Upcoming online EVENTS
27th Annual (Virtual) Poetry Marathon & Benefit
24 HOURS! 250+ POETS! + music, film, & more
JANUARY 30 & JANUARY 31, 2021 | 10 AM - 10 PM
This year's Poetry Marathon is presented by WISCONSIN'S OWN LIBRARY, a unique collection of Wisconsin authors and illustrators owned by the THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN'S CLUBS—WISCONSIN, with funding provided by the Gwendolyn M. Schultz Charitable Trust. This year's Marathon is also made possible by DEWITT LLC, SAINT JOHN'S ON THE LAKE, and JUNEAU PARK FRIENDS.
The Marathon will be livestreamed via Crowdcast—click on the link above to register or attend—and simulcast through Youtube.
SCHEDULE (all times are Central)
SATURDAY, Jan. 30th
10-11 am YOUTH HOUR, sponsored by Mary & Ned Witte, Diane Bezella, Pizza Shuttle, and Shorewood High
Sofia Hansen Cardona, Noa Biener, Isabella Glenn, Alexzandria Harmon, Henry Heyden, Aveon Hudson, Niles Janzen, Atahlia Lopez-Johnson, Graydin Lohre, Gerardo Medina Jr., & Persia Wright
11 am-12 pm COMMUNITY HOUR, sponsored by Louisa Loveridge Gallas
11-11:15 / Still Waters Collective's Pentastic Open Mic & The Retreat's Harambee Poetry Slam Feature: Laniece McGee, Analysis the Poet, & others
11:15-12 / Judith Harway, Renee Glembin, Reggie Finlayson, Sharon Daly, Angela Sorby, Peter Whalen, Sue Blaustein, Jenny Benjamin, Anne Koller, Patricia Clark, & Eloisa Gómez
12-1 pm COMMUNITY HOUR, sponsored by Cornell College MFA in Creative Writing
Martha Kaplan, Kathryn Gahl, Ed Makowski, Kathrine Yets, Parker Weaver, Jayne Marek, Jim Landwehr, Barbara Wuest, Courtney Raatz, Terimarie Degree, Peter Blewett, Bailey Flannery, Ted Dargis, Grzegorz Wróblewski, & Sarah Rosenblatt
1-2 pm WEDNESDAY WRITERS, sponsored by Janine Arseneau
Suzanne Rosenblatt, Judit Gomez, Barbara Leigh, Maria Elena Scott, Daniel O'Keefe, Janine Arseneau, Darlene Rzezotarski, Virginia Small, & Susan Winecki
2-3 pm WISCONSIN FELLOWSHIP OF POETS, sponsored by Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
Lisa Vihos, Ronnie Hess, Scott Lowery, Elisabeth Harrahy, Mark Zimmermann, Sylvia Cavanaugh, Sheryl Slocum, Nathan Reid, Angela Voras-Hills, & Maryann Hurtt
3-4 pm POETS FROM SAINT JOHN’S ON THE LAKE, sponsored by Saint John’s on the Lake
Kent Mayfield, Sandy Duffy, Jana Troutman-Miller, Barbara Byer, Nick Pabst, John Schmitt, Virginia Chappell, Alex Molnar, Pat Busalacchi, Bernice Popelka, & Elliot Lipchik
3:45 pm —INTERMISSION—
4-5 pm A TRIBUTE TO SALLY TOLAN, sponsored by Tom Tolan & family
Readings from the life’s work of the late Milwaukee poet Sally Tolan, 1927-2020, by Tom Tolan, Sandy Tolan, Yam Tolan, Mary Tolan, Kathleen Tolan, Sandra Maier, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, & John Tolan
5-6 pm WISCONSIN POETS LAUREATE, sponsored by Riverwest Realty
Nick Demske, Abayomi Animashaun, Jodi Vander Molen, Vida Cross, BJ Hollars, Ed Werstein, Margaret Rozga, Angela Trudell Vasquez, Esteban Colon, & Dasha Kelly Hamilton
6-10 pm WOODLAND PATTERN 40TH ANNIVERSARY HOURS, sponsored by LiveWriters, Greg Flegel & Rich Greene, Scott Gelzer & Sherry Goldsmith, Colectivo Coffee, and Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung. Featuring poetry, improvisational music, short films, & archival footage.
6-7 / Susan Firer, Portia Cobb, Rick Ollman, Janet Jennerjohn, Paul Druecke, Bryon Cherry, Zack Pieper, Freesia McKee, Mike Michaels, Ae Hee Lee, RS Deeren, & Bob Hanson & Karen Ingvoldstad
7-8 / Takahiro Suzuki, Karl Gartung, Jacqueline Lalley, Greg Flegel, Jen Benka, Ching-In Chen, Franklin K.R. Cline, John Koethe, Sam Pekarske, Brenda Cárdenas, & Roberton Harrison
8-9 / Peter Burzynski, Stacy Szymaszek, Chuck Stebelton, Tyrone Williams, David Wilk, Maureen Owen, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Elizabeth Robinson, Diane Glancy, Joe McPhee, & The Transatlantic Bridge #2.1 (Dan Bitney, Rob Frye, JayVe Montgomery, Olivia Scemama, & Simon Sieger)
9-10 / CAConrad, Joshua Beckman, TC Tolbert, Janelle VanderKelen, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jennifer Scapettone, Anselm Berrigan, Ed Roberson, Duriel E. Harris, Ruth B8r Ginsburg, Eileen Myles, & Kati Katchever
SUNDAY, Jan. 31st
10-11 am RIVERWEST CURRENTS, sponsored by Riverwest Currents and dedicated to the poet Antler
Vince Bushell, Harvey Taylor & Susie Krause, Thomas Treder, Ellen Warren, Desmond Bone, Mooney J. Jadrich, & Shell Bells
11 am-12 pm UNTOLD STORIES + RACINE/KENOSHA FEATURE, sponsored by Lotus Legal Clinic
11-11:30 / Laurel Blackstone, R.C. Nichole, Deborah Estrada-Carson, Hannah Lenzo, Pita, EnerJ, Jamie Lovely, Liz Luckett, & Austin Reece
11:30-12 / Stephen Kalmar II, Debra Hall, Jean Preston, Rachel Wiedower, Carol Lee Saffiotti-Hughes, Joseph Engel, & Nick Ramsey
12-1 pm COMMUNITY HOUR, sponsored by AllWriters' Workplace & Workshop
Robin Lane & Paul McComas, Robb Astor, Lindsay Tigue, Jesse DeLong, Garin Cycholl, Liandra Skenadore, Kathie Giorgio, Lisa Krawczyk, Tate Lewis-Carroll, Tim Kloss, Stephen Anderson, & Sarah Moore, & Steve Pump
1-2 pm WHOSE LANGUAGE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND by Kim Kielhofner, sponsored by WE Energies Foundation
Named after a novel by the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007), Whose Language You Don’t Understand (2018) is a video cycle exploring the limits of language. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called “The Fortress,” consisting of over 10,000 pages—and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and astonishing one that challenges the conventions of writing and reading. In Fritz’s work, writing sustains a reality. Writing becomes a movement into an alternative world, and readership offers radical possibilities.
2-3 pm GENRE: URBAN ARTS, sponsored by Anonymous on behalf of Teens Grow Greens & Girls on the Run
Nakeysha Roberts Washington, Aysheh Manaei, Samihah Pargas, Lyn Patterson, Colleen Rowe, Anita Holloway, Marcus Emel, Shaunteri Skinner, Dana Kaleta, & Ananda Deacon / To have an existential crisis (2016) by Anouk Chambaz
3-4 pm QUEER HOUR + IN-NA-PO (INDIGENOUS NATIONS POETS), sponsored by The Queer Curatorial Fund of the UWM Department of Film, Video, Animation, & New Genres and Scott Gelzer & Sherry Goldsmith
3-3:30 / Jennifer Morales, Siwar Massanat, Elizabeth Hoover, CJ Scruton, franciszka voeltz, Canese Jarboe, & Jenni Moody
3:30-4 / Kimberly Blaeser, Margaret Noodin, Craig Santos Perez, Jake Skeets, & LeAnne Howe
3:45 pm —INTERMISSION—
4-5 pm LATINX POETS FEATURE, sponsored by Erick “CK” Ledesma & Howard Leu
José Felipe Alvergue, Mauricio Kilwein-Guevara, Matthew Gutierrez, Rosa Alcalá, Daniel Borzutzky, Jose-Luis Moctezuma, alida cardós whaley, Carmen Murguia, José Manuela García Oquendo, Urayoán Noel, & Marili Pizarro
5-6 pm OSCAR PRESENTS, sponsored by Ed & Brooke Krishok
Andy Gricevich, Lauren Russell, Mike Hauser, Richard Meier, Timothy Yu, Steve Timm, Jordan Dunn, Lewis Freedman, Stacy Blint, & Abraham Smith
6-10 pm SMALL PRESS FEATURE with CHAX PRESS, CANARIUM BOOKS, UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE, BELLADONNA*, FATHOM BOOKS, PITYMILK PRESS, & VEGETARIAN ALCOHOLIC PRESS, sponsored by Reuter & Associates, The New Order of Saint Agatha, Karen Campbell & Kevin Ronnie, FATHOM Books, Outpost Natural Foods, Polonez, & Mobile Car Care
6-7 (Chax Press) / David Weiss, Andrew Levy, Maryrose Larkin, Steven Salmoni, Michael Gottlieb, Simon Pettet, Eli Goldblatt, Saba Syed Razvi, Sarah Rosenthal, & Charles Alexander
7-7:30 (Canarium Books) / Ishmael Klein, Darcie Dennigan, Paul Killebrew, Suzanne Buffam, & giovanni singleton
7:30-8 (Ugly Duckling Presse) / Jean Day, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Sawako Nakayasu, Jennifer Nelson, Corina Copp, & Rachel Levitsky
8-8:30 (Belladonna*) Krystal Languell, Gabrielle Civil, Maxe Crandall, Kimberly Alidio, Ashna Ali, & Becca Klaver
8:30-9 (FATHOM Books) / Joseph Spece, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Eric Westerlind, Marissa Bognanno, & Youna Kwak
9-9:15 (Pitymilk Press) / Edie Roberts & Chelsea Tadeyeske
9-15-10 (Vegetarian Alchoholic Press) / Janelle Cordero, Al Russell, Gina Tron, Denise Jarrott, Sierra Nicole-Qualles, Lauren Turner, Kelsey Marie Harris, & Travis Tate
Community Group: Readshop
Sat. Feb. 6 | 12:15–1:30 pm CT | $Give What You Can
Led by poet and Woodland Pattern co-founder Karl Gartung, Readshops are community sessions dedicated to exploring poetry texts from the 20th century that are often labeled "difficult." Participants take turns reading the poetry aloud, discussing it as questions arise—on the spot, as deeply as needed. No preparation is needed; the only prerequisite is curiosity.
The group is currently reading Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. This volume collects the first three installments―Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, and Atet A.D.―of Mackey’s genre-defying work of fiction. A project that began over thirty years ago, From a Broken Bottle is an epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intricate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected, profound happenings take place as N. delves into music and art and the goings-on of his transmorphic Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, in which he is a composer and instrumentalist. This triple-set book opens in July 1978 with a dream of a haunting Archie Shepp solo, and closes in September 1982 in a parallactic studio recording session on a glass-bottomed boat borne aloft by the music.
To join this group or learn more, contact Education Director Alexa Nutile below.
Poetry & Economic Justice
Part of The First Function of Poetry: A Social Justice Series.
With events organized and hosted by Stacy Szymaszek.
Poetry Reading: D.S. Marriott, Jasmine Gibson, and Ted Rees
Thurs. Feb. 18 | 7 pm CT | $Give What You Can
D.S. Marriott was born in Nottingham and educated at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several books, including Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019), Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018), Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and the chapbooks In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Bluetown is forthcoming from Omnidawn.
Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn living in Harlem. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire, and freedom. She is the author of Only Shallow (Montez Press, 2020) and Don't Let Them See Me Like This (Nightboat Books, 2018).
Ted Rees is the author of Thanks giving: a Poem (Golias Books, 2020) and In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). He facilitates online writing workshops through his Overflowing Poetry Workshops programming, and has recently delivered talks and lectures at the Kelly Writers House and Simon Fraser University. He co-edits Asterion Projects with Levi Bentley and is editor-at-large for The Elephants.
This reading will be followed by “A Dollar's Worth of Blood, Please”: Anti-Capitalist Poets, a multi-part workshop led by Stacy Szymaszek.
Workshop: “A Dollar's Worth of Blood, Please”: Anti-Capitalist Poets with Stacy Szymaszek
Sundays Feb. 21, 28, & March 7 | 2–4 pm CT | $100 ($90 Members)
In this workshop we will devote half of our time talking about the work of leftist and proletariat poets who were writing in the United States during the Great Depression and further into the 1930s. We’ll also read some of Mark Nowak’s critical work on how lineage construction obscured certain “social poets.” We will devote the other half to reading contemporary poets whose work is developing a field of anti-racial capitalist (anti-neoliberal, anti-colonial . . .) poetry in the US and read some of Chris Nealon’s critical work on poetry in late-late capitalism. The workshop will be reading-heavy (individually outside of class) from a PDF I will provide, with gathering time spent on discussion. I will give writing prompts related to the reading but there will be no critique of work. At the end of the workshop everyone will be invited to submit a poem for a pamphlet that will be printed and shared.
Writers we will read include Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, John Wheelwright, Ernesto Cardenal, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, Wendy Rose, Mark Nowak, Chris Nealon, Kevin Davies, Ted Rees, Jasmine Gibson, and D.S. Marriott.
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of the books A Year From Today (Nightboat Books, 2018); Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017; hart island (Nightboat Books, 2015); Hyperglossia (Litmus Press, 2009); and Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005). Her sixth book, Famous Hermits, will be published in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. She was the Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana–Missoula in 2018–19, Poet-in-Resident at Brown University, and Visiting Poet for the Fire Island Artist Residency. Szymaszek was the director of The Poetry Project from 2007–18, and now lives in Tucson, AZ, where she does freelance work for the field of poetry. Learn more at stacyszymaszek.org.
Featured Video: ONE POEM: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives
On August 18, 2020, the founding members of the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of more than 25 organizations (including Woodland Pattern), presented a live broadcast ONE POEM: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives via Crowdcast. Please consider giving to organizations and efforts working against injustice, including those recommended by the founding members of the Poetry Coalition here.
The poets featured were Prisca Afantchao, Sojourner Ahebee, Kazim Ali, Kimberly Blaeser, Jericho Brown, Meera Dasgupta, Kwame Dawes, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Safia Elhillo, Martín Espada, Sesshu Foster, Kimberly Jae, Raina J. León, Mwatabu Okantah, Arsimmer McCoy, Alberto Ríos, Terisa Siagatonu, Matthew Thompson, Emma Trelles, Nikki Wallschlaeger (reading on behalf of Woodland Pattern), Monica Youn, and avery r. young.
Woodland Pattern & COVID-19
Due to the ongoing pandemic, we have closed our doors for the first time in four decades. During this hiatus from our physical space, we are working to facilitate remote projects and welcome your input and participation.
While we're closed, we hope you will join us for online book discussions, writing groups, workshops, live poetry performances, and other events. We also invite you to sign up for our newsletter to receive Prompts Against Anxiety—weekly exercises that promote at-home creativity, personal fortitude, and solidarity with others.
Please take a look around on our new website to take advantage of the various resources here, including recordings from recent online events. Be sure to also check out ongoing visual art exhibitions and read our statement on racial justice, where you can also find links to anti-racism organizations and educational materials.
We acknowledge that in Milwaukee we live and work on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homelands along the southwest shores of Michigami, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present.
We further acknowledge the grave evil colonialism introduced to these lands through genocide as well as slavery, and also via racist and xenophobic beliefs, laws, and practices that continue to inflict harm upon Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives. We honor those who have lived—and do live, now—at these intersections of identity and experience, and are committed to the active dismantling of white supremacy.
720 E. Locust Street
Milwaukee, WI 53212
Phone: 414 263 5001
Hours: Tues–Fri | 11-8pm
Sat & Sun | 12–5 pm | Closed Mon
Contactless pick-up: Wed–Fri | 2–6 pm, Sat | 2–5 pm
Building Accessibility: Despite the age of our physical location, and attendant limitations to access, Woodland Pattern is committed to making its programs and facilities available for as many as possible. Please call for more information.
Events Accessibility: Woodland Pattern is in the process of obtaining captioning services for its online events and can provide ASL interpretation for live events. Please contact us with accommodation requests and questions.
© Woodland Pattern 2020