Marilyn L. Taylor

Hartford Avenue Poets: Masquerades & Misdemeanors Marilyn L. Taylor

Judging from the skyrocketing number of poetry enthusiasts who read, write, and participate in poetry events nowadays, it looks like Walt Whitman was right: we Americans are celebrating ourselves and singing ourselves with a degree of enthusiasm and relevance unmatched in recent literary history. And if the art of poetry is thriving from coast to coast, nowhere is it more vibrantly alive than right here in Wisconsin?the domain that we, the Hartford Avenue Poets, call home. The Hartford Avenue Poets are eleven practitioners of poetry who convene monthly to share and critique new work. Some of us are survivors from the group?s earliest days back in 1999; others have joined more recently. Our venue is a classroom building on Hartford Avenue in Milwaukee, on the edge of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus. Each of us currently lives in or near Milwaukee, but we come from small towns, family farms, urban centers, the suburbs. Our approaches to poetry are as varied as our backgrounds, ranging from close observations of nature to matters of politics and protest; from our impressions of the local to our notions of the world at large; from expressing ourselves by way of the traditional lyric to the linguistically experimental lipogram. Never in its long history, in fact, has this group been more richly endowed with energy, ingenuity, and sheer competence. We hope that readers will find this out for themselves as they read the poems that follow. Marilyn L. Taylor Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2009-2010