Wendy Vardaman

Untitled

Madison, WI

Wendy Vardaman, Madison, WI, is a poet, writer, editor, blogger, publisher, and mother. She works with words more than visual material, except when doing graphic design and book covers. She’s been admiring visual poetry for a long time and tries it out on paper or digitally sometimes. She enjoyed the chance to bring visual and poetic thinking together a little more in “Owed to UTerUS,” which displays the lines of a visual poem in expanding circles from the printed uterus, with poetic “Idioms from the RePublic of UTerUS” scribbled around the other poem. The idioms take expressions about other body parts and replace those words with “uterus,” which has no idiomatic expressions. The Xpansive UTerUS rejects invisibility: is language and body, is inside and outside, is connection, is US.  Wendy Vardaman (wendyvardaman.com) is the author of Obstructed View (Fireweed Press), co-editor/webmaster of Verse Wisconsin (versewisconsin.org), and co-founder/co-editor of Cowfeather Press (cowfeatherpress.org). She is one of Madison, Wisconsin’s two Poets Laureate (2012-2015).