Faces of Milwaukee: Antler

The subject of today's portrait is poet Brad Burdick, better known as Antler. Born in Wauwatosa, he became interested in poetry in middle school inspired by the early American poets, in particular Walt Whitman. He met his lifelong partner and fellow poet Jeff Poniewaz as a teenager, who turned him on to the work of Alan Ginsberg. After seeing Ginsberg read in Milwaukee and Madison, the pair invited him to stay with them while he was in town, and when they later saw him read in San Francisco, Poniewaz convinced Antler to give Ginsberg some of his poems. When Ginsberg returned to Milwaukee later that year, he told Antler how much he liked his poetry, and this inspired Antler to send him a collection of poems when he felt it had reached book length. With enthusiastic support from Ginsberg and poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, it was published as Last Words through Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore. City Lights would also publish Antler's 1980 collection Factory.

Antler's poetry frequently uses themes of nature, wilderness, and environmentalism, spiritual and sexual energy, and his identity and experience as a gay man. In 1985, he won the Whitman Prize from the Walt Whitman Association, given to the poet "whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry," and Ginsberg described him as "one of Whitman's `poets and orators to come`". He was named poet laureate of Milwaukee in 2002 and 2003, and remains active as a poet and a supporter of poetry and other arts in Milwaukee today.