By Godsil
I am partnering with Chris Ward to create paperback books modestly priced that express the new spirit carrying Milwaukee and the cities and countrysides of the Great Lakes into some new kind of civilization. Here is our first offering, My Milwaukee, by Olde Godsil.
My Milwaukee will hopefully be available at many local bookshops. Or use the Contact page to order copies ($5 each). If you would like to consider publishing your works with Backpocket Press…just say so!
My Milwaukee on display:
Cover Painting: the “Soldier’s Home” by Shelby Keefe:
Olde Godsil With Grandchildren Kate and Rebecca, Around 2005:
The poems in My Milwaukee include:
The Harlem Renaissance Is Moving to Milwaukee
Zen Peddlers in the Noosphere
When Milwaukee Becomes the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas
You’reDelicious!
Good Food and Beauty
You’re Golden
Poison Arrows
Athenians Contra Spartans
Out of the Closet
My Milwaukee
This Is How It Looks!
Let Us Gentrify Milwaukee
Let’s Fix Our Eyes
The Sweet Politics of Savannah Baboons and Forest Bonobo
Reviews of My Milwaukee
What I treasure about your book is the gentle, loving way you urge us to be all that we can be. The poems celebrate the ordinary which is really quite extraordinary. The poems are colloquial yet worldly. You capture glimpses of pain and evil in our lives. Instead of dwelling on this your words become a salve of sorts. The offer a blueprint, if you will, for the many ways we can and do transcend the ugly. The poems make me feel that we can personally and collectively harness prized personal virtues, justice and the equation for a healthier life. We are a wonderful city and I am so happy that you are documenting this. Thank you again for giving us the book. Be well.
—Jane
This is from the Father of my daughter Megan’s fiance Okun Jeyifous. I have no idea how much of his words of praise of “My Milwaukee” are due to our friendship and how much due to other things. But I can say I am deeply honored to have a man like Biodun Jeyifo in my life. He has been the planet’s main “translator” of the works of the great Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel Prize winner for literature and an authentic democratic revolutionary of Nigeria. BJ was Wole’s student at U. of Ibadan as well as his comrade in struggles against military dictators of Nigeria. Both imprisoned. BJ now at Harvard on the basis of his magisterial work on Soyinka.
—Google "Biodun Jeyifo" for more of this great story.
Brother Godsil,
Writing also to thank you for the poetry chapbook - which I read and re-read several times with great delight and instruction. You’re a troubador in the true sense of the word, i.e the vatic sense in which the poet writes to effect magical transformations of reality and the world.
Be well, comrade…
—BJ
This is from the Mother of my daughter Megan’s fiance Okun Jeyifous. I have no idea how much of her words of praise of “My Milwaukee” are due to our friendship and how much due to other things. But I can say I am deeply honored to have a woman like Sheila Walker in my life. She is a professor of Psych at Scripps and was recently made head of the African American Studies Department at the Claremont group in L.A.
—Babamegan
Some of the poems remind me of those of Bertolt Brecht — concise and to the revolutionary point! —Shelia Walker
Maybe Walt Whitman never really died.
Perhaps New Jersey’s bardic yalper was reincarnated in the Cream City a century later as:
A robust roofer, a marketeer extraordinaire, and a social entrepreneur;
A serial monogamist who scattered his seed wisely and well, still mothering his brood;
A refugee expelled like Lot from the burning groves of the Academe, never looking back;
A Keeper of the Eternal Flame for the Fallen at the Garden of the Soldier’s Home;
An organic intellectual conducting Agorizing reappraisals; and
A Marxist from the Karl, Groucho, and Gramscian tendancies;
His name would be Jim Godsil, poet of “My Milwaukee”, a blue/red/green collar collection of manic rhymes worthy of Whitman’s handle. Do yourself a favor. Cheap enough to buy two and share with a pal, thin enough to fit into the back pocket of your jeans, pick up “My Milwaukee” and prepare to pick yourself up. Whitman lives in Bay View!!!
—Jeff Eagan, key founder and first Executive Director of ESHAC, Inc., which played major role in Riverwest’s early renaissance back in the late 1970s.
Godsil conjures-up hopeful images, grounded in the soil beneath cracking asphalt and abandoned lots. He digs deeply into our melting-pot-socialist history, reminding us that Milwaukee was built on the unflagging energy of immigrants determined to invent a new world. Celebrating that foundation, Godsil paints a vision of how this city may tug itself upward by the bootstraps, rescuing its just and noble destiny from the clutches of despair. Godsil’s poetry shines light into shadowy spaces so that tomatoes may grow.
—Singer/Songwriter Howard Lewis of Embedded Reporter
In an age of arrogance, cynicism, and when most are looking at one another with grave reserve bordering on suspicion, Godsil’s My Milwaukee reminds us that meaningful art can come from humility, from an authentic social consciousness that does not self-indulge. His words are an affirmation that kindness can be beautiful. Godsil is a poet moving forward slowly, measure by measure, always taking time to revel in the others he encounters, and to make sure we’ know we’re always welcome to move along with him.
—Stephanie Shipley, Chef, Amaranth Bakery and Cafe
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