Picto-Poems
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.
Kimberly Blaeser
Kimberly Blaeser, writer, photographer, and scholar, served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-16. She is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and the 2020 bi-lingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance; and editor of Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. A Professor of English and Indigenous Studies at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Blaeser also serves on faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program in Santa Fe. Included in more than 80 anthologies with selections of her work translated into multiple languages including Spanish, French, Norwegian, Indonesian, Chinese, and Hungarian, Blaeser has performed at over 300 venues around the globe from arctic Norway to the Kingdom of Bahrain. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic poetry have been featured in many venues including the exhibits “Ancient Light” and “Visualizing Sovereignty.” She lives in rural Lyons Township, Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Blaeser is founder of the literary organization In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations’ Poets.