Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body

As part of Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body - the Poetry Coalition’s second annual programming initiative on a theme of social importance - Woodland Pattern is pleased to host a reading with Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jay Besemer, and Jose-Luis Moctezuma. The reading was organized by Milwaukee Poet Laureate, Roberto Harrison. Event-specific print pieces featuring work by Nikki, Jay, and Jose-Luis will be available courtesy of Oxeye Press.

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Witness, PoetryNow podcast through the Poetry Foundation and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel from Bloof Books (2016). She lives in Wisconsin.

Born in San Gabriel, CA, Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a Mexican-American poet, translator, and editor whose poetic and critical work has been published in Jacket2, Big Bridge, FlashPoint, Chicago Review, MAKE Magazine, Cerise Press, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Spring Tlaloc Seance, was published by Projective Industries in 2016. His manuscript, Place-Discipline, was selected by Myung Mi Kim as the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize. Place-Discipline is forthcoming in Fall 2018. Moctezuma is completing a PhD in English at the University of Chicago, where he works on anglophone modernism, avant-garde politics, and visual cultures.

Jay Besemer is a poet, performer, artist and occasional editor whose books and chapbooks include The Ways of the Monster (forthcoming, KIN(D)/The Operating System 2018), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil), Telephone, Chelate (both Brooklyn Arts Press), and Aster to Daylily (Damask Press). He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. He tweets frequently @divinetailor and sometimes does things on Tumblr. Besemer’s work inhabits and engages the tense spaces where body meets land, selves meet society, illness meets expectation and language meets its own failure. In this constantly shifting setting, the poem itself is variably-embodied, and serves both maker and audience as a mode of processing and experiencing an increasingly precarious existence.

About the program:

The phrase “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live” is an excerpt from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem Flores Woman from her collection Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award in 2006.

Any and all are invited to program on this theme in March and share their projects using #MyDreamingMyLoving and #PoetryCoalition.

http://www.woodlandpattern.org/events/?event=389