Poetics of Home

I’ve never been “from” a place. I grew up visiting my birth city on school breaks when my family wasn’t stationed abroad. As a military kid, I absorbed my parents’ stories about bus routes and deli shops and bar stoops and the empty lot where an ice cream shop used to be. My mental map of the city was limited to routes for visiting grandmothers and cousins.

Relocating in my late twenties, I had no relation to my city’s streets or its skyline. I didn’t have a favorite pizza parlor or radio DJ, memories of dances or tournaments, and no landmarks where I’d experienced my first anything. My parents had those stories. My cousins, aunts and uncles had them. I knew about the people I come from, but not the place that made them.

Though I was born in a hospital that still stands at the city’s center, I was only comfortable declaring myself a daughter of the city, not yet its obvious bloom. Essentially a transplant to my hometown, I learned the city like other career nomads, carving out pathways through professional endeavors and civic work. It was when I gave myself permission to access the city’s creative pulse that the city began morphing into a home.

I attended comedy shows, art exhibits and live music events. Eventually, a coworker took me to a poetry open mic. I’ve always been a fan of literature, as an early reader and young writer, but never appreciated poetry. It was introduced in school as haughty riddles from dead white men, with little of the language capturing my attention or interest. Within minutes of taking our seats, I knew I’d crossed into a new world. These were not the measured and haughty stanzas from high school English. These were personal stories, life queries and epiphanies. They were lyrical commandments written before work shifts, after a quarrel, and in between parenting duties. I was reintroduced to poems as heartbeats.

I eventually curated an open mic of my own. “Still Waters” on Thursday nights. Week after week, poem after poem, heartbeats thrummed together in a crowded tavern. More than sharing their writing, people came to tithe offerings of themselves. For a decade, I watched strangers become community. When I started building classroom residencies for elementary schools and afterschool programming for high schools, the community became a culture. Teens from the poetry clubs became teaching artists and coordinators with the program, and many are now advocates, storytellers and entrepreneurs in the community.

Still Waters Collective will celebrate its 25th anniversary next spring. While there are thousands and thousands of poems behind us, there are countless more stories ahead. I’ve been clearing a path for next generation to steward this collaborative work into the future. I’ve witnessed them explore their identities, their families, their histories and aspirations, and their city. Our city.

Through these many years and poems, people have shared pentameter stanzas about despair and loss and crushes and dignity and sorrow and fantasy and violence and racism and ecstasy and crippling rage. I’ve watched the poets falter and soar. Supported second chances and unexamined gall. Challenged the status quo and staved rebellion. Far more than poems, I opened spaces for people to listen and be heard. That’s what it means to be from a place, right? To be molded by its history and make an imprint in return?

Milwaukee is more than a file address now, more than where my extended family lives. Far more than a birth city, Milwaukee carved space for my creativity to flourish and define Home.