How do you describe dreams?
Mathias Svalina describes them as, “the place where with all utility taken away from the mind, it just becomes an artist. When there’s no use for the mind to accomplish things, [to dream] is a creative act.”
Svalina is a poet who writes and delivers “dreams” – short surrealist narratives on paper – by bike in different cities for a few weeks at a time. His Dream Delivery Service is coming to Milwaukee Sept. 11-21 with Riverwest’s Woodland Pattern.
Svalina will hand-deliver dreams to subscribers within a 4-mile radius of Woodland Pattern (720 E. Locust St.) each morning at dawn. Anyone in Milwaukee who does not live within that 4-mile radius is welcome to subscribe and will receive their dreams by mail each day. Milwaukee residents can subscribe online, free of charge.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Svalina created the Dream Delivery Service in 2014 out of Denver, a way for him to create more poems in the same mode and share his work with the world. Once he took his dreams on the road he figured he would do it for about a year – eight years later and he is still delivering dreams to people’s doorstep.
The poems are written in the way people tell others about their dreams.
“They typically start off by placing you somewhere,” Svalina says. “You’re in a garden, all of the plants are growing too fast, and something happens that is outside the logic reality.”
Today, the Dream Delivery Service has been conducted in around 45 cities, some including a Dream History Tour. Based on typical city-history walking tours, Svalina guides participants through a neighborhood pointing out buildings and spaces while telling invented fables and myths about them. The tours combine facts from history and surrealist innovation.
Svalina led a Dream History tour of Riverwest this past Sunday. “It was entertaining,” Svalina says. “It’s also a way to use poetry and surrealism in a public space and do the kinds of things that are so often just at readings or just in books in a kind of embodied way that’s connected to the neighborhood.”
During his time in Milwaukee, Salina will participate in other events with Woodland Pattern, as well. Poetry in the Park, a summer reading series in Juneau Park, is set to feature Svalina and three other writers on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 6:30 p.m.
On Sunday, Sept 15., from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. the second annual ‘Brunchraiser’ will take place at The Cooperage to benefit some of Woodland Pattern’s programs, gallery exhibitions and visual art programming. With the theme “Sunday Best,” a surrealist poetry confessional booth will be attended by Svalina.
“Them not knowing I was raised Catholic and an altar boy, I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to ask me this,” Svalina says. “I was very quick to agree to that.”
Attendees will have the chance to “confess their sins” to Svalina, and he will quickly write up a surrealist set of penance for them.
On top of the Dream Delivery Service, Svalina is the author of eight books, most recently Thank You Terror, which was published by Big Lucks Books. Throughout his life, he has led writing workshops in universities, community spaces, prisons and libraries.
For more information about Svalina’s time in Milwaukee, visit the Woodland Pattern website. You can also check out Svalina on Instagram.
