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:

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

Here gathered at seasons family and clan.

Preserve the service and traditions of the University.

That in old age after, when the wars may come.

And the high places round these lakes attest.

To the junk heap of Memory. The Pipe of Peace.

With bold gifts and largesse, from his father's store.

Were unto them as us yet more than bread.

Formal parting, at the end of the University year.

So shall youth achieve it, with good works before.

Watched the great cloud-drifts in the central blue.

The spirits of the old W**nebago Indian sachems of.

Let the billows bear him, gave him to the deep.

And had its names, its legendary lore.

The spirits of the old W**nebago Indian sachems of.

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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.)