Main Street Wisconsin

A place for poets to gather.

Poems About Wisconsin Protests,
February 18, 2011-September 11, 2011

Heart, by Matthew Stolte

Editors' Notes

One Month In, March 18, 2011, by Sarah Busse
The Essay That I Begin Writing While Walking to the Wisconsin Capitol Trying to Discern the Right Question, 2/24/11, by Wendy Vardaman

Poems by Dates

February 18-24
February 25-March 3
March 4-10
March 11-17
March 18-24
March 25-April 7
April 8-30
May 1-31
Summer (June 1-September 11)

More Relevant Prose

News About Wisconsin's Poet Laureate Position

Special Message from the WFOP President: WI Poet Laureate Commission ‘De’commisioned, by Lester Smith

More Than Words, by Katie Vaughan

From Milwaukee's Poet Laureate, Brenda Cárdenas:
On Wisconsin 2: Dispatches from Poets on the Ground

Contributors

Call for Poems About Wisconsin Protests

The Main Street Wisconsin issue, "Poems About Wisconsin Protests," is now closed. The editors of Verse Wisconsin invite you to send poems about the protests, as well as other well-crafted political poetry (and other work) to our regular issues of VW. See the Submissions page for details, and watch for future Main Street Wisconsin calls.

Please download a pdf of "14 Broadsides" selected from these poems in March, 2011. Broadsides were distributed at VW events through the spring, and you can print, copy, cut & pass these out at upcoming community & political events. Thanks for helping to put poems about the Wisconsin protests out into the world!

We're proud that poetry publications such as Verse Wisconsin offer another kind of forum for people to meet, outside of, though not disconnected from, daily political life. Whatever our different stripes publicly or privately, we all sit down to the blank page or screen, and try to catch a little reality on the page, somehow, someway.

As editors at Verse Wisconsin, it's core to our mission to value diverse voices in poetry. We try to provide a forum that encourages conversation between acquaintances old and new. We hope, in some small way, that these conversations and connections play out in larger arenas as well. If nothing else, maybe it helps us to remember that even as we struggle to find a way forward, we're all part of a common, human family.