Laura Zastrow
Mireles reading at a Jan. 14 “Stories and Spirits” event at Yahara Bay Distillery.
If you see poems etched into the sidewalks along Williamson Street or displayed on Madison Metro Transit buses, or hear them recited at Common Council meetings, you’re witnessing traditions established by Madison’s poets laureate.
Madison’s newest poet laureate, Oscar Mireles, executive director of the Omega School for adults seeking to complete their GED/HSED, is looking forward to establishing his own traditions. He’s the first Latino to hold the position, and the first male since inaugural poet laureate John Tuschen left the post in 2000.
“I want to build upon what other poets laureate have done,” says Mireles, 60, the editor of three volumes featuring works by Wisconsin-based Latino writers published under the series name I Didn’t Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin.
His calendar is filling up quickly. Although Mireles didn’t officially begin his two-year tenure until Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he estimates he’s received about 50 calls from organizers of various groups in Madison — including the Madison Reading Project and Arts Wisconsin’s Arts Day — since Mayor Paul Soglin announced in early December that Mireles would replace outgoing co-poets laureate Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman.
“I knew I was going to be little more high profile,” Mireles laughs. “But it was also a little more than I expected.”
On Sunday, Jan. 31, Mireles will be the guest of honor at a reception and poetry reading at Centro Hispano, 810 W. Badger Rd., from 2 to 4 p.m. Former poets laureate also will read, as will other notable poets from the city. The event is free and open to the public.
It will be the first official effort by Mireles to achieve one of his goals as poet laureate: uniting local writers of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and music in mutual support and collaboration.
“There’s a lot of writing going on in Madison, and people are doing good things,” he says. “I want to bring them together to look at what we have in common and how we can support each other’s activities.”
“[The poet laureate position] is a testament to our cultural values, civil discourse and exchange of ideas,” says Karin Wolf, arts program administrator for the Madison Arts Commission, which oversees the position. “Madison was one of the first cities in the country to have a poet laureate, and that’s something I can brag about.”
The generic definition of “poet laureate” — a local poet officially appointed by a government organization or official to write poems for special events — doesn’t seem broad enough to cover the role poet laureate has played in Madison.
Since 1977, five people have held the position and taken lead roles in creating verse for everything from Wisconsin’s Sesquicentennial in 1998 to the 2011 protests against Act 10 at the State Capitol.
During his first term as mayor, in 1977, Soglin appointed Tuschen as the city’s first poet laureate. Tuschen served for 23 years and organized poetry readings, performed in a variety of venues, and is credited with bringing beat-era performance poetry to Madison. He died from an esophageal hemorrhage in 2005 at age 56.
Former Mayor Susan Bauman appointed Andrea Musher to succeed Tuschen in 2001. Musher, who is now a retired UW-Whitewater English and women’s studies professor, sought to formalize the position by bringing it under the Madison Arts Commission umbrella. Musher also established the John Tuschen Poet Laureate Memorial Fund through the Madison Community Foundation, which provides a small honorarium for new poets laureate to begin projects, and she’s eager to see what Mireles has planned.
“I have no idea what Oscar will pursue, and that what’s cool,” says Musher, who says she can imagine a combination salsa party-poetry reading on the roof of Monona Terrace on a beautiful summer night. “Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Oscar can go anywhere with this.”
In 2007, former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz (now an Isthmus contributor) named Fabu Phillis Carter — known simply as “Fabu” — as Madison’s poet laureate. During her tenure, Fabu brought a multicultural perspective to the role, introducing poetry to parts of the community not typically exposed to it. Her poetry is located in the Atrium entrance of the Park Street Villager Mall and on the Williamson Street sidewalk in front of the Weary Traveler Freehouse.
Soglin, elected for his third stint as mayor in 2011, named Busse and Vardaman to the shared position in 2012. Together they established quarterly poetry readings at Madison Common Council meetings that continue to this day.
The most recent reading, on Dec. 1, 2015, was “Applying for Citizenship,” written and presented by Rubén Medina, a professor in the UW’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Lines included “The White House / should be moved / to Puerto Rico / the Congress to Harlem / the United Nations/ to Wounded Knee” and “All military forces / in foreign lands / should return / within 30 days.”
Council members applauded loudly when he was done.
“Here we were, standing before a political body, delivering a poem that was very critical, in a civil manner,” Wolf says. “If we could all do that, the world would be a better place.”
Mireles agrees, saying he hopes to use his experience in adult education to help make Madison a better place through the written and spoken word.
“I’m a grassroots writer, in terms of trying to make my writing accessible,” he says. “Working with adults going back to school has helped me focus on that accessibility.”
Mireles also plans to make appearances at local elementary schools, especially those in Latino communities. “When young people see a writer of color, someone who looks like them, they get excited,” he says. “It makes a difference.”
He also expects to publish his first children’s book this year, The World’s Most Beautiful Piñata, in collaboration with the Madison Children’s Museum, and he’s excited about the challenge of bringing poetry to a broader audience.
“Poetry has been with us for generations, but we’ve almost made it inaccessible to some people,” he says. “Poetry can bring intellect and emotion to an issue. Part of my role has to be helping people see how poetry is more than grammar and structure. It’s about having a voice.”
Elvis Presley Was a Chicano
In the latest edition
of the National Enquirer
it was revealed that
Elvis Presley,
Yes...the legendary Elvis
was a Chicano
Fans were outraged
critics cite his heritage
as an important influence
I was stunned
Can you believe it?
Well...I didn’t really at first
but then I remembered...
his jet black hair
you know with the little curl in front
sort of reminded me of my cousin “Chuy”
Elvis always wore
either those tight black pants
like the ones in West Side Story
or a baggy pinstriped Zoot Suit
Pachuco style
with a pair of blue suede shoes to match
Then I figured no, it couldn’t be
So I traced his story back to his hometown
a little pueblo outside Tupelo, Mississippi
a son of migrant sharecroppers
looking for a way out
of rural poverty
Let’s see...Elvis joined the army
Maybe he enlisted with his “buddies”
They never made a movie about it
But they fought hard anyways
I read somewhere that Chicanos
have won more Silver Stars
and Purple Hearts than any other ethnic group
Maybe Elvis was a Chicano
I wasn’t convinced yet!
Elvis was a swooner, a dancer, a ladies man
and always won the girl
that hated him
in the beginning of the movie
he had to be a Latin lover or something
even Valentino and Sinatra had a
little Italian in them
Elvis played guitar
like my Uncle Carlos,
always hitting the same four notes
over and over again
But now, I think I have figured it out
It was probably that Colonel Parker’s idea
to change his cultural identity,
since it was just after the second big war
and the Zoot Suit Riots
it wasn’t the right time
for a Chicano Superstar
to be pelvising around
the Ed Sullivan Show,
late on a Sunday night
I think it was just a hoax,
to convince more people to buy that newspaper
If Elvis Presley really
was a Chicano
He wouldn’t have settled
to die alone,
in an empty mansion
With no family around,
No “familia” around
Who cared enough
to cry
— Oscar Mireles
