The Portal to a City's Soul is Vast
1.
When you live on the west edge of the Great Lakes,
you feel the prairie’s breath on your back,
hot days like foundry blasts.
When something is too beautiful it seems
like a very ineffective commercial for earth.
Here’s a gull missing a chunk of itself.
Flawed worlds are the only ones worth inhabiting.
Minnesota nice upside your head!
But this is Milwaukee. Our singers are practicing their arias.
The audience is assembling on the shore.
2.
Outside: the city stirs to make the city.
City of empty night buses, city of factory ghosts,
brewery ghosts, socialist party ghosts, city of
movie palaces, copper-domed basilica, corner bars,
ships, foghorns, and church bells.
A city in a tug of war with the past and the present.
Garlanded with factories, factories ascend
the pyramid at dawn to have their machines
torn out, held up dripping grease to the Sun.
City hymnology. Giving grease a ride.
3.
The block is soft, deceptive like a butter knife,
and this block would shout,
“Nos diste un CHINGAZO, cabrón.
Mira esta cara rota, these baton-cracked ribs,
this black and blue street dizzy con gente.”
It has no license, this faded blue sedan.
That happiness is a wind I create within my lungs
along the debris laden cosmic highways.
Your shimmering humanity, a sun in its own universe.
The portal to a city’s soul is vast.
4.
In art, ownership is anathema and deserves to be
punished. Let’s be a harmony,
hundreds of notes at once,
the voices of copper pennies
jangling in a jar of hopes for another day.
You have a voice, why not sing the dog to dinner?
Somebody puts somebody’s money
where somebody’s mouth should be.
They will try to convince you there are no voices.
Listen to the voices.
5.
Stark, we ear each other.
You never know who your words may reach
so keep them flowering.
When I embroider flowers, I inhale,
remember again each petal-deep pocket.
I hope someday my flowers will blossom.
They have thorns of potential and purpose.
A stream of flowers gliding into my heart
until every thorn is safe inside. I feel pretty good—
even my flowers have flowers.
6.
We are all dealing with the same crimson,
carnelian, burgundy, brick, blood, cinnamon, rose, fire.
Suddenly beneath the tree were caskets for me to open.
We cry at the death of strangers
who might have been ourselves.
Crying the heaviest, fattest, saddest tears
in bullet-proof exchanges at gas station windows,
in the wicked mortgage red line.
Hell investigates life with great opportunity.
Ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough to read this poem.
7.
We thrive nonetheless, she thought,
as she checked her account balance.
All humor originates from a place of pain,
whether small or seismic. One stitch
after another her philosophy the quilt
grows that way, as roses grow
from concrete and get all the praise.
Shoe store is burning. I’m flexing out front.
My art is my weapon I sleep to reload it.
A line forms at the gate with truth as bait.
8.
The sun is ever rising, in Bay View as in Amman.
Imagine who walked here, ages ago,
what they saw and revered. Vel Phillips,
Frank Zeidler. This terrain their shoulders,
this canopy their mantle. To have understood
how a creative spirit like this could be so
stubbornly obscure. Legacy
is the genome’s retelling—double helix turned prophet
proclaiming the future and whispering our past.
The applause is for the struggle.
9.
A lake illuminated by the moon,
by the moon illusion.
I visualize a renaissance of flickering spirit.
The snow is mapped now as the pulse of the world multiplies
to imagine each angle of place is us,
love-speak against the windowed glass.
I ply my eye to a telescope so powerful I see
an eye at the other end. I wake
with eyes the sound of clarinet. We move
gracefully past each other in the party store.
10.
The game’s tied up now with 2.1 seconds left,
but it’s 2.1 seconds of game time, not real time,
and we wondered what would happen to the mural.
There’s no telling how long we can get away with these
deviant fires on the beach. Have you stood
at the water’s edge today? To disobey a rule
for so long you’re no longer breaking it.
Festooned by flags, Polish and Puerto Rican side by side,
we each see our own picture of the sky and what we have painted there.
With each freeze and wave it only matters that you feel beautiful.
11.
Maybe we can change the end times.
You bring your nightmares and I’ll bring your dreams.
Maybe we can skip intros while you process.
Maybe when the fences are gone
that boy across the street will befriend me.
Here is the aggregate of circumstances,
your collection of detours and dreams.
Milwaukee, maybe an epilogue, maybe in your steps.
Maybe the other side of the long expanse of bridge
you think you can’t cross.
12.
How does one surprise God?
Deities do as they please, baby.
Invite the sacred creatures but do not seek them.
The hand worships through work. “Thank god,”
they say when the acoustics feel revelatory.
Who wrote all those poems—that me that needed to see me, God?
Pipes corroded with lead and clogged with prayers,
I recognized the spirit of God and called a plumber.
The trick is always and forever to jiggle it
to jiggle it a little.
13.
A boat drifts in the current spinning slowly
as its occupant stares at the sky. I believe
all water can be holy if you try hard enough.
Let goodness good the good. We were built for abundance.
Give yourself margin to doodle any shape.
Art is the fabric that binds our city’s past to its present.
Meet me at the corner, tell me the story I want to hear.
What comes next without bounds or limits?
The wool hat you found on the street, washed and dried and it fits.
“Where are we going?” . . . the future, the future, the future.
From the Latin for “patchwork,” a cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.
—Academy of American Poets (poets.org)
When asked to compose a commemorative text for the occasion of the opening of Ruth Foundation for the Arts’ new space in Milwaukee, we were determined to meet their request to address “the cultural context of this region.” Overlooked and underserved for decades, ours is a culturally rich terroir, long overdue its national spotlight. But we had no desire to make an argumentative case—prose wasn’t going to perform the lyrical work needed anyway (at least as we imagined it) to illuminate our hidden gem of a city and region. Nor did we want to be the sole voices speaking on behalf of our community. Instead, we wanted to serve as a conduit, as we do in our professional lives, for a multitude of voices.
So, we turned to the cento form as a means of entering conversation and began our research, selecting and compiling lines from hundreds of Milwaukee poets, writers, and artists who offered insights about our shared civic, cultural, and physical landscape. We then began to trace the ineffaceable images and motifs that bind these individual visions together, and the cento wrote itself within a day. We could have easily continued it, and perhaps we will. Like a city, a poem is an infinitely evolving thing, never truly finished, continuously revealing and renewing itself through interpretation. In a literal sense, we hope this cento serves as a starting place for each reader—a portal, if you will, to discovering not only more from the artists embedded within it, but also those who are not represented here, including those whose words have yet to be written.
To all the poets, writers, and artists embodied in this work, and to all those who have been a part of our lives in Milwaukee, we send our gratitude and appreciation.
Jenny Gropp & Laura Solomon
Executive Directors of Woodland Pattern—Milwaukee, WI
July 24, 2024
In anticipation of the opening of our new space in September 2024, we invited active participants and longtime contributors to the artistic communities in Wisconsin to write about the cultural context of this region. While we recognized the impossibility of capturing this state in its entirety through this one endeavour, the goal was to gather a range of perspectives to provide a fuller and more complex understanding of the artistic production of this region. We welcomed thoughtful, critical pieces that allow readers to see the artistic milieu, or this place, in a new light, reflections on Wisconsin's histories that have defined its present, or future-facing pieces that guide us towards new directions.
Morgan Parker reading at Woodland Pattern on May 9, 2019. There Again, the Disappearance work by Maria Gaspar, Valaria Tatera, and Vaughan Larsen on display. Photo courtesy of Woodland Pattern.
Located in Milwaukee and home to an internationally recognized collection of poetry and printed matter, Woodland Pattern is a nonprofit gallery, book center, and performance space where poets and artists have found support for their practices since 1979.