Lisa Vihos + Sunset Park
Lisa Vihos
Lisa received her BA in Art History from Vassar College and an MA in Art History from the University of Michigan. She spent more than two decades as an art museum educator, helping people of all ages recognize their own creativity and the transformative power of art. She is an award-winning poet with two Pushcart Prize nominations, and numerous awards from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, as well as the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2016, she was awarded Vassar’s Time Out Grant for her project, still on-going, to build a children’s reading garden at a school in Malawi. She has published four chapbooks, her most recent being, Fan Mail from Some Flounder (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2018). She is one of the founders of Stoneboat Literary Journal and has been the journal’s poetry and arts editor since 2010. Lisa blends her interests in visual art, poetry, and public spaces to create venues in which people can share their voices through programs such as 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Poetic Pairings, and other reading series and workshop opportunities.
Visit Lisa’s website and poetry
www.lisavihos.com
This Partner Project
Community Stewardship: The Birth of Sunset Park
Lisa explored and sung the praises of Sunset Park, a small hidden gem below the bluff where North Avenue bends into 3rd Street. Her poetry project includes her own personal meditations on what it means to steward a small stretch of the lakefront, and resulted in a documentation through words and mixed media that she developed as the project unfolded.
Lisa created opportunities for community members of all ages to take in and ponder the inherent beauty in this special place. The culmination of this initial part of the community project created a “poetry walk” along the shoreline, employing signage that presented poems created in workshops with high school students, seniors, and other members of the Sheboygan community.
May Each One Flow
From morning dew to evening rain,
water blesses the fields,
makes all things green.
Soil yearns for moisture
and by water’s touch
new life comes, prepares the harvest.
From silent spring to rushing stream
nutrients move, fish spawn,
and all is given.
Life is the river we carry unseen.
May each one flow to the great lake,
clear and clean.
First appeared in Sheboygan Insider, January 2023
Dear Water #1
The older I get,
the more like you
I become, vast
and unrelenting.
Less worry about
looks and praise,
less fear of death.
No stress, only
moving, absorbing
ebbing and flowing
tides in, tides out.
To rinse, to shed,
to make dry land fertile
so all seeds germinate.
This poem appeared in the summer 2022 issue of Bramble