Picto-Poems
10/24/2015 - 3:00pm
This event features Wisconsin Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser’s “Picto-Poems,” intersecting layers of text and image inspired by Native American pictographs. Blaeser will read the poems, visually present the art images, and discuss the examples of this new creative project. The picto-poems bring her nature and wildlife photography together with poetry to explore intersecting ideas of Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance. Others re-mix and re-examine historical images of Native peoples, or trace the connections between contemporary Indigenous experiences and indelible place markers of story. Taken from the evolving collection Ancient Light, these images invite reorientation as they blur the lines between place and spirit, between anger and humor, between image and voice.
Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose. She is also the author of the scholarly monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Blaeser has been the recipient of awards for both writing and speaking, among these a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry, a first book award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and three Pushcart Nominations. Her current creative project features “Picto-Poems” and brings her nature and wildlife photography together with poetry to explore intersecting ideas of Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She currently lives with her family in the woods and wetlands of rural Lyons Township, Wisconsin.
RECENT BOOK:
Picto-Poems
201 W. Mifflin Street
Madison, WI 53703
we couldn't do it without you:
