As Wisconsin’s newest poet laureate, Brenda Cárdenas is traveling around the state with a mission: inspiring creativity through ekphrastic poetry.
This form of poetry invites people to pen a creative response to a work of visual art. Cárdenas, a recently retired UW-Milwaukee English professor and an award-winning Mexican American author who intertwines English and Spanish in her poems, will teach ekphrasis in workshops at libraries, art museums and cultural centers, and gather the public’s resulting poems.
Then she’ll take it one step further. Those poems will go to a local visual artist to create a piece in response, which will then be used as a prompt for a new group of poets. “Poets and artists will respond to works by other poets and artists in their region,” she says.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
She’s publishing the collaborative results on wisconsinpoetlaureateproject.com, where she hopes others will join in and participate. “I’ve always wanted to see what might happen if the relay went on for much longer, like the old game of telephone.”
Cárdenas, who previously served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-12, started the state position in January and will serve through 2027. “A big part of the role is spreading the good news about poetry,” she says. “You’re trying to reach people with all levels of experience and to help people learn how to read, understand or write a poem.”
Poetry can improve one’s mental and emotional state, “especially in helping with people who have experienced trauma or isolation,” says Rita Mae Reese, co-director of the Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison and a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission that runs the program. “To help them find their voice is so powerful.”
To be considered for the laureate position, applicants must send a proposal for how they will foster poetry statewide. In that regard, Cárdenas’ interest in ekphrastic poetry has a benefit. “It gives poets who are only beginning in the genre a prompt, so they don’t have to think, ‘What am I going to write about?’” she says.
The Wisconsin Poet Laureate program was created in 2000 with a state-funded annual budget of $2,000. Since the state stopped funding the position in 2011, it’s been kept alive with contributions by arts organizations like Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern and stewardship from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. Because the position doesn’t pay a living wage – only a $3,500 stipend each year – it limits who can afford to apply for the program.
Building the website to archive her project, Cárdenas says, will eat most of her first stipend. Even so, “I was drawn to the opportunity to function as an ambassador of poetry in our state,” she says, “to share my enthusiasm for poetry with all of its mystery, surprises and emotional resonance.”
The Carmelite folds like a bat
into her ochre wings. Eyes
from all six windows conspire
flight, cloistered gaze shifting
in a suspicious wind. Everything
curls into this spectral eve: snails
coiling from the veins of leaves,
curtains unlashing – sprung tongues.
Released, a flurry of onion-skin spells
flock to lips. Whose vow will break
against an orange sky? Whose swoop
and whir, whose murmur?
Sister is a closed umbrella
gathering thunder in the V of her cloak,
a storm in her singular step.
— From Trace, Red Hen Press, 2023
