For inspiration, I tend to be pulled to the lake.

We have some beautiful lakefront areas in the city where you can sit and write and be lost for hours and let the waves come back over you.

Let your writing go back over them.

It's it's kind of a symbiotic relationship in a way.

I write poetry mainly because it's an outlet for me to speak my philosophies in life.

One big one overarching one being that we're in this together.

This is all a collective thing that's happening and we have to find ways to work with each other and struggle with the good and the bad things that happen to, you know, make the best of it and keep walking forward.

You know, just as everybody's a unique individual, anybody that sits down to write a poem is going to be different than me, which is a really cool aspect about it.

I write every day.

It just kind of helps me center myself.

[Music] [Music] My main forms of art are music and poetry.

[Music] They both kind of have pieces of storytelling in them in a way is direct to people you're trying to reach and direct within yourself as [Music] well.

We are at Woodland Pattern.

It is the epicenter of poetry in Milwaukee, maybe even the state.

They do so much for the poets in the city and around the country.

It's had a huge impact on me as far as them supporting my art and just helping me along and teaching me so many things.

You can take different programs here to learn about writing poetry and stuff like that.

So, I've been able to do that a bunch.

So, yeah, it's a great place.

Just a couple of influences that have had a big impact on my life.

Firstly, Frank O'Hara.

His book, Lunch Poems, kind of changed the way that I thought about poetry because I found it right about the time that I found Woodland Pattern.

And it just made me see that you could just walk into the world and have wonder in your life and write about that.

And he does that very beautifully.

Also, Roberto Harrison, uh, who's a poet from Milwaukee, actually.

He's been kind of a mentor to me in a lot of ways, just by like showing me different authors that I would have never heard of and stuff that he thought I might be into.

And by, you know, reading his poems and seeing his beautiful artwork has influenced me tremendously.

Lastly, today, I brought a book by Bob Kaufman, who's a poet from San Francisco back in the 60s, generally termed the beat poet.

Bob Kaufman's ideas do leap across the page and it's it's kind of like um in music when you have a singer they say they leap across the speakers to you.

He meets you where you're at but it's in such a weird tangle of phrases and ideas that you're just left with the feeling of wow I don't really know what that was but that was really exciting.

Let's do that again.

you know, you can feel everything in them and they're just vibrant pieces of art and they make me aspire to be able to someday write something like that.

What drove me to write Death Moan was some of the associated traumas with what happened in Minneapolis.

[Music] The first poem in the book came the day after that started.

Shoe store is burning.

I'm flexing out front.

This convenient circus crawls.

It lets them keep cozy gentrification chimera perch.

Minnesota nice upside your head.

And that is one that just came absolutely fast.

And I knew that there was something happening.

Sometimes you can just feel like a manuscript is being formed in some way.

I am the reverent friction of the ghost, the one who convinced me to burn, the one chained to my clammy comfort.

And so like I tried to keep myself in that mind frame for a while and force myself kind of to look at it, not turn away from it.

Uh death moan is what came out of that.

Some of the motifs in my poetry rely on juxaposition existence belying the false natures.

Her holding on always like double knots banded across the expanse until it is time to let go.

Some of it now is going towards I had this idea, this thought that words are just hunks of sound and we just kind of put them together and sometimes they sound different ways with other sounds that you're putting [Music] there.

You will foresee the moon in burst blood.

Then you will see the moon in full blood bloom.

You will understand the gloom, yet you will still have no way to adjust crimson sadness.

Poetry really does allow me to think expansively just in the manner of the mundane things that happen every day in life.

You can see the universe in them.

What I'm trying to do is say what happened to me in a poetic way.

Dig a shallow grave.

Swallow and baptize there the press of God shrapnel from the sky harvesting the earth its inhabitants device operating as you kneel often times I don't understand a lot of poetry that I read so what I do is I let it wash over me and as it washes over me flexcks of things go by and I'm like oh what is that and then something else is popping by the poem can mean different things today than it can mean tomorrow even.

You know, I think the meaning of the art is to inspire, to show other people that I may not get this art, this piece of art, but this person had this feeling in his soul that he could put something, make something and put it out.

Maybe I could do something like that.

Art is an inspiration machine to me.

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