liveart(s) artlive(s)

I became one a few years ago--at first with an eye to reentering the academic job market after fifteen years away (I know, how stupid, right?), and then just because I enjoyed it. I go to conferences for fun. Check out various disciplines and organizations. Sometimes I even give papers. Sometimes I blog about going and sometimes I Tweet. Sometimes I post about conferences and events before and after via Facebook. I am shameless, Academy. I respect neither your privacy nor your dignity, nor your compartments, and sometimes, I laugh at you. You are so serious, and you get so angry when someone doesn’t use language the way you define it. But let’s be honest. I envied you too. You have the job I thought I wanted / worked hard to get once upon a time but didn’t, and in my story-telling, you can be more than a little clueless, distant, unkind, arrogant. And yet. You know things. You have interesting ideas. I like to gather these up when you’re not looking and run home with them. I like to take them apart and put them together in unexpected ways, like the little packet of legos I got when I checked into the Digital Pedagogy Lab.

**

Can I tell you a story about legos? Christmas of my oldest son’s kindergarten year. He asked for and got the Red Beard Runner, 691 little sharp pieces of terror on the high seas, and he refused to do anything else that day but make sure the set got built exactly according to its instructions and let me tell you, that took all day… This product-driven quest required his dad and me alternately and sometimes simultaneously, as we searched the box for pieces and helped him understand the instructions. But he was reading them. He was taking them in. He was putting that damned boat together himself with his own five-year-old fingers, and I couldn’t even tell you what our three-year-old daughter did that day. And that was just the beginning of a long and tyrannical relationship with the Lego company, not to mention a family dynamic that has taken more than a little while to set on a better course.

That’s all to say that Legos don’t have happy associations for me, with or without the instructions, even though I’ve got a 30-gallon tub of them stashed in the basement that I can’t bear to get rid of. And though I’m entirely capable of building them and reading the instructions, though I’m the one who made many of the purchases, I don’t have a lot of positive personal memories of exchanges that happened with and through Legos, though I do have positive memories of other toys, building and nonbuilding, that required less script, less technical skill, less propensity to terrorize their users, less possession of my child. I don’t know if that’s more than a little ironic considering how long it took me in my own life to let go of scripts, to value personal interaction, or just symptomatic.

**

I’m not a particularly good communicator. That is, it never came easily. I’m still working on social skills that approach the ones my youngest son achieved naturally by seven or eight. As someone who actively struggles to communicate effectively with others, I value and think a lot about good inter-personal speech and writing and about group bonding and communication too. I know that it is based on knowledge, interest, appreciation,  generosity, compassion. It takes time as well, a lot more time for some of us than others. It takes time to understand interpersonal communication styles with a goal to incorporating everyone in genuine and non-superficial ways, and it‘s not just a matter of making quiet people speak up or quieting those who seem to take up too much conversational space.

I was once in an educators’ workshop in which we spent almost the entire time going around the room telling 1) about ourselves and 2) our theory of liberation pedagogy. Not having thought about that before, I was a bit panicked--new words can be threatening, but of course, in traveling around the circle of teachers & leaders & activists, we each of us discovered our liberation pedagogy--what it meant, that we had it--and built in the process a more collaborative sense of the meaning of the term than if the workshop leader had lectured/explained/given us that  meaning before hand. You may not call that “teaching,” and I suppose it isn’t in the traditional sense of an authority imparting information to a group of captives, but I learned in that circle, and more importantly, perhaps, wanted to act as a result.

**

I am the white mother of two white sons and one of them is a computer programmer so I do take exception to making white men and programmers the enemy. I first realized that easy comments about “white men” being the problem might not be constructive when I looked around my dinner table at home after making one of those comments myself--I told you I was a slow learner when it comes to good communication--and realized that I had hurt my sons’ feelings. If the patriarchy hurts all people, and I believe that it does, my sons are no more to blame for its existence than anyone else.

I also worked for many years in a theatre program that my daughter belonged to with mostly white kids who were, among other things: neurologically atypical, suicidal, OCD, learning disabled, trans and transitioning, physically and cognitively disabled, ESL speakers, autistics and people on the spectrum, homeless, cutters, diagnosed with ADHD and PTSD, sufferers of panic attacks and eating disorders and anxiety, slow processors, abusers of drugs legal & illegal … That list isn’t to put each of those characteristics in parallel in terms of their objective impact, but just to say that a lot of stuff was going on in their lives that the theatre program had to account for all the time. And sometimes we did, and sometimes we helped make someone’s life a little better, and sometimes we failed miserably. And I don’t know which is worse: seeing someone die or worrying that you can’t do anything to stop it or not seeing it coming until it’s too late and worrying that you didn’t do something that might have helped.

Death, at any rate, makes you appreciate life, as Fatma said this past week.

**

Each of my three kids struggled in different ways with school, as did I. I know about learning disability and being non-neurotypical. I know about loneliness and bullying and shunning. I know about mental illness. I know about being an outsider. I know about not being able to fit in despite desperately wanting to. I know about self-harm. I know fear and panic. I know remorse and self-reproach.

I also know about forgiveness and reconciliation. About transformation that can occur through deep listening and coming back to the table. About the power of good thoughts, prayers if you will, and continued concern and hope, even when it would be so much easier to walk away, even when blame, of self and others, is all you have the energy to do. About the power and the difficult work of love & of hanging onto someone by the tips of their soul. About recognizing and working toward wholeness--mental, physical, emotional, spiritual.

I know about these things through lived experience as well as through reading and data, and I know that you do too.

**

Perhaps my continued curiosity about academic questions and methods doesn’t justify my continued presence in academic settings long after leaving the Academy. I haven’t taught a traditional classroom in 20 years now, though I teach occasional workshops for all ages and online and have appeared in classrooms, and I recently returned to community college to study art and design. I see myself as a learner more than a teacher, though I accept the fact that we are all teachers and bear communal responsibility for being good ones. And I’m comfortable, usually, in that role, though I wasn’t always, and I wasn’t this week at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. I don’t blame anyone for my discomfort. It was grounded in my own insecurities about what I know and don’t know and how I learn and when I feel like I don’t belong and how I get over the feeling of unbelonging.

It is entirely possible that I don’t belong here.

**

My personal interest in the digital ranges from multimedia publishing, to the design of online writing & art, to the creation of inclusive digital experiences (think digital book launches and conversations), to programming and web development, to social networks, to online teaching, to building virtual communities that reflect the diversity of actual communities, to digital collaboration, to online activism and engagement, to online employment.

This is a set of activities that can be divided into ones that require relationships and ones that do not or might not. And it’s probably not hard to imagine that those things that I can do alone (like programming and web design and data mining) are more technically challenging but easier to facilitate than activities like collaborating on a Google document with strangers or motivating people to contribute work to a Twitter-based collective poem.

I came into the week at the Digital Pedagogy Lab knowing that the barriers to digital community building were high, but I still had some naive thoughts about the possibilities…. The way that the digital breaks down geographical barriers and allows for previously unimagined connection. The way that the digital breaks down temporal barriers to allow for communication that is instantaneous. I am leaving with less optimism, less naivete, around those possibilities, and that’s a good thing. I leave believing that our digital connections are no more and no less efficacious than the corresponding personal connections they refer to. No more and no less enduring. No more and no less useful in our own lives.

I don’t need 10K Twitter followers to have a meaningful life anymore than I need (or believe I deserve) 10K readers for my writing. Having three or four good readers, even one or two, who care about what I have to say, as I care about what they have to say, enriches and feels like enough for me. Adding numbers of unrelated readers doesn’t add meaning or value to my life, doesn’t make me or my work any more or less significant, doesn’t make me a better or worse writer-artist.

Maybe thinking of the digital as a tool rather than a revolution is not such a bad thing, if it means that I don’t privilege its importance above other tools at my disposal. Like my pen and notebook. Like my glitter and gluesticks.

My body and voice, on the other hand, are mine to deploy online and in person. I use them to the extent and in the ways that I can and with the overall goal of living a meaningful life. Being at Digital Pedagogy Lab last week was meaningful for me. I required it to be. And now I’m rethinking the extent and nature of my personal, occupational, and organizational digital presence. I’m not sure that my meaningful life--or my relationship and responsibility to the world--requires digital presence. I do know that it requires me.

**

I left this week with a question I’d thought about before, but one whose relevance I hadn’t fully located in the digital: how do I know what I don’t know?

But I have other questions too including,

what/who am I responsible for?

what is the relationship between academic publics and public academics and is that best played out online or in person?

to what extent will the academic use of data/words/discursive levels to gatekeep and to alienate audience members continue in an age of the commons, and will that gatekeeping make academic knowledge (and academics) more or less relevant?

how/where/when do we negotiate common meanings for words and concepts if we want to talk across disciplines and occupations as well as across differences of race, class, gender, ability?

what do we ask of language and metaphor, like the lab, for instance? what does it ask of us?

what do we ask of each other?

how do we make a place for ourselves in a community, and what are the responsibilities and risks involved?

how do we make our personal/our lived invisibility visible to each other in ways that are constructive to group interaction and to community building?

if I’m exhausted by something at the end of a day/week, is it something I can reasonably ask myself to do?

who do we want to see us and why?

when communities come together/ when we think we speak the same language/ when we use the same word but it means something different or has different connotations…. how do we know and negotiate meaning? who decides?

what are the most important elements of community building?

how do you know when an event succeeds and what counts as success?

what is the role of struggle/ joy/ pain/ discomfort in learning in general and in your personal learning?

are blame & envy also ways of knowing? can I recognize & use envy to understand something about myself and to work for justice?

for me, being a mother has been an important way of knowing--from unschooling to learning about different personalities and learning styles and needs for fun & risk-taking to understanding the errors I’ve made after the fact--what are your ways of knowing besides being a scholar?

to what extent can both words and numbers be used to shore up our own positions as experts and impede relationships in learning circles?

to what extent are (un)belonging and mistake-making also ways of knowing that we have to be willing to engage?

what are the commonalities of transformative experiences, and can we speak of transformation with respect to the digital or digital communities?

can we use the digital to help people slow down and how? why would that be beneficial/not?

how do we negotiate speed inside digital communities?

who is not at the table? what does it mean to invite people into a space? how do we center and value voices that aren’t heard, aren’t even present?

what does it mean when you walk into a space/event and say to yourself, “I don’t belong here” and how do we recognize/ respond to that feeling in ourselves and in others?

#Toasting the amazing poet-prose (and prose poet) contributors in local ground(s)—midwest poetics: 

Antler Linda Aschbrenner Laurel Bastian C. Mehrl Bennett Kimberly Blaeser Gary Busha Sarah Busse Brenda Cárdenas Ching-In Chen Cathryn Cofell Philip Dacey David Daniel CX Dillhunt Drew Dillhunt Greer DuBois Martín Espada David Graham Adam Halbur Lane Hall Callen Harty Matthea Harvey Judith Harway Karla Huston Meg Kearney John Koethe Michael Kriesel LaMoine MacLaughlin Jeri McCormick Patricia Monaghan Jennifer Morales CJ Muchhala Jeff Poniewaz Doug Reed Harlan Richards Charlie Rossiter Margaret Rozga Shoshauna Shy Sifundo aka Be Manzini Thomas R. Smith Bianca Spriggs Sandy Stark Margaret Swedish  Bruce Taylor Angela Trudell Vasquez Wendy Vardaman Lisa Vihos Moisés Villaviencio Barras Frank X Walker Phyllis Walsh Mary Wehner Greg Weiss Laura C. Wendorff Marilyn Zelke-Windau

What does it mean to make digital space? #digiwrimo http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/ @hybridped http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/author/wendy-vardaman/

Everyone/every organization has a pedagogical practice: What’s your pedagogy of liberation (thanks to Dawn Elise Fisher aka Dr. D.E.F. for this question)? #HipHopEd @Hybridped Because we’re stronger together than separate

Being in a social game/experiment at the Hip Hop Educator’s Institute with Margaret Rozga & Sarah Busse—the three of us randomly stuck together in the back corner of the room, unable to move in the game—no money/no transportation—making art with our time and trying to tell people what we were up to in the #BeautifulBackCornerNeighborhood

Barn raising or Barn razing?

What journals /orgs support “Midwest” arts & the identification/exploration of regitional identities and cultures?

Poetry Mooc ModPo: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry and https://www.facebook.com/groups/modpo/ and @ModPoPenn: Who wants to have a Midwest ModPo Meetup in 2015? Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago/….

What is Editing of Witness?

What is Performance Publishing?

What place would you most like to see/hear/experience a poem that you haven’t?

Back up to running about 10 miles/week now. Going for 15. (This is down from the 20 I did before VW but up from the 0 I’d gotten to before starting physical therapy this summer. Thank you physical therapy.)

Wisconsin. Winter.

VW published some amazing interviews with fantastic poets. A group conversation on blogging. But nothing beats Linda Aschbrenner interviewing herself, “I Ask Myself What It’s All About” http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue111/prose/aschbrenner.html

#Inspiration: The historical record (e.g., Jessica Nelson North, Lorine Niedecker). Projects that aren’t here any more (e.g., Primipara, Wisconsin Poetry Review). Performance projects (e.g., Lamentable Tragedie of Scott Walker by Doug Reed, Making of the Latina Monologues by Angela Trudell Vasquez)

#Inspiration: Sarah Busse’s #sexyvoterhaiku

#Inspiration: The Main Street Issue, “Poems About the Wisconsin Protests,” http://www.versewisconsin.org/mainstreet.html #elevatingthediscourse

“[Midwestern identity & literature] begins with a collective assertion of existence and the right to exist. With the members of a literary community writing themselves rather than being written. Where do we start if we don’t simply want to point backwards to monolithic figures in an idealized [& fictional] rural white farmscape? The vastness of contemporary Midwestern literature is bound up in contemporary Midwest culture and what it means to be Midwestern. It is concerned, as we have been, with the relation of art to daily life. With art in public space. With questions of community and diversity. With identifying and repairing differences that divide us along lines of class, race, age, gender, education, geography. With noticing people who are nearby and making a difference to each other. Sometimes in large ways, sometimes in very small ones. It documents events that happen here. It is playful. It produces creative political actions, as we witnessed during the Wisconsin protests of 2011. It is founded on a long-standing ecopoetry, poetry of place, and environmental awareness that includes many current examples and past luminaries, as well as living indigenous Midwestern cultures that inspire and shape present-day awareness of important issues like mining, water quality, and fracking. It is multicultural. It is urban. It is inclusive at its best, and we have come to think of the particular kind of Midwestern editing we practice as an Editing of Witness. We have also thought of it in terms of maximalism rather than minimalism. Of generosity rather than austerity. Of honesty, though we like our irony and work hard to maintain a sense of humor. (What’s not to laugh in a place where winter lasts nearly half the year?) Of relevance and connection. Of practical. Of multi-faceted. We say yes to experiment and yes to technology, as long as those things aren’t privileged. We say yes to plain speaking and accessible and formal, as long as those things aren’t privileged. We say yes to what is new and what is traditional, separately and in the same poem and poet. We have been about providing space for poetry in VW and in its projects and assert that that act, however small or large, is a kind of activism. We assume that good editing includes finding out what people are already doing and making. That it’s about creating new relationships with a diversity of makers, and that, too, is activism. We invite you to be activists by making more space for poetry in your daily life and in the lives of people and organizations you interact with, however large or small.”—from “Forewords & Backwards: Notes from the Cupcake Circus” (intro to local ground(s)—midwest poetics)

Greatest terror during VW: Chasing down Martín Espada from behind in a crowded room where he was the featured reader to ask him for an interview then HAVING TO TALK ON THE PHONE FOR TWO HOURS all the while knowing that I sounded like an idiot.

#Inspiration: Everything Margaret Rozga who used the term “poetics” in VW 110 to talk about/ bring together public poetry & political poetry, http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue110/prose/rozga.html

#Inspiration: Linda Aschbrenner, Overpass Light Brigade, Solidarity Sing Along, Still Waters Collective, Monsters of Poetry, the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery & Lynda Barry’s presence there as a writer-artist-thinker, the Young Shakespeare Players, Chicago’s performance/theatre scene from Jane Addams’ Hull House forward, Doug Reed’s brilliant Lamentable Tragedie of Scott Walker, http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue108/prose/reed.html,  Burdock Magazine, Writers in Prison http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue103/prose103/bastian.html, First Wave and the Hip Hop Educators’ Institute http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue110/prose/hiphop/intro_note.html, Jane Carman & The Festival of Language, Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, Affrilachian Poets, the Exquisite Uterus Project http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue112/prose/exquisiteUterus.html, Bonk!, Oscar Mireles’ series of books I Didn’t Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin, so many groups/agencies (about 40) that VW/Cowfeather has partnered with and so many others that we haven’t

#Inspiration: my husband (who never complains about the messy house or diy arts) & our 3 creative-funny-intelligent children who grew up in this mess

#Inspiration: My essay “poetical economy/exchange….” and mini-manifesto “14 Theses Advancing the Currency of Meaning, Not Money” http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue109/prose/vardaman.html, began on the bus ride home from the Goodman Community Center the day I heard Mario Garcia Sierra, then director of Centro Hispano, school NEA chair Rocco Landsman on resource inequity among arts organization and the trickle-down granting system that is public arts funding in the US

#Inspiration: Greer DuBois—thinker, collaborator, colleague, writer, performer, daughter. Every single idea I’ve had about arts organization has been made better in conversation with her. Favorite VW memory: working together on a co-written piece, “Our Expanding Dramaverse,” wherein we try to map the totality of the contemporary dramaverse/verse drama, from Shakespeare to Hip Hop theatre & performance poetry

 #Inspiration: Karin Wolf , Fabu & the City of Madison’s Poet Laureate program

#Inspiration: Everything Sarah Busse—extraordinary craftswoman-artist-editor-seeker-spellcaster-collaborator-friend

from local ground(s)—midwest poetics, 10 Ways to Hear Each Other Into Existence (from “(di)Verse Wisconsin—Community & Diversity” http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue113/prose/busse_vardaman.html)

1. Emphasize community and connection 2. Bring people together who might not ever get together otherwise 3. Give up ideas of prestige in favor of creativity 4. Have fun 5. Relinquish power 6. Invite new voices to contribute 7. Create space 8. Allow process to happen 9. Listen 10. Let go

from local ground(s)—midwest poetics, A Few of the Questions We Still Haven’t Answered (from “(di)Verse Wisconsin—Community & Diversity” http://www.versewisconsin.org/Issue113/prose/busse_vardaman.html)

  1. How can we better reach across basic divides (academic writers versus “community” writers; mothers v. non-mothers; various educational levels; gender and family choices; income/wealth disparities; geographical regions; aesthetic differences; etc.) in our daily practice?

2. How do we prove we are “serious” writers? Do we want to do this? What does the word “serious” imply?

3. Who determines which publications have prestige? Who decides what “counts” and what gives them that power?

4. Can we reimagine our work as connecting and interconnecting in webs of network? Looping? Weaving? Bumper cars? Roller derby?

5. How do we live meaningful lives, and how do we empower others, those who will never afford an MFA program, writers in prison, writers at the margins, how do we empower those writers to also write their way into ever deeper meaning?

Most of the crowd seems to be occupying themselves with conversation and/or phones—taking photos, video, texting. My cell is old and not at all intelligent—can do some of these things, but is so cranky about it that it’s not worthwhile. It’s a cloudy early Fall day in Madison. Yesterday was beautiful—sunny & warm. So was the day before and the day before that. But the weather is changing. The skies keep opening and closing, as if a toddler somewhere is playing with a big faucet. Some people have plastic bags for their phones. Some for their heads. The oak tree I press against presses back and keeps me—so far—mostly dry and able to write with pen and paper. And the sun breaks through the clouds occasionally. So far I’ve seen two poets, several gymmates from Supreme, some neighbors, a few faces I recognize but can’t place, and, as always, a bunch of kids, families, parents I know from the Young Shakespeare Players.

  where there’s a line lines will form. Or

  The place is bursting with line. It goes out the County Clerk’s office and around the corner and around another corner. It’s pretty impressive really. There’s a woman on a cell phone behind me yelling about how her car got towed. She just keeps saying to the city official on the other end, I can’t walk two miles.

  Off to Milwaukee tomorrow to the first Midwest Small Press Festival. Then to Chicago Sunday to see the still timely Angels in America (both parts) at The Court, seven hours total. You know the story. A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. Most of the actors play at least two roles, male/ female/ nonbinary. There’s a closeted Mormon law clerk. A right-wing lawyer, Roy Cohn, who participated in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs. Transparent theatricality. A mentally unstable wife. A compassionate drag queen turned compassionate nurse. AIDS early 90s. Like all the best plays it’s about failure and forgiveness, the Rosenberg haunting scene straight out of Richard III. Robie House and the Art Institute are on the agenda Monday, returning Tuesday evening. Which means it might be tricky to get back before the recall polls close, so just in case, I’m voting today.

  maybe not. Maybe bodies pointing the same direction

  Earlier today I emailed the files for Verse Wisconsin’s Fall “It’s Political” issue to the printer after zipping/ changing/ rezipping them several times with last minute layout minutiae for an interview of Frank X Walker, Kentucky poet-activist-publisher (now Poet Laureate) and inventor of the term Affrilachia, which flips Appalachia, reminding people that Affrilachia is and always has been culturally diverse, never racially homogenous, blessed with Affrilachian poets/ writers/ artists like Walker, like Nikky Finney, like August Wilson, one of whose brilliant Century Cycle plays, Jitney, I have just seen in Chicago. It’s a play about a gypsy, or unauthorized, car service, operated by a black man in Pittsburg’s Hill Neighborhood, circa 1970. In a place where people are too poor to own cars, too poor to pay for standard cabs—if they would come when called, too unimportant by city standards to merit public transportation, a dependable, predictably priced car-for-hire is indeed a service. And the phone rings throughout the play, requiring each of its answerers, regardless of mood, availability, and condition, to respond, Car Service. Not always with cheer or alacrity. But regular. Predictable. Steady. From the solid owner of this jitney station, to a good-natured numbers’ runner who appears to take/ make his own calls, to an alcoholic driver who has, in his day, been a fine men’s tailor, to an elderly driver/ checker player who inserts himself into everyone’s business, to a somewhat hotheaded younger man back from Vietnam and trying to buy a house on the GI Bill for his partner and two-year-old, to a Korean War Vet whose story of stacking and clearing bodies off battlefields for nine months is a critical turning point for Youngblood, who realizes finally that a wounded man can heal, that he has, and can give, support. The resolution of the play involves this community embracing and absorbing its most marginalized member when his father cannot. Like all the best plays it’s about failure and forgiveness.

  while waiting for the same something is not poetic. 

  The two people in front of me are students talking about their semester fails. One lives in Madison and goes to school out-of-state. She’s just back. One lives somewhere else, but is registered here. They talk about being anti-Walker, not pro-Barrett. Still, they are here. Spending an hour or more on line on a beautiful first day of June.

  Up ahead of me a ways is an older man and his wife. He’s a retired professor from South Africa. Once he told me a story of how a woman took an interest in him, giving him a typewriter and teaching him to read and write as a teenager, breaking the law to do the right thing during Apartheid.  Eventually the teenager become a poet, made his way to the US, a PhD, citizenship, this voting line.

  Maybe bodies waiting for the same inevitable 

Like me, like the characters on the other end of the unauthorized phone line in Jitney, August Wilson did not drive. I feel a solidarity with other artists and writers who share this rather odd characteristic. It makes me want to read/ watch/ write about their work. Most of the people here on Bascom Hill today have probably arrived either by bus or on foot, given the difficulty of parking at this event. I walked the two miles from my house. The majority are students on campus or nearby, but there are older people, too, and children. Two sit at my feet under the oak tree. One knits, another excellent way to pass the next two hours. Most people are not so lucky to have a place to sit on the crowded mall among 20,000 other bodies, very few lucky enough to lean against a massive oak tree.

  is not poetic either. What is poetic then? Your 

Earlier today I ran into another mom taking the packed bus down here. Covered with Recall Election buttons, she saw me and before even saying hello said, Oh, you’ve got a Barrett button, but I couldn’t get one. They were all gone already. She was with her daughter, just home from college, and spoke of how they’d be out of town for the weekend and would have to drive with particular care to make it back and vote.

  Before arriving, I have an exchange with a friend. She says, I have no confidence in the process. I worry about this too. What she means is that she has no confidence that this recall election will be honestly counted and determined. Walker’s Republicans have raised 30 Million dollars. Thirty times more than the Democrats’ candidate in this historic election. That’s a lot of sign rentals. A lot of polls. A lot of media time. A lot of last-minute spin.

  What we need, we agree, is independent oversight of FitzWalkerstan, a Fifth World country,  as my husband suggests, reminding me that South Africa was at one time on its way to a fair system, too, until Apartheid was institutionalized, setting the society back a hundred years, bringing violence, hardship, international economic sanctions, the long uphill.

  sky/ your birds you look at while trying to distract

  In the last hour things fill up, and we settle in, shoulder to shoulder from the stage to Lincoln at the top of the hill. We came in an hour after security opened. It was about 1/3 full at that point, and it’s unclear when they’ll decide “enough.” People keep wandering this way, thinking that the space where the girls sit, encircled by the tree and their dads, is open. They look. They wander away. Try to figure where to insert themselves. Looking out over the crowd, I see small children sitting on their parents’ shoulders. Mothers & Fathers. I remember coming to the Kerry/ Bruce Springsteen rally in 2004. Our youngest was 8 then—we went with friends, and my husband gave him and his best friend turns on his shoulder. I’m wistful about the fact that he’s not here now, though I invited him. He was a regular at the protests, the Capitol rallies in 2011, using his newly-deep man-voice to lead chants till it grew horse, marching with fellow students to deliver Valentines to Gov. Walker. There were over 100,000 on multiple days during that winter stretch and over 100,000 the day that Kerry & Springsteen were here two elections ago on a long stretch of West Wash. No tickets required. No security scan. No metal detectors. Jim Doyle was governor of Wisconsin, and we didn’t have concealed carry or hall passes at the Capitol either.

  yourself passing time? Your feet, ankle deep in streams

  A friend passes me on her way out. About an hour, she says. Asks how my daughter’s first year at college went, as I do hers. I’ve been reading about the student protests in Montreal. She replies, They weren’t affected much at McGill. She took lots of video out her dorm window. Saw them getting tear-gassed. It’s hard for us here to understand why they’re protesting. They have such good benefits and tuition already. She pauses. But I guess that’s why it’s good. They’re willing to speak up, raise their voices.

  of childhood? A poet friend on medication for reasons he

  The girl at my feet draws, raises the notebook to show to the circle of people around her. There are port-a-potties back at security, but I don’t know how we would get out or back if we needed to go. I had one cup of coffee this morning and a bagel. Used the bathroom in Sterling Hall, my husband’s building. His office is in the newly created Comp Lit-Folklore Dept and sits across the hall from a physics lab called “The Madison Plasma Dynamo Experiment.” Sterling is historic space. It’s where the bombing occurred on campus in 1970, in which a physics professor was killed. The brothers who planned and committed that crime thought they were attacking a war-related lab. The professor who died was working late. Our oldest son started physics grad school this fall. But not at the UW–Madison. He’s back on old territory at UW–Seattle. Where we lived during the 90s. August Wilson lived in Seattle during those years, too. Though I never saw him or the plays, I read about them in the morning paper sometimes when the children were occupied with Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, wishing I had time/ babysitting/ money to go. Read about other local artists, like Chuck Close, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Dale Chihuly. Envied what they made, their art-focused lives. I would look up from the table, still covered with breakfast plates, crumbs, peanut butter smears. At the floor sticky with spilled apple juice and smashed raisins. At the spit-and-banana-covered bouncy seat of my baby and the glue/ glitter/ paper slivered desk where my daughter at three years old loved to work, collaging and assembling what she called projects. Everyone but me, it seems, is making art.

  Can’t you just be happy? my over-worked, tenure-seeking husband sighed. We’ll look back on this time and realize it was some of the best years we spent.

  does not disclose fights for every line now, he says.

  I uncap my special election pen when I get my ballot, spend as long as I can to draw a heavy black line from arrow point to shaft, drawing out the moment. Go back and forth two times, three times. First for governor. Then Lt. Governor. Everyone in line has been talking about Walker for the hour. About voting. When we get to the actual office it says, No Political Discussion on the door. I ask Wanda, who is witnessing our signatures on the heavy, sealed envelopes in which we stuff our pre-creased ballots if they’ve been this busy all day. Wanda, who is separating I Voted Today stickers one from another, says she’s from the 3rd floor and came down this afternoon to help keep things moving.

  This line opened on Monday, Memorial Day and closes

  On my left it’s gloomy dark, to my right the sun tries to break through fast-moving clouds, though the bright stage lights on booms are even brighter. The whole time we stood in line, volunteers young and old passed alongside us, chanting, Have you registered? Have you moved this semester? Since you last registered? Have you registered? Have you registered?

  Have you registered? isthe refrain of the day, like Car Service in Jitney. I feel a stab of guilt. I have not volunteered this fall for this activity, though I’d promised myself I would. Instead, I’ve been working on the fall issue of political poems and preparing to leave my part-time, mostly volunteer job at the theater, segmenting the work I do there into yet smaller  more manageable (I hope) volunteer-sized bits, finding people to take on tasks, showing them what to do. I train one woman who is between college and grad school to do registration and schedule performances. Another under-employed mom to find production coordinators and train them. I hope she’ll look for people to shovel the sidewalks if it snows, or maybe people will self-organize. An alum parent says she will help enter data. A dad plans to create online self-registration. A high school actor takes over scheduling photos. It’s an experiment in self-organizing crowd behavior and group creativity. Will it work? I don’t know. Probably not as planned. Probably enough. Maybe less will get done. Maybe by someone who hasn’t helped before.

  tonight at seven. After that you will have to vote at your

  There’s an alder making the rounds of the long line. Another woman comes and says at the water fountain, It’s an hour and five minutes from right here. The alder says, I hope you’re excited to vote. I’m here to get you if you’re a new voter. Any new voters? A tall young man, shorts and cornrows, accompanied by his mom, says, I’m a new voter. And she nods her head up and down and gives the thumbs up sign to us in the line and gifts us with a beautiful smile. I smile, nod back. She announces, New voter. Um hmmm. And you know his mama brought him here. But she’s not making him vote. He’s glad to stand in line, as are, I believe, the rest of us. And when we pass the elevator hall and see the line on the other side of the building, there are people in that newly revealed segment that my part of the line knows. I see the mother of another of my daughter’s middle-school friends. A student in front of me waves at a woman across the way.

  polling place. Pole to pole we balance. We teeter.

  Kids wave at a helicopter circling the hill. Preliminary speeches end and the music comes back on. We wait some more. A two-year-old in front of me does the toddler dance between her dad, her mom, a friend of theirs. There is always someone I know standing next to me in a crowd in Madison. Today it’s a theater parent and a little further away, an actor. The woman who sings the National Anthem is a neighbor. The mayor goes to my gym. I’ve met Tammy Baldwin on several occasions—at the theater where I gave her a tour and a Shakespeare T-shirt, at Brocach on my birthday, at an anti-Walker rally on a freezing February afternoon. One of the things I’ve always liked about the theater is the number of people who cross my path outside of it during a year or two everywhere I go in Madison, a community within a community.

  A video on Facebook shows an iceberg calving. That

  Walking around the Square, back towards State Street and home, I keep seeing people I know. Madison. Two-hundred-thousand bodies and you can’t go anywhere without bumping into someone. But today it’s even more so. From the coffee shop on Monroe St. to the gym. To the bus ride downtown to the County Municipal building. And now I cross the street and there is an actor from the theater. She is developmentally disabled and has a great sense of humor, as I discovered working with her last year. I stop to say hello. Another block. There is someone from the parish. He sits on a curb resting and waves when he sees me. His wife waves too. They have nine mostly grown children. Three of them have a serious genetic disease. They moved here a few years ago to be near Children’s Hospital. The dad commutes from here to his job in Janesville. When I last heard, their house their was still For Sale. But they wave. They smile. I look down at my sticker. I raise my arm and wave back. I smile. It’s all I can do.

  newborn ice cannot survive alone.

  We’re all just standing here shoulder to shoulder politely waiting for the President. We’ve been standing and waiting for five hours now. I worry about him. He looks so tired. Older, grayer. A little frazzled. I wonder how, in a climate of so much hate, they keep him safe. How does he go anywhere? What’s it like trying to be a dad at the same time? What’s it like using up your one & only chance to parent your kids like this?

  When I leave the County Building, walking down the two flights of stairs to the street, a woman with a cane and a limp approaches. How bad is it? I reply, About an hour. She nods. If I thought it might deter her, I am wrong. Not bad at all. I watch a while, while she takes each step—foot/ cane/ foot, foot/ cane, foot/ cane, foot.

  **

  Waving a Palm

            for a young voter 

She waits in line 5 ½ hours to see the President rally a cheering, cell-phone clicking crowd of seventeen-thousand at the UW-Madison on a sunny fall afternoon turned wet and gray, says she wouldn’t remember at forty that accounting class she missed, anyway, will always remember being crammed into Library Mall, one of the lucky,

another 10,000 turned away, then tells the reporter: No, it’s too much trouble to vote. Dear Miss Lawless (her real name), Before it’s too late, stopand reconsider: so little that’s important will ever be announced with palms & trumpets.

  Ode to Students

February 2011

These remarks focus on how performance poetry—performing poetry—has informed, increasingly, Verse Wisconsin, its projects, and our vision of publication—or more aptly, making poetry public, as one means toward responsive, community-building poetic practice & possibility.

  My interest in this problem predates February, 2011, and the political protests in Wisconsin, but the protests increased the pace and informed our methodology at VW with respect to performance and making poetry public,  as we decided early on, rather impulsively, that we would collect poems about them. Which is how Verse Wisconsin came to publish, beginning February 18th,  a spontaneously conceived and unfolding “Poems About the Protests” issue simultaneously as “notes” on Facebook and as a special online “Main Street Issue.”

  Although it may not have traveled far outside the borders of Wisconsin or even reached many of those following the protests in-state, the call put us and the poets we knew in touch with a larger community of arts activists, leading to poem displays at two protest arts shows in Madison (2012) and in Chicago (2013). The immediacy of the situation provided a context for individual poems, as well as the Main Street Issue. If social media creates certain threats with respect to “real” personal relationships and community, we learned that it also creates opportunities: the potential to engage quickly and spontaneously with a wider geographical audience of poets and thinkers and to learn from them; the possibility to participate in transformational interactions online as well as in person, as happened, we believe, with the Main Street work. I would point to this issue as the beginning of what we came to think of as digital place-making.

Watch a video of the protest poem archive.

We closed out the Main Street Issue six months later because the spontaneous, creative feeling of the poetry had dissipated. Had subsided soon after March and become, in the case of better work, more deliberate, more crafted, more reflective in that Wordsworthian way we’re so often advised, as poets, to adhere to at the risk of, what? Foolishness? Cliché? Ordinary thoughts/ thinking/ words/ imagery/ metaphor? Yes. Yes. And yes. And yet. For a very brief period of time, about a month, people, poets, just allowed themselves to write what they felt without too much revision, without over-thinking, certainly. And somehow, the urgency and the improvisational nature of the writing as call-and-response—to the situation, to neighbors, to other poems—worked. It meant something to those who shared their poems, and to us, and to readers who popped in for just the span of that issue, and then it didn’t any more. So we stopped collecting work for the Issue, which had been open to all & on all sides of the issues, but continued to make other calls for performance and political poetry; be open to political poetry in general; and most importantly look for new ways to share poetry publicly and to expand our definitions of poetry, political poetry and publishing, as well as opportunities to discuss the role of public poems and poetry in civic spaces with all kinds of people. The call itself was a response to our interest in bringing poems into the public square, testifying to the fact that poetry is a way of knowing, like numbers, like facts, like photographs and video.

  A small circle of poets working together allows for the possibility of spontaneity in ways that institutions, by nature, do not. Of needs assessment that takes hours or days, not months… Of reacting to circumstance. In theater and performance, improv and other kinds of games teach trust and deep listening. Teach focus on the present moment. Teach physical awareness and awareness of breath. Teach, in the case of Boals’s Theatre of the Oppressed, active participation. Though written poetry prioritizes word craft, excellence of language, and revision that unfolds over a long time in order to attain it, so-called page poets and poetry can learn much from performance poets and theatre (and vice-versa), including the fact that poetry itself can sometimes rightly be improvisational in public circumstances: the poem as game/as collaboration/as therapy/ as self-exploration/as ethnographic expression has a place. Think of hip hop & the cypher: a circle of poets whose members contribute beats, or rhymes, starting and stopping in response to each other, picking up significant words and phrases to create links across the circle, taking turns for each performer.

  The activist-performance underpinnings of our work has also been inspired by values and goals emerging from hip hop pedagogy grounded in social justice and critical pedagogy (in particular the research of Maisha Fisher-Winn, Christopher Emdin, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Mark Gonzales). These values include

equity and access to artistic and all social space;

democratically structured performance & learning circles that also encourage excellence;

the importance of self-knowledge and personal relationships;

communities that promote the sharing and exchange of voices and stories;

inter-generational inquiry;

experiential and local knowledge;

lifelong engagement in and expression of learning through performance arts;

a host of values and practices often dismissed or even scorned in academic culture—spirituality, ritual, revelation, tradition, transformation and healing (personal, communal, cultural);

active citizens engaged in creating communities that meet basic needs, including living a meaningful life.

  We’ve come to know what hip hop knew at the beginning (early 1970s) and what Paolo Freire and Augusto Boal were putting into words about the same time: many spaces act as informal and ephemeral classrooms and as stages in daily life. Each of us can take on the roles of teacher/ performer/ producer/ audience member at different and sometimes surprising moments. The speed with which we respond—the flexibility—allows us to make the most of the moment in ways that traditional publishing (and traditional academic departments) often deems less important, less valuable, less artistic.

  Even before the Protests, but increasingly afterward, we created and became involved increasingly in efforts to publish in unexpected places and spaces, in addition to magazines and books: a gumball vending machine, city buses, bicycles, shoes, postcards, roadside signs, cheap & colorful broadsides, a poetry Calendar, at Madison’s City Council meetings; in art shows; juxtaposed with composting demonstrations and soil science as a poetry (de)compos(t)ing station.

  Around the edges of VW as a magazine, we held readings, panels, presentations, conversations, and other events, which invited people to engage with us and with poetry and large life questions involving poetry. These events in turn drove our thinking and the content of the issues we published, evolving from marginal to central features of our process and product. Along the way, we came to believe in the importance of face-to-face conversations, with and through poems, as a means to bring people together, discovering new ideas and questions, while building relationships and promoting what we call “public poetry,” that is, poetry whose purpose isn’t longevity or individual “publication” as commonly understood in books, magazines, or even online, but made public: shared, through a variety of methods, with and by a wider public and for publicly meaningful reasons (which is not synonymous with “accessible” content).

  Along the way we also began to wonder about what other kinds of publication could come from improvisational writing, or writing in response to circumstances. About ways that improv and performance poetry might guide written publishing as well as performance. About how publishing might unfold in less scripted ways, either as a “live” poetry magazine, or as writing that bypassed traditional editors altogether. As poetry write-ins for instance; or the open outdoor classroom; as hacking; as disruptive/interruptive performance.

  What else could the journal be?

a poetry show.

a poetry mural.

a poetry supper club.

a poetry couch.

a play/performance of poems.

an exhibit.

a one-time event.

a game.

a souvenir or result of an event.

a community center gallery.

a hashtag.

a political action.

  The last online issue of VW in April, 2014—Midwest Remix—is deliberately an issue of witness and Maximalist aesthetics. It employs lessons learned from hip hop pedagogy in its editorial concept, particularly the notions of cypher, crew, collaboratively generated content, the importance of the local and of local counter-narrative, conversation that occurs across divides of race, age, gender, and aesthetic, art that incorporates civic action. This issue draws on a number of Wisconsin’s performance poetry communities as we have witnessed them, from activists and publishers of ephemera to multicultural communities, spoken word, hip hop, & reading series, inviting many guest curators to provide their own content for the issue. Also included is documentation of collaborative, conversation-based cross-genre projects built in partnership with civic groups: a performance of poetry at an art museum’s temporary exhibit; a traveling show of photos, spoken word, poetry and audio readings focused on water resources in Madison & Dane County, including events that bring together artists, poets, scientists, activists, and policy makers; the “(de)compos(t)ing station” (mentioned above), developed for Wormfarm Institute’s “Land, Food, and Transformation Decomposium.”

  Digital publishing means work can be created with speed and ease: shared through, and also as, websites, blogs, Facebook pages & notes, Tweets and images uploaded to Twitter, video, Pinterest pins, etc., all at no, or very little, expense. And this technology doesn’t just mean that you can easily (and quickly) create a traditional journal or website-based product, social media product, or e-book. What it means is that anything—any object, any event—can be a journal, if by journal we mean a repository of written and/ or spoken text, and that any DIY object that you (alone or with others) are capable of making and imagining can be digitally augmented through, e.g., QR codes, apps & hashtags, to take an audience to content that is both curated and self-organized: text, video, audio, images, blogs, we sites, social media pages, all of the above.

  We're exploring more hybrid/collaborative possibilities with our most recent project, a newly-published anthology of poems, Echolocations, Poets Map Madison, whose experimental November launch and ongoing experiments in digital place-making activities are also documented in the April issue of VW and on the Cowfeather Press website. The launch included simultaneous reading, improvisational, and activity corners, as well as conversation; an expandable set of digital resources that can continue to unfold; a hashtag, #WriteYourMadison, to create and archive open and self-organizing content; and flexible, expanding partnerships with other arts, community, and government organizations, including Madison Metro Bus, a local college, the city’s convention center, and individual artists, one of whom created a “slow-art” project with seven of the poems from the book: his work is featured as art for the last VW issue.

  It’s not a coincidence that the book’s title, Echolocations, Poets Map Madison alludes to both geography/mapping and to “eco”: the kind of activism we have come to recognize as most valuable to us is one in which we witness and share what happens around us, make space for others to do the same, and in the process, learn about and value each other and the stories we each have to share, all for the purpose of creating sustainable, meaningful, joyful lives.

  Over the past five years, we’ve engaged in joint endeavors with over thirty organizations and community partners, small and large (including Wormfarm Institute, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI), Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, Forward Theater, Writers in Prison, the Wisconsin Humanities Council and Book Festival, the Dane Co. Water Commission, Metro Bus, Madison Library, Madison’s Common Council, as well as literacy groups, retail spaces and others…). We have done what institutions call “outreach” to “community” organizations and the “public” and we have done what we call inreach—reaching in to institutions, and I can tell you, the latter is a lot harder. As we discovered the centrality of (often spontaneous) collaboration to our process, we realized that, at its most interesting, the role of editor allows us to be—rather than gate keepers or canon makers—event planners and civic actor-producers. Embracing and engaging with transience, rather than resisting it, allows us to do new and original work, to ask better questions, to create new alliances and new pathways for information. Rather than worrying about and trying to create and maintain a publishing institution—offices, staff, equipment, infrastructure, we have emphasized process, relationships, communication and transformation.

  The path we have taken as editors has led us from a starting place of balancing the promotion of “excellence” and the nurturing of excellence, to a different model: one in which the editor/publisher helps to convene and also participates in democratically-structured performance circles with the capacity to transform both our practice of poetry as well as how we think of ourselves as artists and people; one in which each person is a member-contributor who plays different roles at different times: artist-writer, producer-editor, audience member-critic. One in which the love of poetry—the fun of poetry—is inseparable from writing, performing, editing, producing, reading, critiquing and listening, and all of these acts are more enjoyable approached holistically, organically, in a meaningful context for real reasons, with friends and colleagues. One in which poetic engagement and performance helps connect us to ourselves and to other people, discover a sense of purpose, and see ourselves as active participants in society. One in which we share the resources available to us, value and find out what happens near us, and bring that knowledge to those around us. And artistic excellence? That, we believe, will come out of creative communities that are accessible and collaborative. And the strength and existence of those communities, in case you are interested, are the only way to survive the zombie apocalypse.

 contact: [email protected], @wendylvardaman

Some online resources

Info about First Wave and the  Hip Hop Educators’ Summer Institute is/will be at  http://omai.wisc.edu/, Twitter: @omaifirstwave.

Info about Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed and its summer conference is at http://ptoweb.org/, Twitter @PTOtweets.

Participate in weekly Hip Hop Educators’ Conversation, Tuesday, 9-10 p.m. EST, #HipHopEd.

Hybrid Pedagogy, A Digital Journal of Learning, Teaching and Technology (combining Critical Pedagogy with digital pedagogy) http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/, Twitter @HybridPed

  Some related essays by the author online

“Living Arts, Some Notes from the Solidarity Sing Along” in HEArt, Human Equity Through Art, Oct. 23, 2013 (http://heartjournalonline.com/vardaman)

“(e)Books Like Parchment, How Digital Publishing Changes Everything and Nothing, Nothing At All, for Poets, Part 1,” LiveArt(s) / ArtLive(s), Oct. 24, 2013 (http://wvardaman.tumblr.com/)

“swaggacity in the heart land, or the hart that crosses a city street: notes from “Hip Hop in the Heartland,” in Notes, Poems & Reflections from Hip Hop in the Heartland: 7th Annual Educator and Community Leader Training Institute—UW-Madison, special section in Verse Wisconsin 110, October, 2012 (http://versewisconsin.org/issue110.html) 

  More online essays & projects that explore Verse Wisconsin's values & aesthetics

Wendy Vardaman and Sarah Busse, “(di)Verse Wisconsin: Community & Diversity,” http://versewisconsin.org/Issue113/prose/busse_vardaman.html

Sarah Busse & Wendy Vardaman, “EveryMom: Or How—and Why—to Support Wisconsin Writers”, http://versewisconsin.org/Issue111/prose/vardaman_busse.html

Wendy Vardaman “poetical economy/exchange: kitchens, coffee shops, cluttered tables, communities”, http://versewisconsin.org/Issue109/prose/vardaman.html

Poetry at Madison’s Common Council, http://www.cityofmadison.com/MAC/poetryCC.cfm

#WriteYourMadison, https://twitter.com/search?q=%23writeyourmadison&src=typd

(#WriteYourMadison is a project of Madison’s Poets Laureate, as well as a Twitter hashtag to organize & support poetry links and discussion about poetry and community.)

  Some questions about the live poetry journal

1. Here are some examples of innovative Midwestern performance-poetry: UW-Madison Hip hop Educators’ Summer institute and First Wave/ Birthplace of Improv (Chicago)/ Slam—Green Mill, Chicago / Louder than a Bomb, Young Chicago Authors, Still Waters Collective (Milwaukee), High School for the Recording Arts (Minneapolis)/ The Encyclopedia Show (Chicago)/Festival of Language Xperimental readings/ Overpass Light Brigade/ the Q Brothers-Chicago Shakespeare Theatre partnership/ Potency of Poetry (American Players Theater)/ Young Shakespeare Players (Madison)/  Jazz Institute (Chicago)/ Midwestern devised poetry/theatre projects: Mary Swander’s Farmscape (Iowa); “May 4thVoices” (Ohio); Latina Monologues (Milwaukee)/ Mad Theory, A Performance Philosophy Symposium (Madison)

What are others?

2. What experiences of a “live poetry journal” have you had?

3. What are the most important qualities of a live poetry journal? e.g., flexibility, responsiveness, community building, open access, experiential, interactive…

4. What it would mean to transform the written journal into a live magazine? The conference? Why would we want to do that/ why not?

5. What are the important elements of the written journal to preserve? 

6. What does poetry and performance poetry know that other types of inquiry might not?

7. To what extent & under what circumstances can visual art/visual poetry be performative? 

8. How do your departments/colleges/universities engage the “public”? Examples/ limits/ problems/ successes? How does the public engage you and what are the paths for allowing that to happen? How might the live poetry journal as a format encourage dialog and collaboration between institutions and organizations, large and small?

  10 Ways to Hear Each Other Into Existence

1. Emphasize community and connection

2. Bring people together who might not ever get together otherwise

3. Give up ideas of prestige in favor of creativity

4. Have fun

5. Relinquish power

6. Invite new voices to contribute

7. Create space

8. Allow process to happen

9. Listen

10.Let it go

  A Few of the Questions We Still Haven’t Answered

1. How can we better reach across basic divides (academic writers v/ “community” writers; mothers v. non-mothers; educational levels; gender and family choices; income/wealth disparities; geographical regions; aesthetic differences; etc) in our daily practice?

2. How do we prove we are “serious” writers? Do we want to do this? What does the word “serious” imply?

3. Who determines which publications have prestige? Who decides what “counts” and what gives them that power?

4. Can we re-imagine our work as connecting and interconnecting in webs of network? Looping? Weaving? Bumper cars? Roller derby?

  These remarks focus on the first of these concerns: how performance poetry—performing poetry—has informed, increasingly, VW’s vision of publication—or more apt, making poetry public, as one example of responsive, community-building practice & possibility. That vision has three important influences that happened (not surprisingly) around the same time.

  How many of you regularly attend theatrical performances? Poetry readings? Slams? Open Mics? Art shows? Academic lectures? Lectures in other disciplines? Neighborhood Festivals? Festivals or events in neighborhoods other than your own?

The first occurred at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, February 3-6, 2011, specifically a panel on “Verse Drama,” which inspired an essay with co-author Greer DuBois. Although VW was already planning a Verse Drama issue, the panel, with its somewhat rigid definitions derived from past form, got us thinking about what contemporary verse drama would, or did, look like. We left with many unanswered questions including: Is this really what contemporary poetry drama looks like? Do we recognize and acknowledge the verse drama that is happening already, in other places and spaces, in other forms, and by other names?

  The 2012 essay that we wrote for VW, “Our Expanding Dramaverse,”  hasn’t exactly revolutionized anyone’s thinking, though it may have influenced a few friends and colleagues. Here’s our concluding vision of contemporary verse drama:

What’s in a name? Poetry drama, verse play, dramatic poetry, closet drama, cheoreopoem, Spoken Word, Hip Hop Theater, Poets/Poetry Theater, dramatic monologue…Can’t we give the whole amazing range of possibilities, an umbrella term, with the knowledge that what [both] verse and drama means has changed since 1600, and will continue to change, though what was wonderful then, poetically and dramatically, is still available? Let the practice of 21st century verse drama be about appreciating different forms of each and different aesthetics; about learning/discerning what poetry and drama can still offer each other, as well as their audience; about transcending false divides between high and low, page and stage; elite and folk, us and them; about bringing what was once whole together again; about remembering that poetry, like the world, isn’t flat, and that the dramaverse, if not infinite, is at least bigger than we thought it was.

This issue, incidentally, opened VW up to submissions of verse drama and performance poetry on a regular basis.

  A second, work- and life-changing  event happened less than two weeks later with the Wisconsin protests, beginning February 11th. A few days later, as the protests quickly became enormous, we wondered if we ought to issue some sort of formal statement about them, and decided, rather impulsively, that perhaps we could collect poems. Which is how Verse Wisconsin came to publish, beginning February 18th,  a spontaneously conceived and unfolding “Poems About the Protests” issue simultaneously as “notes” on Facebook and as a special online “Main Street Issue”.  Although it may not have traveled far outside the borders of Wisconsin or even reached those following the protests in-state, the call put us in touch with a larger community of arts activists, leading to poem displays at two protest arts shows in Madison (2012) and in Chicago (2013). The immediacy of the situation created a context for individual poems as well as the Issue they were part of. If social media creates certain threats with respect to “real” personal relationships and community, we learned that it also creates opportunities: the potential to engage quickly and spontaneously with a wider geographical audience of poets and thinkers and to learn from them; the possibility to participate in transformational interactions online as well as in person, as happened, we believe, with the Main Street work.

    How many of you are from Wisconsin? The Midwest? Know about the pre-Occupy 2011 Protests? Participated in a 2011 protest-related event?

    World Watching, by Matthew Stolte, Madison, WI, Main Street Issue

  Dancing with Liberty

Madison, Wisconsin, February 19, 2011

  My friend called to say, “I’m waiting at the top of State,” but I was across

  the square, so I kept walking with the crowd past the media stands where a few angry

  men screamed through bullhorns while we answered the call: Show me what

  Democracy looks like, singing back over and over, This is what Democracy

  looks like, the marchers slowing to let parents with strollers cross to the Capitol,

  past the costumed onlookers, past the sax player giving us “Solidarity Forever,”

  past the Harley-jacketed family, past “Queers from Chicago” with raised fists,

  Show me what Democracy looks like— This is what Democracy looks like—

  but at the top of State, amid thousands of marchers, my friend and I could not

  find each other, so I called and told her, “Look for the man dressed as Liberty,”

  and cut through the crowd to stand beside a young black man in green silk

  and a plastic-foam Lady Liberty crown— Show me what Democracy looks like—

  This is what Democracy looks like— and he told me he was from Milwaukee,

  and that his mother was a teacher, and I told him I was from Alaska

  and my father was in the service, and all the while music was pounding

  out from the Capital steps, and after a few minutes we were dancing to

  Michael Jackson, swaying and pumping our arms, Show me what Democracy

  looks like—This is what Democracy looks like—and somehow, my friend

  never did find me, and none of us who are hoping for justice know

  whether we will find it, now or soon or never, but what the heck, my friends,

  isn’t this what Democracy looks like: each of us, all of us, dancing with Liberty?

  —Patricia Monaghan in Main Street Issue, Verse Wisconsin, and Echolocations, Poets Map Madison, Cowfeather Press 2013

  We closed out the Main Street Issue six months later because the spontaneous, creative feeling of the poetry had dissipated. Had subsided soon after March and become, in the case of better work, more deliberate, more crafted, more reflective in that Wordsworthian way we’re so often advised, as poets, to adhere to at the risk of, what? Foolishness? Cliché? Ordinary thoughts/ thinking/ words/ imagery/ metaphor? Yes. Yes. And yes. And yet. For a very brief period of time, about a month, people, poets, just allowed themselves to write what they felt without too much revision, without over-thinking, certainly. And somehow, the urgency and the improvisational nature of the writing as call-and-response—to the situation, to neighbors, to other poems—worked. It meant something to those who shared their poems, and to us, and to readers who popped in for just the span of that issue, and then it didn’t any more. So we stopped collecting work for the Issue, which had been open to all, but continued to issue other calls for performance and political poetry, be open to political poetry in general, and look for other ways to share poetry publicly, as well as to discuss the role of public poems and poetry in civic spaces with all kinds of people. The call itself had been a response to our interest in bringing poems into the public square, testifying to the fact that poetry is a way of knowing, like numbers, like facts, like photographs and video.

  A small circle of poets working together allows for the possibility of spontaneity in ways that institutions are, by nature, do not. Of needs assessment that takes hours or days, not months... Of reacting to circumstance. In theater and performance, improv and other kinds of games teach trust and deep listening. Teach focus on the present moment. Teach physical awareness and awareness of breath. Teach, in the case of Boals’s Theatre of the Oppressed, active participation. Though written poetry prioritizes word craft, excellence of language, and revision that unfolds over a long time in order to attain it, page poets and poetry can learn much from performance poets and theatre (and vice-versa), including the fact that poetry itself can sometimes be improvisational in public circumstances: the poem as game/as collaboration/as therapy/ as self-exploration/as ethnographic expression; or in hip hop, as with cypher, a circle of poets whose members contribute beats, or rhymes, starting and stopping in response to each other, picking up significant words and phrases to create links across the circle, taking turns for each performer.

  Anybody cypher regularly? Ever?

Encountering cypher and hip hop pedagogy brings me to a third significant moment: a lecture I went to a few days after the death of Trayvon Martin by Gloria Ladson-Billings, who speaks critical pedagogy and educational anthropology with a Philadelphia accent. She played a new release by the social justice emcee Jasiri X about Trayvon. She performed a poem herself, as did a student from the First Wave hip hop learning arts community at the UW-Madison. Newly written poetry performed and embedded in an academic lecture? It was surprising and transformative.

  Since then, I’ve written about the Hip Hop Educators’ Summer Institute  (co-sponsored by the UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) and Urban Word in NYC) and attended it twice; I have cyphered ineptly; I have developed a tag; as VW, I’ve collaborated with fellow-attendees on a feature about the Institute (http://versewisconsin.org/Issue110.html); and collaborated with First Wave on a public “Poetry and Performance” event bringing together student performance poets with university- and community-based poets responding to their work and discussing it at the Wisconsin Book Festival the last two years.

Hip Hop in the Heartland Educators' Institute, UW-Madison, 2012 

  Hip hop pedagogy at the summer institute is “not simply about using hip hop texts in classrooms. It’s about learning from the culture of hip hop in order to teach/ to work more effectively and honestly with young people, as well as to create more just and effective organizations. It’s about radically transforming ourselves and our society through art, inclusiveness, conversation, racial literacy, and critical thinking around these broad issues. It’s about telling and hearing each others’ stories. It’s about investigating and unpacking values associated with certain kinds of aesthetics and language.” (http://versewisconsin.org/Issue110/prose/hiphop/intro_note.html) I’ve had the privilege to learn from teachers, community members, and a variety of performance poets, academics, artists, non profit leaders, and educators, all of whom are changing their fields through performance poetry and through a pedagogy that emerges from 40 years of hip hop culture, including Christopher Emdin, Maisha Fisher Winn, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Sam Seidel, Adam Faulkner, David Kirkland, Mark Gonzales, Baba Israel, Quarysh Ali-Lansana, Mahogany Brown, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, and Michael Cirelli,. One of the best places to begin learning more is through weekly Twitter conversation, 9-10 p.m. EST, that occur using the hashtag #HipHopEd.

  Values and goals emerging from hip hop pedagogy, grounded in social justice, include equity and access to artistic (and of course all social) space; democratically structured performance & learning circles that also encourage excellence; the importance of self-knowledge and personal relationships; communities that promote the sharing and exchange of voices and stories; inter-generational inquiry; experiential and local knowledge; lifelong engagement in and expression of learning through performance arts; and a host of things often dismissed or scorned in academic culture—spirituality, ritual, revelation, tradition, transformation and healing (personal, communal, cultural); active citizens engaged in creating communities that meet basic needs, including living a meaningful life.

  How many of you participate in some kind of small arts circle? More than one? As artists? As producers of content (e.g., directors, editors)? Audience members?

  Our work at VW has led us to realize what hip hop knew at the beginning and what Paolo Freire and Augusto Boal were putting into words about the same time: many spaces act as informal and ephemeral classrooms and as stages in daily life. Each of us can take on the roles of teacher/ performer/ producer/ audience member at different and sometimes surprising moments. The speed with which we respond—the flexibility—allows us to make the most of the moment in ways that traditional publishing (and traditional academic departments) often deems less important, less valuable, less artistic.

   We created and became involved in efforts early and increasingly to publish in unexpected places and spaces, in addition to magazines and books: a gumball vending machine, city buses, bicycles, shoes, postcards, roadside signs, cheap & colorful broadsides, a poetry Calendar, at Madison’s City Council meetings; in art shows; juxtaposed with composting demonstrations and soil science as a poetry (de)compos(t)ing station. Around the edges of VW as a magazine, we’ve held readings, panels, presentations, conversations, and other events, which invite people to engage with us and with poetry and large life questions involving poetry. These events in turn have driven our thinking and the content of the issues we published, evolving from marginal to central features of our process and product. Along the way, we came to believe in the importance of face-to-face conversations, with and through poems, as a means to bring people together, discovering new ideas and questions, while building relationships and promoting what we’re calling “public poetry,” that is, poetry whose purpose isn’t longevity or “publication” as commonly understood in books, magazines, or even online, but made public, shared, through a variety of methods, with and by a wider public and for publicly meaningful reasons (which is not equivalent with “accessible” content).

  Along the way we also began to wonder about what other kinds of publication could come from improvisational writing, or writing in response to circumstances. About ways that improv and performance poetry  might guide written publishing as well as performance. About how publishing might unfold in less scripted ways, either as a “live” poetry magazine, or as writing that bypassed traditional editors. As poetry write-in for instance; or the open outdoor classroom; as hacking; as disruptive/interruptive performance.

  What else could the journal be? …

a poetry show.

a poetry mural.

a poetry supper club.

a poetry couch.

a play/performance of poems.

an exhibit.

a one-time event.

a game.

a souvenir or result of an event.

a community center gallery.

a hashtag.

 Which brings us to the present moment of VW and three examples of where we are in moving toward a live journal. The first of these, the last online issue of VW in April, 2014—Midwest Remix—employs lessons learned from hip hop pedagogy in its editorial concept, particularly the notions of cypher, crew, collaboratively generated content, the importance of the local and of local counter-narrative, conversation that occurs across divides of race, age, gender, and aesthetic, art that incorporates civic action. This issue will draw on a number of Wisconsin’s performance poetry communities as we have witnessed them, from activists and publishers of ephemera to multicultural communities, spoken word, hip hop, reading series, inviting them to provide their own content for the issue. (You all are invited to be part of that through a reflection on this conference as well.)

  A second type of current project involves poetry exhibits embedded in readings and conversation-based events. We have two of these up right now: one that brings poems to Forward Theater’s playhouse for display in response to a production, as well as events with actors; and a traveling show of photos, spoken word, poetry (and audio files) focused on water resources in Madison & Dane County, including events that bring together artists, poets, scientists, activists, and policy makers.

    “Beyond the Water’s Edge” Photography, Spoken Word & Poetry Exhibit in Celebration of the Dane Co. Lakes & Watershed Commission’s 25th Anniversary, November, 2013 (Above)

  The Verse Wisconsin “(de)compos(t)ing station” at Wormfarm Institute’s “Land, Food, and Transformation, a Decomposium,” June, 2013 (below) and PassWords road sign from the Farm Art DTour

      The Oaxaca, Mexico, launch of Luz de Todos los Tiempos / Light of All Times, by Moisés Villavicencio Barras, Cowfeather Press

  Digital publishing means work can be created with speed and ease; it can be shared through, and also as, websites, blogs, Facebook pages & notes, Tweets and images uploaded to Twitter, video, Pinterest pins, etc., all at no, or very little, expense. And this technology doesn't just mean that you can easily (and quickly) create a traditional journal or website-based product, social media product, or e-book. What it means is that anything—any object, any event—can be a journal, if by journal we mean a repository of written and/ or spoken text, and that any DIY object that you (alone or with others) are capable of making and imagining can be digitally augmented through, e.g., QR codes, apps & hashtags, to take you to content that is both curated and self-organized: text, video, audio, images, blogs, web sites, social media pages, all of the above.

  We hope to explore more of these possibilities with our most recent project, a newly-published anthology of poems, Echolocations, Poets Map Madison, and an experimental launch event this month that includes simultaneous reading, improvisational, and activity corners, as well as conversation; an expandable set of digital resources that will unfold, as the magazine disappears, over the next 2 years; a hashtag, #WriteYourMadison, to create and archive open and self-organizing content; and flexible, expanding partnerships with other arts, community, and government organizations.

  Tweets about "#WriteYourMadison"

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  How many of you walk or bike? How many of you write about the place you live in? Include names for local places—buildings, parks, lakes, schools, etc. and people in your writing? Teach local writers? Invite local poets to read their work at your college/university?

  Working on the Echolocations anthology has made us more aware of the importance of local poetry as it engages with specific times, places, and people. Our understanding of place is inseparable from the varied stories people tell about it, and the stories we’re willing to hear. Many of the poems in this book question and complicate narrative, rather than accepting dominant stories. Can a poetry anthology help us to understand coming cultural challenges and better engage with our neighbors? We believe so, and a number of poems write directly to interracial communication, white privilege, invisibility, lack of knowledge, and the difficulties of creating—or recognizing—that knowledge. Our vision of the living journal isn’t just about poems/art, but about the making of art and its meaning in the context of particular communities: it is about people.

  Mr. James Braxton: A Memory Poem

  Eighty-seven years sparsely covered his jutting bones with a veneer of amber skin. His quixotic face held an absence of pain even when he retold the hurry from Mississippi to Madison. Jumping the train at nineteen to escape a lynching mob cause he didn’t hold both his voice and his eyes down when he “sir’d” a white man incorrectly. Radiant kindness beamed on high from his deep set eyes. Bright lights that clicked on to show folks the way into his smile and to continue right on into his heart. His curling southern talk wrapped folks into a quilt of soft conversation. James Braxton earned and lost much in Madison, Wisconsin. His business, his money, one of his houses along with a wife. But he never lost respect from good people or his personal joy as he walked up and down Williamson Street With his stretched out hand, a wave of authority and welcome.

  —Fabu, in Echolocations, Poets Map Madison, Cowfeather Press, 2013

  Do you have time to participate/attend activities outside your workplace? Outside your family commitments?

  Over the past five years, we’ve engaged in joint endeavors with over thirty organizations and community partners, small and large (including Wormfarm Institute, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI), Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, Forward Theater, Writers in Prison, the Wisconsin Humanities Council and Book Festival, the Dane Co. Water Commission, Metro Bus, Madison Library, Madison’s Common Council, as well as literacy groups, retail spaces and others…). We have done what institutions call “outreach” to “community” organizations and the “public” and we have done what we call inreach—reaching in to institutions, and I can tell you, the latter is a lot harder. As we discovered the centrality of (often spontaneous) collaboration to our process, we realized that, at its most interesting, the role of editor allows us to be—rather than gate keepers or canon makers—event planners and civic actor-producers: embracing and engaging with transience, rather than resisting it, allows us to do new and original work, to ask better questions, to create new alliances and new pathways for information. Rather than worrying about and trying to create and maintain the trappings of a publishing institution—building, equipment, infrastructure, we prefer to emphasize process, relationships, communication and transformation, asking ourselves: Who can we invite to the party? What kind of gathering will it be? How can we make it more interesting and engaging? What other parties are going on around us that we might think about attending?

  The path we have taken as editors has taken us from the starting place of balancing the promotion of “excellence” and the nurturing of excellence, to a different model: one in which the editor/publisher helps to convene and also participates in democratically-structured performance circles with the capacity to transform both our practice of poetry and how we think of ourselves as artists and people; one in which each person is a member-contributor who plays different roles at different times: artist-writer, producer-editor, audience member-critic. One in which the love of poetry—the fun of poetry—is inseparable from writing, performing, editing, producing, reading, critiquing and listening, and all of these acts are more enjoyable approached holistically, organically, in a meaningful context for real reasons, with friends and colleagues. One in which poetic engagement and performance helps connect us to ourselves and to other people, discover a sense of purpose, and see ourselves as active participants in society. One in which we share the resources available to us, value and find out about what happens near us, and bring that knowledge to those around us. And artistic excellence? That, we believe, will come out of creative communities that are accessible and collaborative. 

  Some online resources

Info about First Wave and the  Hip Hop Educators’ Summer Institute is/will be at http://omai.wisc.edu/. Twitter: @omaifirstwave.

  Info about Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed and its summer conference is at http://ptoweb.org/. Twitter @PTOtweets.

  Participate in weekly Hip Hop Educators’ Conversation, Tuesday, 9-10 p.m. EST, #HipHopEd.

  Hybrid Technology, A Digital Journal of Learning, Teaching and Technology (combining Critical Pedagogy with digital pedagogy) http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/ Twitter @HybridPed

  #WriteYourMadison is a new project of Madison Poets Laureate Wendy Vardaman and Sarah Busse, as well as a Twitter hashtag, intended to create and organize poetry links and open discussion about the relation of poetry and community.

  Some related essays by the author online

“Living Arts, Some Notes from the Solidarity Sing Along” in HEArt, Human Equity Through Art, Oct. 23, 2013 (http://heartjournalonline.com/vardaman)

  “(e)Books Like Parchment, How Digital Publishing Changes Everything and Nothing, Nothing At All, for Poets, Part 1,” LiveArt(s) / ArtLive(s), Oct. 24, 2013, http://wvardaman.tumblr.com/

 “swaggacity in the heart land, or the hart that crosses a city street: notes from "Hip Hop in the Heartland," in Notes, Poems & Reflections from Hip Hop in the Heartland: 7th Annual Educator and Community Leader Training Institute—UW-Madison, special section in Verse Wisconsin 110, October, 2012 (http://versewisconsin.org/issue110.html) 

  Some questions about the live poetry journal

 (Email [email protected] or tweet to @wendylvardaman.)

These are some examples of innovative Midwestern performance / poetry: UW-Madison Hip hop Educators’ Summer institute and First Wave/ Birthplace of Improv (Chicago)/ Slam—Green Mill, Chicago / Louder than a Bomb, Young Chicago Authors, Still Waters Collective (Milwaukee), High School for the Recording Arts (Minneapolis)/ The Encyclopedia Show (Chicago)/Festival of Language Xperimental readings/  Overpass Light Brigade/ the Q Brothers-Chicago Shakespeare partnership/ Potency of Poetry (American Players Theater)/ Young Shakespeare Players (Madison)/  Jazz Institute (Chicago)/ Midwestern devised projects: Mary Swander’s Farmscape (Iowa); “May 4th Voices” (Ohio); Latina Monologues (Milwaukee) What are others? 

What experiences of a "live poetry journal" have you had?

What are the most important qualities of a live poetry journal? e.g., flexibility, responsiveness, community building, open access, experiential, interactive...

What it would mean to transform the written journal into a live magazine? The conference? Why would we want to do that/ why not?

What are the important elements of the written journal to preserve? 

What does poetry/performance poetry know that other types of inquiry might not?

To what extent & under what circumstances can visual art/visual poetry be performative? 

How do your departments/colleges/universities engage the “public”? Examples/ limits/ problems/ successes? How does the public engage you and what are the paths for allowing that to happen? How might the live poetry journal as a format encourage dialog and collaboration between institutions and organizations, large and small?

  Invitation from the M/MLA Conference Panel, “Formerly One Art: Poetry, Performance, and Praxis”

  Use two lines from Moisés Villavicencio Barras’s “Reasons in the Winter”(from Luz de Todos los Tiempos / Light of All Times, Cowfeather Press, 2013)  as a starting point for a poetic- or prose-reflection on this conference and its relation to your work as a poet-teacher-critic. Write/ record/ collage/ cartoon/ Gif/ code/ film/ perform and/or otherwise embody/ enact/ jot it down and send your whatever to Verse Wisconsin (Wendy Vardaman & Sarah Busse, [email protected]) for inclusion in the spring issue. Collaborate with someone else if you like, in or out of this room, or take the poem back to your students, share the prompt,  and ask the class to create a piece in response to their experience of college. Deadline: January 15.