Lake Michigan, just below us, and settled over the park just as the event started.

Beyond the readers, it was really good to see all my friends on the WP staff as well as other friends including Esteban Colon, Bryon Cherry, Mary Skillings, Mario the Poet, Anja Sieger, and others. We shared some stories, talked about the Polish Octave form our mutual friend Nicholas Ravnikar created as well as others (and Christian Bok’s insane but amazing book, “Eunoia.”)

We discussed the making of self-published chapbooks, other upcoming poetry events, and even a bit of Ren Faire and Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote several short poems while listening to the readers as well, and I’ll share some of them at the end of this post.

All in all it was a fun and beautiful evening and a great way to kick off the season of Poetry in the Park. I’m highly looking forward to reading at the next one! On reflection though, the best part wasn’t the great readings, but the community and camaraderie. I really can’t stress this enough because it has become a driving force behind a lot of what I do in the arts these days. The art itself is important, but “the friends you make along the way” are the really important part. Building a scene, sharing artistic experiences together, discussing thoughts/feelings surrounding these things together, sharing a good laugh. When we start taking our art-making too seriously it can get stiff and suffocate.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Fluxus events, “Happenings”, etc I’ve read about from the 1960s. One of the major parts of many of these and other avante-garde arts events at the time was that there seemed to have been less division between the various arts. Musicians like David Tudor would be creating sound while Merce Cunningham and other dancers performed, while Jackson MacLow and other writers shared their work, while painters painted, moving sculptures flew around on cables, etc. They were inter-disciplinary events where related AND unrelated things all became part of one big experience.

I’m encouraged by the direction our local poetry scene is going. There is momentum for collaboration (not that it wasn’t happening before.) My hope is that we can continue to come together to experience each others’ performances while we broaden our scope and start including even more of the other arts as well. (Shout out to Wilhelm Matthies who has been including musicians, poets, visual artists, videographers, etc in monthly events in Racine lately.)

Anyway, community is cool. Keep it up!

---

Woodland Pattern – Poetry in the Park

Whipped wool
Oodles tap pattern
Return
Root waffle planned
Lantern drone
Pollution nectar
Noodle dance
Wild lichen
Wetland siren sapling
Centered on subwoofer

---

The Moisture Infiltrates the Instrument

Receive our ladlefuls,
Handfuls of words
First foghorns catching snow flurries
Lost in the cottonwood
Lost offshore, bleating
Long tones for lovers
Come through me in threes
Stopping for songs
Offshore
Lost and bleating

---

Fogsong

Even without this intense humidity
We’re going to need adjustments
I like to feel
What the earth must feel
I like to take it in that way
Filtering down, down, down
Finding the time
For one more song

---

Isolated Times

Delight mind moving
Through birds in the avenue
Winds string sense
Mincing questioned
Curly across horizons
Spilled for decidedly
Copper kettle blues babies

There is a runestone swap meet
A dry spell in the cornfields
There are dancers in the minefields
There is a dice game in Bryon Cherry’s notebook

Don’t swallow these words if you want to live
All across the neighborhood
People singing from the windows
Swing songs as medicine
For isolated times