Jeff Poniewaz & Antler
Antler’s epic poem Factory was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the City Lights Pocket Poet Series in 1980. Antler’s book Last Words was published by Ballantine in 1986. Antler: The Selected Poems was published in 2000. Allen Ginsberg called Antler “one of Whitman’s ‘poets and orators to come’.” Antler won the 1987 Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually “to an outstanding younger poet” by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City, and the 1985 Walt Whitman Award, given annually to an author “whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry.” The citation accompanying the Whitman Award stated: “His poems make audible the words of the earth, with original energy, insouciance, and affectionate comradeliness toward all beings.”
Antler’s poems have appeared in hundreds of periodicals, including: City Lights Review, New Directions Journal, Whole Earth Review, Utne Reader, Exquisite Corpse, New York Quarterly, Wilderness and The Sun. His poems have also appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Erotic by Nature, Son of the Male Muse, Earth Prayers, The Soul Unearthed–Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal through Nature, Wild Song–Poems of the Natural World, What Book!?–Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop, The Journey Home: The Literature of Wisconsin through Four Centuries, and American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century.
He has taught at Esalen Institute in California, Omega Institute outside New York City, Antioch College in Ohio, and the Kerouac Poetics School in Boulder.
He was chosen by Friends of Milwaukee Public Library to be Milwaukee’s poet laureate during 2002-04. In 2003 the Councilof Wisconsin Writers chose him to receive its Major Achievement Award. In 2004 he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from UW-Milwaukee, from which he received a BA in Anthropology in 1969 and an MA in English in 1970. When not wildernessing or traveling to teach and perform poetry, he lives near the Milwaukee River in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.