John Sierpinski Keeps the Beat Alive

The Beat generation writers of the 1950s and 60s have had an enduring impact on poetry. As John Sierpinski’s Poetry Spoken Here interview makes clear, the outsider, clear-spoken, risk-taking visions of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs (the core Beat writers) continue to influence him. Visit any major slam venue, talk to the poets and you’ll discover a significant percentage who will say they are influenced by the Beats (or that those who influenced them were influenced by the Beats). 

John has bolstered his independent writing by studying poetry at the University of Wisconsin, Marquette University, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the Vest Conservatory for Writers. His poetry has been published in over fifty literary magazines.

Like the original Beats, Sierpiniski chronicles his life and times, providing a picture of pre-high tech San Francisco and a first person account of what it was like to travel cross-country through small town America in a VW Microbus sporting hippy-length hair.

John has just completed a collection of poems and is actively seeking a publisher. As with the Beats, he enjoys writing poems based on his real life experiences. The poems span many years of writing as well as many years of personal experiences. To listen to John's appearance on Poetry Spoken Here, click here.

Freesia McKee Takes Poetry To Prisons

Poet-activist Freesia McKee cares about more than simply writing and publishing her own poetry. Along with some of her friends and fellow writers she’s been collecting books for prisoners, leading workshops behind bars and helping increase awareness of prison life and writing by working with a special issue of Cream City Review, a literary magazine published out of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee.

McKee and her fellow writers are especially motivated by the incarceration crisis in her home state. She reports that “Wisconsin's prison population has grown 1000% in the last 40 years, compared with a 24% increase in the state's general population. Such growth is a reflection of the nation-wide mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander and others have deemed "the New Jim Crow." Proportionately, Wisconsin locks up more Native American and African American men than any other state, and Milwaukee houses what may be the most heavily incarcerated area of its size in the world--the 53206 zip code. The work of Wisconsin's creative writers is acutely tied to ending mass incarceration once and for all.”

In her Poetry Spoken Here interview McKee lists ways to get involved with bringing poetry and literature into prisons. For a list of organizations involved with prison literacy, getting books inside prisons, donating books, and more, click here.

Brian Laidlaw: Poet and Songwriter

Brian Laidlaw, featured in the Poetry Spoken Here special program on poetry and music, is a poet and songwriter currently living in Minneapolis who began setting his songs to his music while an undergraduate at Stanford. After working seasonal jobs and touring for several years as a solo folksinger, he moved to Minneapolis for an MFA at the University of Minnesota. He received a Songwriting Consultant credit on the Grammy Award-Winning album Can You Canoe? By the Okee Dokee Brothers.

There are a lot of poets who incorporate music when performing their poems. However, Laidlaw has an unusual approach to putting poetry and music together. Rather than presenting a poem with supportive musical accompaniment, he alters the original poem to make it more effective as a song lyric. Often, when altering the poems he looks for ways to increase repetition of key ideas in order to give listeners a better opportunity to keep up with the flow of information being presented.

Brian knows that it takes conscious effort to reach excellence as both a poet and songwriter and so he keeps pushing his skills in both arenas. The product of that effort, The Stuntman, a book of poems from Milkweed Editions, comes with a companion album. Click here to listen to a sampling of music that goes with The Stuntman.  Additional songs are posted on his website. To hear him talk about his strategies, as a poet, for writing songs check out the Music and Poetry episode of the podcast.

Poetry Foundation Shows its Cool with Bob Kaufman Documentary

There are some who are loathe to refer to the Poetry Foundation as cool, but their just-released spring schedule reports that, come poetry month, they will be presenting a program with more than a touch of cool.  Thursday, April 21, 6:00 PM the documentary film, “and when I die I won’t stay dead,” the life of Bob Kaufman will be shown at the Foundation.  Kaufman, an African-American poet who was active among the beats in the 1950s and 60s, was founding editor of the journal Beatitude along with Allen Ginsberg and others. At one point in his life, he didn’t speak for 10 years following a vow of silence he took following the assassination of John F. Kennedy

Much of Kaufman’s poetry was jazz-inspired. The critic Raymond Foye called him the quintessential jazz poet. In France, where we was well-known, some referred to him as the “black American Rimbaud.”  Check out this profile for more on Bob Kaufman.

Billy Woodberry, who will introduce the film is a co-founder of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, a group aimed at creating a new Black cinema, and a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts. The program will occur at the Foundation at 61 W. Superior in Chicago and is free, as is the norm for Foundation programs.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's Book of a Thousand Prompts

The Book of a Thousand Prompts

In talking with Maria Mazziotti Gillan about her book, Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (Miroland/Guernica, 2013), the conversation never got around to one of the books extremely valuable resources for writers—over a hundred pages filled with 1000+ prompts.

Gillan advises randomly selecting a prompt and writing non-stop for 20 minutes. She suggests that you then put the writing away for a while and return to it later to discover what you wrote and decide if you might want to use what you’ve written to produce a poem. Free writing of this type naturally generates a lot of uninteresting text, but it also produces gems of insight and description that can provide the seeds of further writing, be it poetry or memoir.

Here’s a randomly chosen sampling:

The morning after.

Missing you.

Where are they gone?

What we once thought was ugly.

When am I most alone?

Gillan’s entire book is predicated on the idea that we all have personal stories worth telling and, as the subtitle suggests, we need to find the courage to tell them. For more about the book from Maria herself, give a listen to the conversation in Poetry Spoken Here Podcast #13.

Jeff Poniewaz: One Year Gone

Collage from the Memorial Service

It’s been roughly a year since Milwaukee poet laureate Jeff Poniewaz succumbed to cancer on December 13, 2014.

At the Woodland Pattern Poetry Marathon in January, 2015, his life-long companion, Antler spoke and read Jeff’s poems to honor him.  Jeff was a fixture on the Milwaukee poetry scene and is greatly missed by his many friends in the literary and activist community. He was a regular participant at the Marathon and his absence will be strongly felt at the at the one that will happen 10 a.m. Saturday, January 30, through 1 a.m. the next morning. Click here for details.

Several months later, a large crowd turned out for a memorial service to offer their words and poems his honor. If you’d like to hear Antler’s Marathon tribute, click here.