MOUND ONE — experimental digital documentary poetry

Elevated view of a double-tailed turtle effigy mound on Observatory Hill on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. — Wisconsin Historical Society, "Turtle Mound on Observatory Hill (University of Wisconsin-Madison)," Image ID 34547 (1910).

The following experimental digital documentary poem is composed of citations of William Ellery Leonard's new verse translation of the Old English poem Beowulf (1923), Leonard's elegiac poem "The Mounds of Madison" he wrote and read aloud for the Madison State Assembly of the Wisconsin Archeological Society, published by Charles E. Brown in his report of the state assembly in the society’s quarterly bulletin The Wisconsin Archeologist (1910), and Brown's introductory address for the "Pipe of Peace Ceremony of the University of Wisconsin" delivered at the presentation of the ceremony on the Memorial Union Terrace and located in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives (1932).

When this MOUND web page is loaded and/or reloaded, server-side code selects and loads a random collection of lines from a relational database of citations:

Willing comrades, liegemen loyal, may stand by at home.

Here were assemblies of the counsellors.

Wisconsin Commencement program. This Ceremony is.

Theirs were souls of sorrow, theirs were hearts to weep.

And from the view-point of that narrow pride.

Preserve the service and traditions of the University.

Prince so long who ruled them, dear to the end.

Mattock and spade and club and pipe and celt.

As University classmen again present this.

They fetched from ways afar off, for his journeying.

Each lake and watercourse, each grove and trail.

As University classmen again present this.

Than those who sent him whilom a lone babe o'er the wave.

With infants toddling through the wigwam door.

The Four Lakes region --Yellow Thunder, White Crow.

Reload this page. | Return home.

MOUNDS by Maxwell Gray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. (Based on a work at https://madisonmounds.com.) Project research and development take place at the Wisconsin Historical Society Library and Archives and University of Wisconsin—Madison. Both institutions occupy ancestral Ho-Chunk land called Teejop (day-JOPE) ("Four Lakes"), where the Ho-Chunk people have lived and called home since time immemorial. Indeed, both institutions were founded upon exclusions and erasures of the Ho-Chunk and other Indigenous peoples. Today, the Ho-Chunk and other Indigenous peoples continue to have a special connection to the region's land and water, and to resist white settler colonialism and conquest in the state. The project is committed to the development of new modes of collaboration, engagement, and partnership for the care and stewardship of past and future heritage collections and objects. (Learn more about Cultural Institution (CI) notices at Local Contexts.)