Bramble Summer 2021 print issue now available.

Editor’s Note

Poetry often brings both the reader and the writer face to face with the complex, interwoven layers of our experience. What I love about Rosy Petri’s cover art is how it offers a visual and joyful representation of this intricacy. This issue of Bramble aims to convey a similar quality in words. With this goal in mind, it gives a special place to multi-vocal poems.

Several poems include a remembered, or an imagined, voice to contrast and deepen the experience of the poem. Other poems offer extended dialogue, or draw on print sources, use erasure to bring forth a poem embedded in found text, or take the shape of letters that conjure up the presence of another even if the other does not speak. In the concluding haibun, the prose and the haiku speak to each other. The centos weave together multiple strands to create a multi-faceted voice.

The single-voice poem is an established standard in the Anglo-American tradition. The single voice may be that of an observer or dreamer, memoirist or historian, hermit or social justice activist, or many other possibilities. I have written in that single voice tradition and still do. I also had at least two experiences that opened for me a door to poems that weave together multiple voices.

The first of these experiences was at the 2014 Split This Rock Poetry of Provocation and Witness Festival in Washington DC. In addition to readings and panel discussions, the Festival includes one collaborative poetry event in the larger community. This particular year that event took place in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Each poet in turn read one line of their choice celebrating the free exchange of ideas or protesting the surveillance state. The overall effect was a spontaneously constructed cento. I was amazed at the way lines read consecutively even in this unplanned way often resonated with each other. We were making sense together. It was amazing. A similar amazing coincidence happened twice with submissions for this issue, with poems that used similar images and seemed to speak directly to one another.

(The Split This Rock cento is available online.)

The second and even more powerful event took place on the coldest day in January 2016. Poets and UW Milwaukee professors Kimberly Blaeser and Margaret Noodin planned an action in defense of native effigy mounds being threatened by a proposal in the state legislature to loosen the policy protecting them. Accompanied by the Overpass Light Brigade, they planned this action, titled Maada’ookiidaa Minowakiing (Let us share in Milwaukee), that would gather poets together at the site of the mound in Milwaukee’s Lake Park. It would include a speech by Margaret Noodin who teaches the language of the Ojibwe people at UW Milwaukee, Noodin’s original song, "Gimikwenimigo (We Remember You)," sung by Noodin and Kim Blaeser, dance, prayer, and the holding up of the OLB signs that spelled various phrases, including mikwenim and Sacred Site. But how to involve all the poets who volunteered to come? What could a group of poets do?

I thought of the powerful Split This Rock event and suggested we compose a cento. Kim, Margaret, and Sheboygan poet Lisa Vihos put out a call for lines for the cento, arranged the eighteen lines suggested in responses to the call, and sent a draft to the group for their input and approval. Then on that minus twenty-degree afternoon, we gathered, hand warmers in our mittens, ice fishing boots on our feet, scarves around our faces lowered only for the twenty seconds when it was our turn to read a line. In addition to Kim, Lisa, and me, the designated readers included Brenda Cárdenas, Roberto Harrison, Jodi Melamed, and Chuck Stebelton. Kim also spoke briefly about the proposed bill and read a poem written for the event, "Tribal Mound, Earth Sutra." That poem is now included in her book Copper Yearning.

Despite the cold air, the event generated a warmth that renews itself for me every time I call it to mind. Given our action and that of other defenders gathered at the state capitol, the legislature tabled the proposal to disturb and dishonor the mounds. The cento, Cento for Shared Space: The Mounds at Our Feet, and a photograph of the event are included in this issue.

Poetry does not sub-divide, like prose, into fiction and nonfiction. As a result, poetry may be painted into a memoir-like corner with the voice of the speaker identified too quickly as the unambiguous voice of a single author speaking about events in her, or his, personal past. Of course, many fine poems are of this type, but poetry balks at being narrowly confined in any way that squelches the imagination. Poetry also calls into being and opens up other spaces. It relishes the fun of language play, indulgence in patterns of sound, the serendipity of putting lines in conversation with each other, the ability to imagine what does not yet exist, to defend neglected heritage, to build the community we need.

Poetry is an epistemology. It offers a way of knowing that is different from analysis, where an entity is divided into its component parts. It has metaphor at its heart, a way of seeing likeness and the possibility for connection. During the pandemic, many of us longed for the presence of others in our lives when public venues closed and even our homes limited visitors. These last eighteen months have given us abundant reason to welcome additional voices into our poems. We are more with poetry in our lives than we are without it. We are more with each other than we are isolated and alone.

Many thanks to Editor Christina Kubasta for all the ways she encourages Wisconsin poets and poetry, not the least of which is her warm welcome of my suggestion to feature multi-vocal poems in this issue. Sincere thanks to all the Bramble staff and to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets for their work to support this impressive journal and further Wisconsin’s reputation as a place for poetry. Most of all, hearty thanks to all the contributors of poems for this issue of Bramble.

Margaret Rozga
June 2021

Margaret Rozga Photo Credit: T J Lambert — Margaret Rozga
Photo Credit: T J Lambert

As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Margaret Rozga co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Her fifth book of poems is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021).

Artist Bio

Rosy Petri is a mother, artist, and storyteller from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2020, Petri received the Mildred Harpole Artist of the Year award from the City of Milwaukee Arts Board and was selected as a Mary L. Nohl Emerging Artist Fellow. In 2019, as the 11th Pfister Artist in Residence, she created a space to showcase her fabric portraits, record podcast interviews, and celebrate traditions of the African diaspora. The prior year, Petri was a Milwaukee Artist Resource Network mentee under artist Della Wells. Petri’s work can be viewed in several prominent Milwaukee locations, including the Pfister Hotel, where Shavonda’s Bridal High Tea, a legacy piece, commemorates her residency; Northwestern Mutual’s Giving Gallery, where her gestural portrait series TOGETHER is featured; and at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, where her MKE WI series is installed outside the county executive’s office. Petri’s art and fine craft can be found at www.thisisparadisehome.com