Here is a letter to Steve Anderson, a poet and friend, who expressed interest in exploring the concept of Milwaukee “Spirit Poets” to compliment the work of the venerable “Earth Poets” of Milwaukee.

Hey Steve,

A communion of spirit poets, to me, would invove the poets creating a vision of their friends and the friends of their fellow spirit poets having some good times and poetry, music, dance, and theatre offerings of large and small gatherings.

I would like to read a poem with about 4 or 5 other “Spirit Poets” at the St. Patrick’s All City Gathering on St. Patrick’s/St. Bridgid’s Day, March 17, 2008, between 6 and 9 p.m.

I would like to do the same at a gathering of the Domes, when Sandy Foloran presents some of her new offerings to the people at a celebration occasion, that includes, as does the St. Patrick’s event, poetry, music, dance, and food.

I would like to do the same at one of the feature events to mark the re-opening of the Avalon Theatre on KK in Bay View.

And, finally, I would like to do this at a small gathering of 12 at Swee and Lisa’s Permaculture Garden and Sanctuary on Lincoln, near KK and their Future Greens store, sometime this early Fall.

I would like your blessing to invite as many of 5 of my poet friends to be part of the “Spirit Poets” group. I would hope you would consider inviting 5 of your poet friends to do the same. If you have friends who don’t quite yet know they could be Spirit Poets, I hope you will consider inspiring them to do so. I would like to do the same. Many of my friends “are” poetry. All they would have to do was spend a while allowing their poetry to pour forth from their overflowing hearts and pure minds.

I would also like to help Milwaukee poets harness the power of the internet to promote their poetry and poetry!

Here are some reviews of “My Milwaukee” I welcome you to share with friends who might wish to consider partnering with us in this worthy experiment. I would appreciate any promotional material for your poetry that you can dig up, as well as promotional material for the poets you recruit, should be find the Spirit moving you to do so.

Olde Godsil’s “My Milwaukee” and “The Hidden Pleasures of Permaculture in the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas”

Olde Godsil with Shelby Keefe ,
cover atist for “My Milwaukee” and
The Hidden Pleasures of Permaculture”
at the Milwaukee Renaissance.com Benefit
at The Coffee House, Winter 2007

Picture by Tess Reiss

My Milwaukee (Backpocket), by Olde Godsil
by “Dave Luhrssen” <dave@shepherd-express.com>

August 02, 2007

Jim Godsil is someone everyone in Milwaukee meets sooner or later. The intellectual roofer and soulful artisan has conducted countless campaigns by e-mail and in person on behalf of bettering local social and cultural life—calling out the treasures hidden in the city’s history, the potential of the present and the promise of the future. In a booklet of poetry that catches his visions in short, lyrical phrases, Godsil addresses his thoughts to “We Sons and Daughters/Of the Sweet Inland Seas,” the Great Lakes bioregion that might function quite well outside the orbit of Washington, D.C. Godsil’s human preoccupation with his homeland, Milwaukee, has universal resonance at a time when globalization has become the engine of global catastrophe. Gracing My Milwaukee’s cover is a painting of a local landmark, Soldier’s Home, by Shelby Keefe, another artist filled with the unique spirit of our Great Lakes city.

http://www.shepherd-express.com

The poems in “My Milwaukee” can also be viewed on line at

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/OldeGodsil/Poetry

• “The Harlem Renaissance Is Moving to Milwaukee”
• “Zen Peddlers in the Noosphere”
• “When Milwaukee Becomes the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas”
• “You’re Delicious!”
• “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”

Here’s a link to the poems and my second vanity publication by the Holy City Press…

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/OldeGodsil/TheForbiddenPleasuresOfPermaculture

On this page…

• The Mouse and the Worm Transformed Milwaukee
• Dreaming of Life as an Avant Guard City Worm Farmer
• When Milwaukee Starts Feeling Like Some Kind of Holy City
• City Farmers
• When Milwaukee Becomes The Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas
• Confessions of a Sissy Roofer
• And Milwaukee Evolved into a Permaculture City With 10,000 Rain Barrels for 10,000 Kitchen Gardens
• Milwaukee’s Homeland Security Threat: No Food Self-Sufficiency
• Milwaukee’s Resurrection
• Is America’s Resurrection.
• The Marriage of Art, Preservation, and Urban Agriculture
• Thank God Plants Eat Sun and Make Bugs High
• Red White and Blue Are Now Green
• Best and Highest Use
• My Brain’s Euphoria Circuits
• My Milwuakee, cont’d
• Our Family’s Destiny
• Good Food and Beauty
• Let’s Fix Our Eyes

Reviews Might Trump The Reviewed

”Forbidden Pleasures of Permaculture in the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas”

Grace Lee Boggs

> From: Grace Boggs <glbg@sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: Forbidden Pleasures of Permaculture in the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas
> Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:22:12 −0400
> To: “cmtyroof@execpc.com” <Godsil@milwaukeerenaissance.com>
>
> Thanks for much for these poems, Godsil. They’re wonderful!!!!

”My Milwaukee”

Harvard’s Biodun Jeyifo(truth in peddling…BJ is my daughter Megan’s Father-in-Law)

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.

Writing also to ask for your address - once again - so I can send you the piece
of adire cloth that I brought for you from home in Ibadan. I spent some of the
most memorable times of my childhood at the feet of my great grandmother who
was a dyer in this adire cloth tradition which creates pure graphic poetry out
of shades of deep indigo blue…

Be well, comrade…

BJ

Jane Davis Weida(nurse, attorney, Godil’s friend and roofing client)

Hey Jim,

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. They 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

Jeff Eagan(Life-Long Human Rights Advocate, Riverwest Leader, Community and Elderly Organizer and Executive Director, Life-Long Dear Friend)

From: “Jeff Eagan” <jeff.eagan@verizon.net>
Subject: RE: Seek “Review Words” of “My Milwaukee”
To: “‘cmtyroof@execpc.com’” <Godsil@milwaukeerenaissance.com>
Cc: “‘Eagan, Jeff’” <Jeff.Eagan@eh.doe.gov>

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!!!

Singer/Songwriter Howard Lewis of Embedded Reporter,

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 tomatos may grow.

Stephanie Shipley of Amaranth Bakery and Cafe

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.