Blog This Rock

Poem of the Week: Venus Thrash

2012-02-10T16:24:00.001-05:00

Uncivil

I am wearing a white tux with tails,

or a baby blue one with a ruffly shirt,

or decked out in classic black, or coolly

clad in a pearl-white dashiki embroidered

in gold silk, or my favorite pair of holy

blue jeans with a white tee shirt that says

I Heart Pussy, or the green one with the black

velvet fist raised in the air, & you're not

wearing a white dress at all but a wispy

wraparound, strawberry-red, that hugs you

warm & tight around the waist, cut low

at the small of your back, showing off

peek-a-boo cleavage & legs with no quit,

& our folks are here with tissues & hankies

bawling the way parents do at weddings,

& I won't be waiting for you at the end

of any aisle, but we will walk together,

arm-in-arm, hand-in-hand, our wrists

tied & bound with sheer purple scarves,

& we will be the only ones giving us away

under a moonlit sky abundant in stars,

& there will be no Wedding March

on the Steinway but Nina Simone

demanding Be My Husband & I'll Be

Your Wife or Aretha Franklin's luscious

You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,

& we won't exchange vows or rings,

but smoldering kisses & lingering hugs,

& there will be no parchment certificate

stamped with any State's approval

confirming we're married or in love,

but we will jump over a brand new straw

broom, we will light candles & pour red

wine into the earth where our ancestors sleep,

we will wash & anoint each other's heads

with frankincense & myrrh, & the women

will unwind butter-yellow kangas

from their hair & toss them on the ground

before us to cushion our feet.

-Venus Thrash

Used by permission.

Venus Thrash has had poetry published in Gargoyle, Beltway Quarterly, Torch, and the Arkansas Review, and in the anthologies Spaces Between Us: An HIV/AIDS Anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and Haunted Voices, Haunting Places: An Anthology of Writers of the Old and New South. She has read at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Schomburg Center for African American Research, and The Library of Congress. She is a professor of fiction and poetry, and a mother.

Thrash will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Lend a Hand at Split This Rock 2012!

2012-02-09T12:33:00.001-05:00

We're in the final stretch for organizing the 2012 Split This Rock Festival and we need your help to make this work! Please consider volunteering during the Festival from March 22nd to March 25th. Some of the roles for volunteers include:

Venue Czarina: Set up rooms according to the needs of the session, including posting the correct sign for current session. Check that all attendees have valid festival passes. Answer questions and help guide participants to appropriate rooms. Assist the session coordinator as needed. Ensure that all rules of the venue are observed. A cell phone is required for this position.
Register/Check in: Responsible for cash handling/taking credit card info, checking student IDs, coordinating with organizers to hand over cash box when sales close. May help with signups for open mics.
Info/Press/T-Shirt sales: Work alongside registration/check-in volunteers, to sell t-shirts and festival publications, hand out press packets/passes, and answer questions as needed. Responsible for cash handling/taking credit card info, coordinating with organizers to hand over cash box when sales close.

We are hosting three brief, fun volunteer training sessions to prepare you for your shifts! This is a great chance to meet our team and fellow poets & organizers. We ask all volunteers to please attend one of the following sessions:

Thursday, March 8th from 6 - 7pm @ Split This Rock Office, 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600 - Washington, DC 20036
Saturday, March 17th from 10:30 - 11:30 am @ Split This Rock Office
Thursday, March 22nd from 9:30 - 10:30 am @ Thurgood Marshall Center, 1816 12th Street - Washington, DC 20009

If you are coming from out of town and can't make one of these sessions, please let us know. We're happy to accommodate you!

Volunteering has its benefits!

Volunteers who work two or more 2.5 hour shifts will receive a free pass to the festival and a free Split This Rock 2012 t-shirt. Plus you'll meet wonderful, fascinating people and be a part of a movement of poets working for a better world.

To volunteer or for more information, contact our Volunteer Coordinator Kaitie O'Hare at Kaitie.str@gmail.com.

Poem of the Week: Sherwin Bitsui

2012-02-04T17:39:00.004-05:00

In a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,

wearing the gloves of this song tightly over closed ears;

the bursting sun presses licks of flame

into our throats swelling with ghost dogs

nibbling on hands that roped off our footprints

keeping what is outside ours tucked

beneath the warmth of their feet cooling to zero,

as they swarm luminous landmines like gnats,

as thunder shakes white sand from wet hair,

as police sirens trickle from water jars onto squash blossoms,

as starlight, opened inside a darkened room,

begins to tell its story from end to beginning . ..................again.

-Sherwin Bitsui

from Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)

Used by permission.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two poetry books, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award. He is originally from Baa'oogeedí (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation). He is Diné of the Todich'íi'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tł'ízíłání (Many Goats Clan).

Bitsui will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Michon Boston of Eclectique | 916 Interviews Sarah Browning

2012-02-02T12:11:00.006-05:00

E916: How did poetry become so popular in Washington, DC? What makes DC a poetry or a poetic city?

Essex Hemphill

SB: DC has a long and rich poetic tradition, to which we are all the lucky heirs. Walt Whitman spent the Civil War years in the city and the Harlem Renaissance poetry movement was launched here by Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, and others. DC was home to influential Black Arts Movement poets Larry Neal, Gaston Neal, and Amos Zu-Bolton, among many others. Essex Hemphill was the best known Black gay poet of that gorgeous generation tragically lost to AIDS, those who came of age in the 1980s.

It’s no coincidence that most of these poets are African American, of course. Our city’s Black writers and artists have always nurtured and supported one another, developing a strong cultural voice that has been critical to the survival of the District’s Black community.

Today is no different. Older poets mentor younger ones, communities of poetry form and dissolve and re-form. DC becomes a living center for oral poetry – the oldest of poetic forms – newly named “Spoken Word.” The District of course is also home to the federal government, an institution endlessly dissected and analyzed by the press and the popular imagination. Those of us who live here, in contrast, are often forgotten. We claim our place in the world, therefore, with poetry. Here is our story, our poems declare. Pay attention.

Read the full interview here.

Hot Off the Press: Beloit Poetry Journal's 2012 Split This Rock Chapbook

2012-02-02T12:02:00.003-05:00

Beloit Poetry Journal

Vol. 62 No.3 - Spring 2012

Split This Rock Chapbook

For over sixty years of continuous publication, the Beloit Poetry Journal has worked to expand American poetic language and vision through its publication of international poetry and of work that challenges social, political, and aesthetic norms.

The Spring 2012 issue of the journal is a chapbook of new poems of provocation and witness by featured readers at the 2012 Split This Rock Festival: Homero Aridjis, Sherwin Bitsui, Kathy Engel, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Douglas Kearney, Khaled Mattawa, Rachel McKibbens, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, José Padua, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kim Roberts, and Venus Thrash. Robert Shetterly's probing portrait of Langston Hughes, from his portrait series Americans Who Tell the Truth, graces the cover. You can currently preview a handful of the poems on the BPJ website.

Order this special issue now from the BPJ website for only $5.00.

The issue will also be available for sale at the festival.

A subscription to the BPJ costs just $18/year (4 issues); student discounts are available for classroom adoption. Visit the BPJ website to order, browse the full-text archive, or join the conversation with poets from the 2012 Split This Rock Chapbook on the Poet's Forum.

Can She Get a Witness? Kyle Dargan Interviews Sarah Browning at Post No Ills

2012-01-29T18:50:00.001-05:00

Members of Congress only need to look around the District in which they sometimes live to get a snapshot of that turmoil and struggle to which you refer. D.C. has the greatest income discrepancy of any city of its size in the country. We have the highest HIV infection rate, the shortest life expectancy, the highest adult illiteracy rate. So, we know of what we speak.

But we also have a rich history of struggle, of resistance, often through poetry and the arts. Split This Rock builds on this history, on the shoulders of so many who have written and organized and built community here, from Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson to Essex Hemphill and Gaston Neal, to name just a few of our foremothers and fathers. We celebrate this tradition and teach it to one another and to the hundreds who come here for Split This Rock Poetry Festival and our other programs from all over the country.

Read the whole interview here.

Poem of the Week: Kathy Engel

2012-01-27T15:52:00.003-05:00

I Will Not

(after June Jordan and Suheir Hammad)

write about the killing of Troy Davis or

the years he claimed innocence so many times

the words fell from his mouth like drops of honey.

Not about the last minutes when he said

may God have mercy on those who do this thing, or

the penultimate breath as he claimed

innocence. I will not talk about the

executioner or the cheering crowds,

the family he left behind, breakfast

unfinished at the table, the excavation of their

daily yearning, each bite of bread a reminder. I

will not speak about innocence or the sound

of his voice through incarceration, the look in his eye,

the shirt he wore the day he was hauled in or the one

he was instructed to wear on any given court day - was

it prison-ironed, plaid, blue? I will not write about

innocence. I want to look back and write about the day

the killing stopped, how we as animals rose

-Kathy Engel

from Liberty's Vigil: The Occupy Anthology
(Foot Hills Publishing, 2012)

Used by permission.

Kathy Engel is the author, most recently, of Ruth's Skirts (IKON) and co-editor, with Kamal Boullata, of We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (Interlink Books). She is an adjunct professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She co-founded MADRE, Riptide Communications, East End Women in Black, Hayground School and Kickass Artists. She teaches at NYU's Tisch School for the Performing Arts and works as a consultant for social change organizations.

Engel will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Carlos Andrés Gómez

2012-01-20T16:28:00.001-05:00

"Never Again"
(Rwanda poem)

Carlos Andrés Gómez is an award-winning writer and performer from New York City. A former social worker and public school teacher, Gómez has performed at over 200 colleges and universities and toured across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. A star of Spike Lee's #1 movie "INSIDE MAN" and HBO's "RUSSEL SIMMONS PRESENTS DEF POETRY," he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was named Artist of the Year at the 2009 Promoting Outstanding Writers Awards.

Gómez will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Split This Rock Celebrates the Life & Legacy of Bayard Rustin

2012-01-13T16:08:00.000-05:00

Poem of the Week: Naomi Shihab Nye

2012-01-13T15:57:00.002-05:00

The Burn

Such a swift lump rises in the throat when

a uniformed woman spits Throw it away!

and you tremble to comply wondering why

rules of one airport don't match another's,

used to carrying two Ziploc bags not just one

but your pause causes a uniformed man to approach

barking, Is there something you don't understand?

and you stare at him thinking

So many things, refugees marching

from one parched field to another,

rolled packs on their heads,

burn of ancestors smoldering outside stolen homes,

or you could be six again, yelled at on the playground

by a teacher who knew all the bad things you could do.

You're pressing little shampoos and face creams

firmly into a single plastic bag, he could slap you.

Sorry, so sorry, not wanting

to give up seven extra bottles of Bliss brand

lemon & sage soapy soap fresh-foaming shower gel

that you tipped the W houseboy into leaving

so you could pretend you live a Happy Hour life

back home, you hope she takes it out of the trash

when you turn away, obviously she needs a relaxing shower

and a stiff gin and he needs something like a long trip

into a country full of foreign soldiers and we all need

to swallow hard again so the lumps dissolve

and pressure eases and our worlds mingle kindly

and he no longer feels the gun in his back.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

from Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011)
Used by permission.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011), You & Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), Fuel (1998), and Red Suitcase (1994). Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall prize, and the International Poetry Forum. Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has written books for children and edited several anthologies of prose.

Shihab Nye will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Announcing the 2012 Contest Winners!

2012-01-12T16:39:00.011-05:00

Split This Rock is thrilled to announce the winners of our fifth annual poetry contest, judged by 2012 featured poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Click on the winner's names below to read their winning poems on our website.

Judge's Statement

This judge was dazzled by the subtlety and utter power of the poem "White." Worlds within and behind visible public worlds. Everything we don't see and hear—private, precious pulse of identities.

Reading all the finalists' poems felt like entering a potent kingdom of Mattering—topics/subjects of essential collective care, poems embodying deep witness, speaking up in hard places, not shuddering or seeking popular favor—poems of responsibility and elegantly shaped conviction. It was a gift to read them. They are all winners.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye will be featured at the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. She is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2010 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

First Place - White by Leona Sevick

Leona Sevick serves as Associate Provost and faculty member in the department of English at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Maryland and has written extensively on the work of the writer Willa Cather. Her most recent poems appear in Memoir Journal and are forthcoming in Bateau. She writes poems and stories about growing up in an ethnically mixed family in rural America.

Second Place - Làt-Kat by Elizabeth Hoover

Elizabeth Hoover is a poet, critic, and journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, and The Massachusetts, among others. In 2011, she was a resident at the Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts and a nominee for Sundress Publications Best of the Net. She has contributed poetry reviews and author interviews to such publications as The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The Dallas Morning News. She recently completed a biography of Suzanne Collins and is currently working on a biography of Robert Hayden. You can see more of her work at www.ehooverink.com.

Third Place - A constellation of mint by Kevin McLellan

Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbook Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: Barrow Street, Colorado Review, failbetter, Horse Less Review, Kenyon Review Online, Versal, Western Humanities Review, Witness and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA with Frankie (a canary), and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at the University of Rhode Island in Providence.

Liberty's Vigil release

2012-01-09T17:42:00.005-05:00

FootHills Publishing Releases First International Occupy Movement Anthology

Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology:

99 Poets among the 99%

Ninety-nine poets, including 2012 festival featured poet Kathy Engel and a handful of Split This Rock friends: Francisco X. Alarcón, Scott Hightower, M.J Iuppa, and Michael Rothenberg, speak out on behalf of the 99%, encouraging their fellow citizens to join in the effort to end corporate excess and income inequality, and win back the middle-class from corporate titans and their political puppets. Co-editors Karla Linn Merrifield and Dwain Wilder have assembled the first anthology of its type in the world to inspire readers to take action on behalf of the 99%.

We encourage you to check out the Liberty's Vigil blog: http://99poets.blogspot.com for the latest on the project, including readings.

Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99% (128 pages) is available for $20.00 at selected bookstores nationwide – ISBN 978-0-931053-81-8 -- and from FootHills Publishing at www.foothillspublishing.com. FootHills Publishing, celebrating its 26^th anniversary this year, is headquartered in Wheeler Hill, N.Y. Michael Czarnecki, publisher, is available at (607) 566-3881.

Poem of the Week: Jose Padua

2012-01-06T17:17:00.001-05:00

Take a Giant Step

All the out of business auto body shops

on this slow highway, all the abandoned

buildings with peeling paint, the vacant

lots overgrown with junk trees and weeds

bounded by chain link fences, all the things

we could never fix and threw away, all

the insane metaphors for living, the fake

equation of ideas, the pretty words that

soar today in a shallow heart as wisdom

before giving way to tomorrow's clever

observation, commandment, or list

of the neglected and overrated, and all

the shut ups and neverminds we breed

with our lips because we have never been

upon the verge of either idiocy or genius.

This is not where you belong, alone in this

tiny town without mending, this is not

the long endless line that waits for an exit

out of city sleep, this is not the thick wall

you can't hear through. So go, like everything

that has decayed before us, everything that has

shattered so beautifully, go into that street

like a man crashing a parade with smelly clothes

and dirty skin, go into that building that's on fire

because the sky is full of smoke and you are water.

-Jose Padua

Jose Padua was born in Washington, DC, in 1957. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon.com, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and many other journals and anthologies. His manuscript, Here Comes the Monster, was runner-up for the Many Mountains Moving Poetry Prize. After living in big cities like Washington and New York all his life, he now lives in the small town of Front Royal, Virginia, where he and his wife, the poet Heather Davis, write the blog Shenandoah Breakdown.

Padua will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Beltway Poetry Quarterly's FLORICANTO Issue

2012-01-04T12:40:00.009-05:00

Check out the latest issue of the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, inspired by the reading "Floricanto in DC: A Multicultural Response to SB1070" at AWP 2011 - sponsored by Split This Rock, Acentos, and Poets Responding to SB 1070.

With an introduction by Francisco Aragón and including work by Martín Espada, Randall Horton, Aracelis Girmay, Marilyn Nelson,Tara Betts, Regio Cabico, Sarah Browning, Luis Alberto Ambroggio, Joseph Ross, Carmen Gimenez Smith, and more! This special issue is co-sponsored by Letras Latinas, a program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Read the issue in full:

Volume 13:1, Winter 2012
FLORICANTO ISSUE

INTRODUCTION
Francisco Aragón, Guest Editor

A young man raises his hand.

“How does it feel writing about our country?”

The invited guest tells the story of how he came to poetry.

The country in question: El Salvador. The scene of this exchange: a high school in Washington, DC.

Frazier O’Leary, who has taught and coached for thirty years, has gathered twenty or so of his Cardozo students, most of them natives of this small Central American nation, or the sons and daughters of Salvadoran immigrants. A few weeks earlier they had each been given The Art of Exile by William Archila—also born in El Salvador, who migrated to California in 1980 at the age of twelve. After Archila’s presentation, O’Leary’s students line up to have their books signed, chatter and visit with their new friend.

That spring afternoon, in 2010, poetry became a palpable bridge.

Among those who witnessed what took place in that classroom was Dan Vera, who’d graciously agreed to document the moment with his digital camera—whose poem, “If You Want To Purify America’s Textbooks of Ethnic Studies,” is one of the twenty-six poems you’ll read in this winter issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an issue that aims to embody a similar bridge.

Read the rest of the introduction here.

Poetry by and for the 99%!

2011-12-30T10:02:00.000-05:00

Recently we sent out a list of 25 of our favorite poetry books of 2011 (see below). 18 were by people of color; 15 by women. All engage the world in visionary and creative ways.

Compare Split This Rock's list to some by The Other Guys. We were thinking of linking to some of those Guys's lists. But rather than point fingers, we'd prefer to promote the poets we love, the poets who are telling the true story of what it is to be alive today in the United States, in all its variety and beauty and madness and disaster.

If you value this work of amplifying the voices of poets of conscience, please consider a year-end gift to Split This Rock.

Here are four easy ways to give:

Give online - Click here to give securely using your credit card.

Give by mail - Send a check or money order made out to Split This Rock to 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036.

Register for Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Add a donation when you register for the festival at SplitThisRock.org, helping others who might not otherwise be able to attend.

Sponsor Split This Rock Poetry Festival - We'll thank and promote your organization or business in the festival program book and on the website. Contact us for details!

Your tax-deductible gift to Split This Rock supports essential voices and movements for change.

In the words of June Jordan, whose life and work we will honor at the festival in March, We are the ones we have been waiting for. Please join with us today.

With gratitude and hopes for peace in 2012,

Split This Rock Team

Some of Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2011

2011-12-28T12:09:00.008-05:00

2011 has been an incredible year for poetry of provocation and witness! We're seeing an explosion of poetry today, poetry that tells the story of what it is to be alive in the United States, in all its variety and beauty and madness and disaster.

We recommend 25 single-author books by some of our favorite poets below -- Split This Rock featured poets, festival attendees, poets who've read in our monthly series in DC, poets new to us. We also suggest five anthologies that break new ground and we look forward to several books forthcoming in 2012.

Poetry books make great holiday gifts, great gifts, great reading any time of the year. Run out to your local independent bookstore to support poets and poetry or order through Teaching for Change's Busboys and Poets Books, or Powell's, a union shop. You'll be changing the world, one book at a time.

And if you love that Split This Rock is bringing you this diverse alternative to the Other Guys' lists, please consider a gift to support poetry by and for the 99%. Just click here to give. We thank you!

Split This Rock

Recommended Poetry Books of 2011

Wisdom Teeth, Derrick Weston Brown (Busboys and Poets Press)

"After reading Derrick Weston Brown's Wisdom Teeth, it's hard to believe this is his first collection of poems. As Busboys and Poet's first Poet-In-Residence, Brown approaches his poetry with an incredible confidence, which often touches on tense topics of history and culture." - Kaitie O'Hare for Split This Rock

L-Vis Lives: Racemusic Poems, Kevin Coval (Haymarket Books)

"A radically candid collection... daring, historically grounded, and socially cathartic poems... Coval's air-clearing honesty about violent and insidious racism and authenticity and creativity is blazing and liberating." - Donna Seaman, Booklist

The Trouble Ball, Martín Espada (W.W. Norton & Co.)

"Poetry would have no meaning in society if it did not also include the work of poets like Martín Espada who look beyond the surface glitter of contemporary culture, who bear witness, and bring us the hard news from this all too real world we live in." -- Sunil Freeman, First Person Plural

Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney (Triquarterly) - Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
"What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems." --Kwame Dawes, author of Hope's Hospice

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Nick Flynn (Graywolf Press)

"By engaging with the contemporary world, and its atrocities, Flynn faces up to some of the most difficult and uncomfortable questions and confusions of our time, and his devotion to the consideration and confrontation of dark truths, compels the reader to do the same." - Louise Helferty for Split This Rock

Bringing the Shovel Down, Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press)

"These poems speak out of a global consciousness as well as an individual wisdom that is bright with pity, terror, and rage, and which asks the reader to realize that she is not alone-that the grief he carries is not just his own." - Jean Valentine

Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions)

"Girmay's poems, sometimes ecstatic, and always incantatory, take as their project the disciplined practice of building connections... Kingdom Animalia maps the world in which we live, classifying us, grouping us, reminding us of what sets us apart, and what ties us together." - Camille Dungy for The Rumpus

Black Blossoms, Rigoberto González (Four Way Press)

"Black Blossoms taps into the waters of Lethe, as a bower uniting desire and mortality, history and the present, in tones alternately rapturous and threnodial. Gonzalez alights on the darkest and most alluring flowers, "the beauty and grief of life," and draws us down into its intoxicating sweetness." -D. A. Powell

Mule & Pear, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (New Issues)

"Griffiths gifts us with deleted scenes, alternate endings, and a VIP pass to wander the sets of some of the greatest literature of our time... But what else should we expect from an artist who sees the world through so many mediums?" -Frank X Walker

The Requited Distance, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Sheep Meadow)

"The myths and ancient images... wander into each other's stories, get possessed by another's myths and challenge the old music with their questions...There is a surreal, unsettled beauty in these re-settings and these ancient dreams invade our own time with their inevitable augury."- Ed Roberson

Elegies for New York Avenue, Melanie Henderson (Main Street Rag)

"Elegies for New York Avenue, the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award Winner, is quite a collection of verse, styles, and emotions. It tackles all of life's complex subjects but it also celebrates the simplicity of life in Washington D.C." - Brian Gilmore for The Big Ideas

Chameleon Couch, Yusef Komunyakaa (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

"Known for musical references and remarkable imagery, the Pulitzer Prize winner mixes worlds freely. Memory is stirred up and ghosts engaged, from Minerva to Monk.... More than a witness, Komunyakaa navigates between poles: between crime and faith, cages and paradise, love and reason." - Jeffrey Cyphers White, The Brooklyn Rail

Last Seen, Jacqueline Jones LaMon (University of Wisconsin Press)

"At the heart of Jacqueline Jones LaMon's collection is a haunting series of poems born of the silence tragedy and loss wedges into our lives. With restraint and through a variety of characters, LaMon gives voice to those whose voices have been lost to us, who've left behind only questions and vivid empty spaces." - Natasha Tretheway, author of Native Guard

Transfer, Naomi Shihab Nye (BOA Editions)

"Naomi Shihab Nye has more than honored her father by these poems. In their personal and tender qualities, she honors all of us who know loss. Anyone who knows grief, especially the loss of a parent or of a homeland, can find a fatherly love, a homeland, in these poems." - Joseph Ross

Meanwhile, Kathleen O'Toole (WordTech Communications)

"Kathleen O'Toole's Meanwhile dwells as much on what is not present as what is. The book plays with time, transience, land and place, and works these themes into a powerful statement about justice and love." - Katherine Howell for Split This Rock

Spit Back a Boy, Iain Halley Pollock (University of Georgia Press)

"Beyond the bracing intelligence in these poems, beyond the surges of joy and trouble, beyond the poet's awe in this split second, he plunges with imagination into the timeless work of loving witness, resonant with high style and the blues." - Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry

Inside the Money Machine, Minnie Bruce Pratt (Carolina Wren Press)

"Deeply informed by politics and an analysis of the socioeconomic system in the United States today-and it's flaws-Pratt doesn't deliver a polemic...but rather a carefully observed and deeply transformative vision of people doing work in the United States and around the world today." - Julie R. Enszer, Lambda Literary

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Adrienne Rich (W.W Norton & Company)

"Rich is one of the greatest American poets of the past half century...attested to both by the extraordinary power of her poems and by the laurels she's racked up....The events of our blood-dimmed decade have afforded Rich a subject for some of her strongest material." - Sara Marcus, San Francisco Chronicle

Animal Magnetism, Kim Roberts (Pearl Editions)

"Animal Magnetism takes the reader on an unexpected and fascinating tour - a tour of the human body via an exploration of unusual museums and peculiar collections of medical memorabilia... Roberts' verse is lean and lyrical... a formalism [that] is easy and non-intrusive and frames the poems in a sheath of historicity, as if we were observing them like specimens behind an antique glass display." Mike Maggio, Rattle

Though I Haven't Been to Baghdad, Margaret Rozga (Benu Press)

"The poems in Though I Haven't Been to Baghdad throb with the anxiety of those left behind: mother, lover, friend. They are finely tuned to the fractures in daily life when a child is at war, when a child is wounded in war - how language itself stutters through fear and grief... Rozga's striking poems tell us, Look. Here. This is the true cost of war. Here." Sarah Browning, Split This Rock

the new black: poems, Evie Shockley (Wesleyan University Press)

"Shockley's the new black is a dismantling of archetypes: a series of poems where black is at times landscape and at times backdrop, righteous fist in the air or questioning glance...Race is the linchpin but not the quintessence." -Reginald Dwayne Betts for Post No Ills

Mad for Meat, Kevin Simmonds (Salmon Poetry)

"As sharply and carefully honed as his poems are, Kevin Simmonds has managed to preserve a quality of urgency, spontaneity and surprise in his poems through his unquestionable sense of music and, above all, through his willingness to take risks in subject and form." -- Kwame Dawes

Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)

"[Life on Mars] blends pop culture, history, elegy, anecdote, and sociopolitical commentary to illustrate the weirdness of contemporary living. . . . The title poem, which includes everything from 'dark matter' and 'a father.../ who kept his daughter/ Locked in a cell for decades' to Abu Ghraib is proof that life is far stranger and more haunting than fiction." - Publishers Weekly

Tropicalia, Emma Trelles (University of Notre Dame Press)

"Tropicalia gives us instead an ultrasensitive pair of eyes in addition to our own--as acutely attuned to color and texture and passion as a painter's. Trelles writes with a sensibility part emotional and part anthropological, offering a way of seeing first the surfaces and then delving into the poems' subjects with both heart and precision." - Khadijah Queen for Post No Ills

Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, Kevin Young (Knopf)

"Twenty years in the making, Kevin Young's "Ardency,'' a sprawling choral retelling of the 1839 uprising aboard the slave ship Amistad and the aftermath for its captives, rises fearlessly to the challenge of historical poetry, in both the breadth of its scope and the intimacy of its materials. Young transforms archived letters, artifacts, and oral accounts into a carefully composed clamor of voices, stolen through history into some of the year's keenest lines." - Boston Globe

Anthologies

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, Editors: Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, Michael Northen (Cinco Puntos Press)

"Highly intuitive and without artifice, the poetry in this compendium shows that the greatest difference may be the greatest triumph. This book's a brain trust of talent in a world of doubt. Sensory memory, self analysis-the constants of the poet-acquire a greater spiritual value than before, teaching all of us to trust our own abilities. It is sumptuous." - Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality, Editor: Kevin Simmonds (Sibling Rivalry Press)

"If prophesy is speaking an idea whose time has come, then Collective Brightness must be prophetic. In a time when the right for all persons to participate in religious freedoms, such as marriage or ordination, is shifting and changing, and when religious groups of all kinds demonstrate their turmoil over sexual identity, the 100 plus poets represented in the anthology write boldly of faith, lack thereof, religion, exclusion therefrom, and spirituality that cannot be taken from them." - Katherine Howell for Split This Rock

Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry, Editor: Julie R. Enszer (A Midsummer Night's Press)

"In the land of milk and honey, there is room for a myriad of voices expressing a spectrum of emotions and witnessing a pantheon of moments - rage and humor, passion and regret, secular necessity and sexual desire, political exhortation and personal reflection. That's how it is in this collection of work by more than 30 poets, every one somehow queer and in some way Jewish." - Richard Labonte, Book Marks

Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Editor: Allison Hedge Coke (University of Arizona Press)

"One of the most essential anthologies of recent years, Sing is rare in scope and insight. The poems found here are a testament to the power of indigeneity and the urgency of our current moment. This book sings the hemisphere into glorious fullness, teaching us the connections between us, and the great schisms between our knowledge and our actions." - Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone

Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo, Editors: Margaret B. Ingraham and Andrea Carter Brown (Wavertree Press)

Editor Margaret B. Ingraham writes, "This anthology is at once a work of literary merit, a celebratory offering, and an historical record of a hallowed place." A celebration of the 40yh anniversary of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Contains over 60 previously published poems by VCCA Fellows, written about or inspired by their VCCA residencies. The poets are from throughout the United States, around the world, and across the decades.

And a few 2012 books we're looking forward to:

Richard Blanco, Looking for the Gulf Motel (Pitt Poetry Series)
Carmen Calatayud, Cave Walk (Press 53)
Martha Collins, White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series)
Piotr Gwiazda, Messages (Pond Road Press)
Monica Hand, me and Nina (Alice James Books)
Nathalie Handal, Poet in Andalucía (Pitt)
Alan King, Drift (Willow Books)
Alicia Ostriker, The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011 (Pitt Poetry Series)
Joseph Ross, Meeting Bone Man (Main Street Rag)
Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)
Patricia Smith, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press)
Pamela Uschuk, Wild in the Plaza of Memory (Wings Press)

Holly Bass Reviews Alice Walker

2011-12-21T13:26:00.000-05:00

The following review was written by Holly Bass.

Gwendolyn Brooks famously said, “Poetry is life distilled.” Alice Walker’s newest book, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, reveals the evolution of an activist-writer who has distilled her own practice to its purest and simplest form. These are humble poems, composed of sparse lines, often only one or two words in length. But this brevity is not the absence of craft or attention to language. Rather, these poems represent an intentional choice on the part of a mature writer to set aside flourish and embellishment in favor of honesty. These poems are mantras or prayers with meditative silences humming between their lines.

The work is about getting to a truth, often a very personal truth full of surprising rawness and intimacy. In “I Will Keep Broken Things,” she writes, “I will keep/ your/ wild/ free/ laughter/ though/ it is now/ missing/ its/ reassuring /and/ graceful/ hinge/ ...I will keep/ broken/ things./ I will keep / you: pilgrim / of/ sorrow./ I will keep/ myself.”

These are poems of personal pain and global distress, and love as a form of activism. Walker’s long history of activism is represented not only in the content of the book, but in form as well. Whereas previous recent collections were published by a major house, this newest book was released by an independent publisher, New World Library, that participates in the “Green Press Initiative” powering its offices with solar panels and printing books with 100% recycled paper. The poems themselves reside squarely in the space where the “personal is political.”

The title is a celebration of humanity and an acknowledgment of the fraught times in which we live. In her introduction, she speaks of the need to “dance our sorrows away, or at least integrate them more smoothly into our daily existence.” This theme carries throughout the book, balancing what might be termed an optimistic resignation—yes, our world continues to be marred with oppression and violence, but even if we cannot solve or fix it, we must continue to do the work of dismantling power, no matter how Sisyphean the task.

In the poem “Loving Humans,” written for Aung San Suu Kyi, she writes, “Loving humans/ is tricky/ sometimes/ a slap/ in the face/ is all you get/ for doing it/ just right.” She continues, “Loving humans/ means/ writing poems & songs/ novels & plays, slogans, chants/ & protest signs...”

Like “Loving Humans,” many of the poems, composed over the course of one year, are written in first person and directed toward specific individuals or entities: activist friends, the grandson she has never met in person, deceased family members whose spirits she continues to carry, even to her decades-old BMW car and beloved animal companions.

At times they recall the spiritual sensibility of Persian poetry. Take, for example, “The Taste of Grudge,” the collection’s longest poem, written in thirteen parts:

I do not

regret

that

I am

imperfect

In each crack

there is

an orchid

growing

…

This we know:

We were

not meant

to suffer

so much

& to learn

nothing.

Ultimately, the book resounds with love-- for women, for the earth, for peacemakers and for humanity. The poems remind us of our own capacity to change ourselves and the world in which we live. To turn our sorrow into “beauty, form and beat.”

Even So by Alice Walker

Love, if it is love, never goes away.

It is embedded in us,

like seams of gold in the Earth,

waiting for light,

waiting to be struck.

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

Alice Walker

New World Library

$18.00

A free review copy of this book was provided to Split This Rock by the publisher.

Split This Rock Presents: Sunday Kind of Love featuring Melanie Henderson

2011-12-20T17:00:00.003-05:00

Split This Rock Presents:
Sunday Kind of Love
featuring
Melanie Henderson

launching her prize-winning collection:

Elegies for New York Avenue

Sunday January 15, 2012

5:00-7:00pm

Busboys & Poets
2021 14th St. NW
Washington, DC 20009

Hosted by Sarah Browning & Katy Richey

Suggested Donation: $5

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets & Split This Rock

For more information:
www.BusboysandPoets.com

www.SplitThi sRock.org
info@splitthisrock.org

202-387-POET

"Delicious in their sheer sonic energy, the poems in Elegies for New York Avenue take us on a headlong, heady rush through story and memory, portrait and lyric, lament and celebration, every line sounding the way for another, linking again and again to a surprising intimacy and reality. The mosaic of neighborhood and family that Henderson creates is spellbinding. Each piece, each person, each emotion is emblazoned in these poems by precise words and honored by an attention both tender and fierce. These poems throw off sparks. Catch them!"

--Joan Houlihan

BORN HOME

To begin at the beginning

& we are not from this place

We know the snow

doesn't fall in January,

the gum of July doesn't stick to the blood in our skin

& we are not from this place

We know the rows of dependent houses

liberated by separating hues of a president,

my alarm clock's muteness, temporary

it's arteries, a blazing blue; it's 7:59

& we are not from this place

We know how to begin at the beginning

when a high school is just a high school

& our rhythm is not smart

and we are not from this place

We know the vacant eyes of our streets,

pots in the pavement sing

from this place we are from--

We know.

Melanie Henderson was born, raised and lives in Washington, DC. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and studied poetry at the Voices Summer Writing Workshops (VONA). Her paintings, photography and poems have appeared in Drumvoices Revue, Fingernails across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora, jubilat, and Southern Women's Review among others. She was selected as a featured reader for the 2009 Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series and as a recipient of the Larry Neal Writers' Award (DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities). She is the Managing Editor of Tidal Basin Review and the mother of a charming little boy.

Poem of the Week: Kim Roberts

2011-12-16T12:21:00.008-05:00

Portrait of Hippocrates, or Buqrat

from The Falnama of 1703, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

O augury seeker,
...................know and be aware...

In the book of divination,

Hippocrates rides the simurgh,

..................a mythical bird,

as he returns to his home

carved from emeralds
.....................on Mount Qaf.

With his white turban,

scholar's dark beard,
..............and bright orange robe,

he looks over one shoulder

and strokes the bird's

....................golden tail feathers

.......as she flits through an azure sky

between eddies of clouds.
..................Healer of the sick,

Builder of the first hospital,

Master of alchemy,

................astrology and magic,

.....I have prepared myself

for your prognostication
.................with bathing and prayers,
......opened the book in my blindness,

opened my heart in hope
...................and placed my body,

my wounded body, in your hands.

-Kim Roberts

Used by permission.

Kim Roberts' most recent book, Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), won the 2009 Pearl Prize. She is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and the anthology Full Moon On K Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010). She is the author of two additional books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994), and the nonfiction chapbook Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word in DC (Beltway Editions, 2010).

Roberts will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Alice Walker

2011-12-09T14:36:00.001-05:00

The World We Want Is Us

It moves my heart to see your awakened faces;

the look of "aha!"

shining, finally, in

so many

wide open eyes.

Yes, we are the 99%

all of us

refusing to forget

each other

no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs

are dropped by

the 1%.

The world we want is on the way; Arundhati

and now we

are

hearing her breathing.

That world we want is Us; united; already moving

into it.

-Alice Walker

Written by Alice Walker specifically for Occupy Writers.

Used by permission.

Writer and activist Alice Walker is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. She has won numerous awards and honors, including the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, a Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Mendocino, California.

Alice Walker will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Grace Cavalieri

2011-12-02T17:12:00.002-05:00

The Wall

...........The child stands weeping.

She holds uncooked rice in one hand waiting.

She's idealized into a picture

............for American Television.

The sirens sound. The child embraces the wall, presses

her lips against stone.

............A dog outside howls its

mortality. And that is all she hears before

the vision comes to mind of a mother

she once knew.

...........The Book of Koran

lies open, naked, and torn in a broken house.

............The child cannot speak, and has

forgotten how language sounds.

Can she run across the open courtyard?

Someone may be there. Her dog? Where?

...........Grandmother? Where? Rubble flies.

That was while she stood there clutching her rice

...........in the origin of silence.

-Grace Cavalieri

Used by permission.

Grace Cavalieri is the author of several books and chapbooks of poems, and produced full-length and short- form plays. Her newest publication is Millie's Sunshine Tiki Villas (2010, Casa Menendez). Grace has founded and still produces "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio celebrating 34 years on-air, recorded at the Library of Congress. Her play "ANNA NICOLE: BLONDE GLORY" opened in NYC, 2011, Theater for the New City Dream Up Festival.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Creative Democracy: Poetry and the 99%

2011-12-01T10:03:00.000-05:00

Split This Rock presented a panel on Tuesday at the George Washington University's University Writing Program's Forum on Democracy and Public Argument. Katherine Howell, GWU professor and Split This Rock blog goddess open the panel with some poems. Sarah Browning, Split This Rock Director, moderated the discussion between Kenneth Carroll, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Esther Iverem. At the end of the panel, Katherine led the audience in creating a cento, or patchwork, poem about the public voice in all its forms. The poem, and pictures from the panel, are below.

Striving to work hard, do good,
feel like fruitless efforts
Fermentation DIY, blackeyed peas & burnt
weiners, Godfather marinara notes scribbled
in a dark theater - recipes for trouble

Kenneth Carroll reads at the panel.

A voice amplified through
poetry is impossible to ignore
Mr. Ferguson screaming at the
night sky, take me! Imploring some
God who took his wife
A love song whistles, gathering -
round, square, triangled,
parallel: singing us home.

Sarah Browning looks on as Sonya Renee speaks.

For those whose blood had paved
freedom's road, I most owe my
voice to the asphalt of this journey.
A no-fly zone over
my voice, my womb,
my loves, my life.
A little stutter, a little shout.
emocycrad (can you say this?)
my public voice? - hidden
in these letters, a word there
but not here
that is not yet speech

Esther Iverem speaks at the panel.

Still wondering what the next
version of the movement
will look like
My public voice is forever vigilant
to hear wishing for wider fellowship
yearning for newsprint to open up
and release the anguish.

Poem of the Week: Kathleen Hellen

2011-11-28T14:20:00.001-05:00

Belly Song

I sit in the front row of

bleachers -- cheap seats for greater grief.
My son

the tribe in his ribs
the strength in him, keen, huddled
runs through the hits, breathes
through the pale ghost of stitches
these games that go long into hard victories.

Who knows how long we have them?
when sirens call to the streets
when one sends back his fatigue

another's enlisted.

The bones of an open humvee. The bones
at a roadside checkpoint.

It might be that we swallow them:
A belly song. A flag sent home
A rosary like dog tags

A triage of crows flies over
My son

packs up his cleats
The fog of his breathing surrenders
He limps to the car where I tender
his wounds. The bones
of a cradle, breaking.

-Kathleen Hellen

First appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Fall 2009

Used by permission.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review; the Cortland Review; The Evansville Review; the Hollins Critic; In Posse Review; Prairie Schooner; RHINO; Subtropics; among others; and on WYPR's "The Signal." Awards include the Washington Square Review and Thomas Merton poetry prizes, as well as individual artist grants from Maryland and Baltimore City. She is senior editor for The Baltimore Review.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Sulu DC is turning two! TWO! Y'all know what this means, right?

2011-11-18T12:44:00.002-05:00

From our great friends at Sulu DC:

PARTY! Come celebrate with us at our 2nd Anniversary & Awards show! We're fun people, we promise.

*Advance tickets on sale now for $20: http://bit.ly/suludc1111show**
(Buying in advance enters you in a raffle to win $100 worth of sushi! Details below.)

The evening will begin with a reception where you can see and buy cool arts and crafts made by artsy and crafty APIA folk, get your glamour-shot on in our fabulous Sulu DC photo-booth by a professional photographer, and drink and mingle with all the lovely peoples before the featured performances and award ceremony.

Hosted by critically acclaimed spoken word pioneer, Regie Cabico the night's performers include:

- Screening of short films by deaf filmmaker and playwright Sabina England;
- Keva I. Lee, professional dominatrix, fetish model, and former counselor for sex workers in the criminal justice system;
- Chip Han, Virginia-based beat boxer and winner of the 2010 Kollaboration DC talent showcase;
- J Pharaoh & the Manhattan Project, a hip-hop/soul/rock band out of Virginia Beach
- DJ Boo, a Filipino-American DJ and musician based in New York

We will also be announcing the recipients of the following awards:

-Artist of the Year Award
-Community Contribution Award
-Audience Award
-Community Partner Award
-Sulu DC Star Award
-Sulu DC House Award

So come mingle with some down and happenin' people, make new friends and rock out, all the while supporting phenomenal AAPI artists. Doesn't get much better than that! Plus, who doesn't love a reason to get a little dressed up?

Sponsored in part by Toki Underground, DC APA Film, Ichiban Sushi in McLean, Artisphere and Kollaboration DC.

* Everyone who buys a ticket online in advance will be entered in a special raffle for a $100 gift certificate to Ichiban Sushi in McLean! Don't miss this opportunity to host the best holiday party ever -- buy your discounted advance tickets now at http://bit.ly/suludc1111show! Many thanks to Ichiban Sushi for donating this gift card.*

The deets: Each ticket purchased counts as one entry. The winner will be announced at the show. You must be present to win.

Poem of the Week: Kathleen O'Toole

2011-11-18T12:43:00.001-05:00

Halim, waiting

He arrived first as a student of geology

.............in the bicentennial year.

..................................................He witnessed

the fireworks, read the Declaration and believed it.

One by one, he brought his family -- Fatima, Anas,

............Nassir. Today they are all citizens. He alone waits.

He built houses, a business, this dream. Eighteen years

...........of waiting to savor the meat he first smelled roasting

on Manhattan streets. His father's home in Baghdad

...........is in ruins. The cousins in Najaf are dead, conscripted --

His youngest son has brought the daughter of a family friend

.........to Virginia to marry. Even she will be a citizen before him.

Each time he travels home, one more letter in his file

...........for helping the war effort.

....................................Still at each airport, the pat-downs,

pull asides, manhandling -- the eyes.

..........................................................At the immigration office

they say: one more name check. One more set of fingerprints.

His wife says: now they will not give this. They need to keep him
............on this leash.

-Kathleen O'Toole

Used by permission.

Kathleen O'Toole is the author of Meanwhile and Practice, a chapbook of poems. She has combined a more than thirty-year professional life in community organizing with teaching and writing. She has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University and at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She currently works for V.O.I.C.E., an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Northern Virginia.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Judith Arcana

2011-11-11T13:32:00.002-05:00

Can Safety Matches Make Us Safe?

You read the tiny cardboard book before

you scratch the strip under Augie's New Pizza
on the back of MIA:We still don't know

(and isn't that the truth?). Earn college

credit at home, taking tests on a screen

being screened. Bad credit? We can help.

Remember to close cover before striking

or go out on strike /// three strikes: you're out

of the fire into a plastic frying pan, teflon

on electric glowing rings - not like when

your phone rings and someone tells you

what you know you don't want to know.

-Judith Arcana

Used by permission.

Photo by: Barbara Gundle

First published in 5AM, Summer 2011

Judith Arcana writes poems, stories, and essays. Her books include Grace Paley's Life Stories, A Literary Biography, the poetry collection What if your mother, and the poetry chapbook 4th Period English. This year her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies online and in print. Judith lives in Oregon, in an apartment upstairs of her neighborhood library.

Occupied with Poetry

2011-11-08T12:51:00.012-05:00

Art and politics intersect at Occupy Columbia (SC)

Art connected with politics, quite literally, on a warm October night at the intersection of Main and Gervais Streets in Columbia, South Carolina. A downtown poetry and pub walk, hosted by the local arts magazine Jasper, led right across the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse, where the Occupy Columbia protest was in full force, joined for the evening by a Latin American coalition.

We’d started off the evening at a local arts center with “Invocation” by Ron Rash, a poem in which Rash invokes the ghost of his grandfather over a jar of whiskey, asking him to guide him in his first collection, Eureka Mill, a poetry homage to the mill workers of the Carolinas during the 1930s textile mills strikes.

I was leading the pub walk. We had poets with poems, pretzel necklaces, a map with stops marked, and a pizza party waiting on us at the end of the evening. It was a lively group of fellow travelers, propelled by a couple of pints, a snatch of music at one local bar, and some fun (sometimes political, sometimes sexy) poems selected by local poets Ray McManus, Tara Powell, and Kristine Hartvigsen.

The statehouse grounds was on our map, since we had a couple of poems engaged with the difficult histories of our state—one by African American poet Nikkey Finney, “Hate,” and another by DC poet Dan Vera about one of the most awkward monuments on the grounds, “This is not the postcard for the monument to J. Marion Sims,” which he wrote after I took him on one of my “unofficial” tours of the grounds.

Sims, lauded as the founder of the modern science of gynecology, built his reputation by operating on slaves, as Vera points out. Elsewhere on the grounds are monuments to “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman (one of the founders of Jim Crow practices in the post-Reconstruction South), Strom Thurmond (his monument visibly altered to include his bi-racial daughter after his death), and a beautiful monument to African-American history, which our enlightened legislature approved but only if paid for by private not public funds. Oh, and the Confederate flag.

When we crossed Main to join the line of protestors waving signs at passing traffic, we had bags of popcorn to share with them, and a couple of poems we wanted to share as well.

I had been following Occupy Wall Street, and I’d seen the inspiring and arresting images as the movement gained traction around the nation. But it was when I drove by the capitol grounds in my hometown of Columbia and saw the local protestors that I was galvanized. As the local news media began to follow the protest, one image leapt out for me, a photo from the local alternative newspaper the Free Times.

In it, one of my former undergraduate students was leaning against a statue, watching Travis Bland, the movement organizer, raising his arms.

I wrote a poem, “Letter to Travis,” and I had it with me that night.

We asked if we could share the poem. Standing on the steps of a monument to the Confederate dead, I read the poem, phrase by phrase, and the protestors echoed it back in the mic-check format of the Occupy movement, transforming the poem into a call and response.

Letter to Travis

at Occupy Columbia, 22 Oct 2011, after reading the Free Times coverage

I saw that photo of you, lean, grinning, skinny jeans,

flannel shirt, newsboy cap, and nearby,

my former student Anna, hair dyed black, arms crossed

over her tie-dyed purple tee, leaning

on a not-quite-life-sized bronze George Washington

(the one boxed off at the MLK march

earlier this year, unfortunate fodder for FOX to spout off

about respect and legacy and shit like that,

the one with the broken cane, broken off by Union troops

in 1865 and never repaired,

as if he’s doomed to limp down here, and he was shot later

by drunken Governor Ben Tillman, the one

so racist he got his own statue in 1940, just

across the square from George, standing watch

now over a cluster of punks in sleeping bags, just down

the lawn from the one for gynecological

marvel J. Marion Sims, who Nazi-doctored black

women, then ran off to New York to experiment

on destitute Irish immigrant women—such difficult history here,

stories of the black, the poor.). I heard more

about George this morning on NPR, his whiskey distillery

back in business, though without the slave labor,

that story after the one about Occupy Washington

clustered near K Street. The front pages

of the local papers are Gadhafi’s slaughter, the body stashed

in a shopping center freezer, GOP

would-be’s descending on us for another debate, the state fair

ending this weekend, its rides and fried things.

I’ve got the list of what you guys need, Travis, gloves,

storage tubs, “head warming stuff,”

water, and I plan to drop by later with supplies.

For now, though, I look out my window,

the weather beautiful if cool, fair weather, the dogwood gone

red and finches fidgeting among the limbs.

Too easy, probably, to turn all pastoral at times

like these, to tend my own garden,

the last tomatoes ripening up, collards almost ready,

needing that chill to sweeten a bit.

A dear friend wrote me this week, says he’s scared

he’ll lose his job come the new year,

a fear we hear over and over, though the GOP folks

tell us it’s our own fault that we’re

not the rich—individual responsibility and all that.

I want to believe in the joy

and resistance I see there on your face, Travis,

the will revealed in Anna’s crossed arms.

I want to believe it, I want it to last, I want it to win.

I’ll stop by later with gloves and water.

While there can be many audiences for a poem, this was the perfect audience, and Travis, the Occupy Columbia organizer, was there among them. And when they repeated, forcefully, “such difficult history here” or “I want it to win,” I was so moved.

A couple of days later, someone forwarded to me an essay by Sarah Browning about poetry as a form of activism. In it, she writes: “Poetry and other art forms can combat despair, inspire those working in the trenches of social change movements, humanize those we are taught to fear, and build bridges across our differences, telling our human stories.” She adds—and I couldn’t help but think of my own take on our statehouse monuments, or Dan Vera’s poem—“A poem can be a history lesson.”

I hope this poem can do that kind of work. But my partner and I will still stop by again with more practical support: gloves, bottled water, “head warming stuff.”

---

Ed Madden teaches at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Signals, which won the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and more recently, Prodigal: Variations. He is also the literary editor of Jasper. Photos by Kristine Hartvigsen.

Occupy Columbia

http://occupycolumbiasc.org/

FOX coverage of the Washington statue

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/19/naacp-draws-complaints-covering-george-washington-statue-mlk-day/

J. Marion Sims

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Marion_Sims

A local feminist perspective

http://www.scpronet.com/point/0006/p06.html

Review of Meanwhile

2011-11-04T15:43:00.000-04:00

Review by Katherine Anderson Howell

Kathleen O’Toole’s Meanwhile dwells as much on what is not present as what is. The book plays with time, transience, land and place, and works these themes into a powerful statement about justice and love.

Throughout Meanwhile, spirituality and religion echo – from Lent to Advent, from Bible verses to portable communion, from ku to Pentecost to Buddhist peace flags, spiritual things become not the subject of the poems, but an overtone, serving to keep the reader in mind of a search for enlightenment and peace.

The search is not always successful. In the poem “At Kelly Ingram Park” a photographer shoots pictures of the memorials to the victims of the Sixteenth Street Church bombing. The poem moves through time, from when the speaker’s “grandmother lit candles in the dark fearing/ the riots would spill our way in April of ’68” and even further back to “parents// dress[ing] her as Aunt Jemima for Halloween in’59.” The speaker considers the “un-oiled wheels of law” and the “couple of 80-year old preachers, former klansmen/ in wheelchairs for their life sentences,” contrasts these with the broken lives of the young girls who were murdered. The reader senses the fullness of life – the ice cream truck, a neon sign – and the absurdity that comes with the creeping pace of justice that allows hatred to breath long and cuts off innocence.

The next poem in the book continues this juxtaposition between the full life and the broken life. “Seen, Unseen” begins with a litany of natural images – a heron, a Sierra ridge, and winged insects. The poem then shifts, asking us to:
“Imagine a movement/ among the super rich, rushing to cash in their billions./ A river of balm floods the sub-Sahara, overtakes the pillaging of AIDS.”

Justice here is economic and abstract – it is money becoming a healing agent. Such a thing exists only in the imagination, as O’Toole reminds us in the next lines: “Only first see the mothers/ queuing up at a Bostwana clinic, their sons bending over the cassava plots,/ sisters minding babies who play gamely in the dry stream bed.” We cannot imagine justice that will heal this; we certainly cannot imagine it until we have seen this brokenness ourselves.

Our physical lives hold fascination for O’Toole. “County Antrim Archeology” discusses the transience of the physical, how our bodies will be subsumed into atoms, will become just “a small moist stain on the lip of the whirling god.” Even in life, our bodies are divisible; they break, they become ill, they require healing. O’Toole connects the tools we use for healing with the tools we use for murder in “Themes and Variations: Baltimore Museum Sculpture Garden”:

Nuclear medicine, the technician explained
............is only three steps of mind
.........................- a few acrobatic sparks –
from the science of war..........................I watch
...........the inscrutable screens moving dots
and what may be white
.................................masses of organ or bone
as if my flesh were dissolving…

Our bodies are both knowable and unknown, both victim and assailant.

So too are our homes. “Demolition in a Time of Penitence” shows the transience of shelter, and here again, justice is slow, imagined or absent: “For weeks the demolition experts have been at work -/ picking clean the carcasses of four public housing high-rises.”

O’Toole connects this destruction to all of us – the eyes that watch are ours, the skeletons forced out of closets are ours, and questions are left hanging after the explosion that brings the buildings down.

These themes of injustice, transience, and the search for peace converge in the poem “April is National Poetry Month.” The speaker of the poem is in a taxi, listening to the radio with a driver from Sierra Leone. Together, they feel the absurdity of a world with justice for some but not for all:

He recoils at the lawyer’s voice on the radio
defending the serial arsonist: “My client
only set those fires to relieve stress!” …
…his corner of the world
abandoned by Cold War interests, leaving
the vultures of chaos free reign with home-grown
(Harvard educated) rebels swooping in

The rest of the poem slides away from this reality, returns to nature, where many of O’Toole’s poems return in their search for peace: cherry blossoms, the dogwoods of “dependable” spring in DC. “Poetry” this book claims “is where you find it.” O’Toole has found it in the fight to love the world.

Kathleen O'Toole
Meanwhile
David Robert Books
$18

A free review copy of this book was provided to Split This Rock poetry Festival

Poem of the Week: Penelope Scambly Schott

2011-11-04T12:12:00.004-04:00

At the Demonstration

Back when I used to march
in the noon of the green world,

I sang like a crow.
The cacophony of insistence

burnt like lightening.
Now ash lowers the sky

and I gasp through slits in my ribs.
Injustice, are you listening?

Light rises from my round mouth
and my heart jerks in my hand.

Greed hangs among clouds
as we stand here together,

palms up. Whatever sifts down
is our only food.

-Penelope Scambly Schott

Used by permission.

Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of eight collections of poetry, including a verse biography of Protestant dissenter Anne Hutchinson and, most recently, Crow Mercies (2010), available from CALYX Books.

100 Thousand Poets for a Free Tibet

2011-11-04T11:29:00.005-04:00

Reading of poems by Tsoltim N. Shakabpa, Jigme Dorjee DAGYAP, Tashi Rabten, and Tenzin Tsundue in front of the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles.

by Teresa C. Dowell

As a poet, writer, teacher and human being, I feel a moral responsibility to help bring forth voices that need to be heard. If I were in China, I would be put in prison for what I write and say; however, luckily, I live in the U.S. where I can freely express my thoughts and feelings. In places such as Tibet, one can not write or speak one’s mind freely. Consequences include being arrested, imprisonment, torture and/or death.

A few days before ENOUGH: Global Day of Action for Tibet, I made copies of poems by Tibetan poets Tsoltim N. Shakabpa (a.k.a. T.N. for Tibetan National), Jigme Dorjee DAGYAP, and Tashi Rabten (pen name: Theurang).

On November 2, 2011, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a grassroots global coalition of poets, joined L.A. Friends of Tibet and Tibetan Association of Southern California at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles to protest China’s oppression, to read and distribute poems by Tibetans, and to pray during a candlelight vigil in solidarity with the global campaign - ENOUGH is ENOUGH – Global Intervention to Save Tibetan Lives.

It was important for me to bring forth the voices of Tsoltim N. Shakabpa, a renowned Tibetan poet, who experienced a stroke recently and can not travel or read his poems out loud, Jigme Dorjee DAGYAP who lives in Sikkim, Gangtok in the Himalayas, and Tashi Rabten, poet and editor of a banned literary magazine known as “Shar Dungri” (Eastern Snow Mountain), who is in prison, sentenced to four years by the Chinese government. However, their voices need to be heard because it is a matter of survival for a people and a culture on the verge of extinction, and Tibetans are the ones that must tell their story to the world, not the colonizers.

Tibetan Association of Southern California began the protest in front of the visa office in hopes of raising awareness among potential visitors of China. At 4:30 p.m., we protested in front of the Chinese Consulate, demanding human rights, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. Photos of the 10 monks and nun in Tibet who self-immolated this year were strewn like prayer flags across the lawn and on picket signs. Then, we marched around the block, I held a sign painted in the colors of the Tibetan flag that read, “100 Thousand Poets for a Free Tibet” and passed out leaflets with poems by Tsoltim N. Shakabpa, Jigme Dorjee DAGYAP, and Tashi Rabten to passersby and people who were wondering what the protest was about.

Afterwards, we returned to the front of the Chinese Consulate and began the poetry reading with the reading of the poem, “Remember,” by Jigme Dorjee DAGYAP. Tibetans continued to read aloud poems by Tsoltim N. Shakabpa: “We Can and We Must,” “Devil in Disguise,” and “China O China.” Some Tibetan children read poems by Tashi Rabten. The poem, “Rangzen,” by Tibetan writer/activist Tenzin Tsundue was read. It was a very touching and emotional moment for me to hear the poems read aloud by Tibetans in front of the Chinese Consulate.

After the reading, it was already night time, the sky had darkened. Above us was the waxing moon and a few stars. We all sat down on the lawn surrounded by candles during a prayer – om mani peme hung...

At about 7:30 p.m., the press release was read aloud and I listened to the demands for human rights, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. I listened to the names of the 10 monks and nun in Tibet who had sacrificed their lives by lighting themselves on fire in self-immolation, sending their only voice, fire, burning flesh, over the great Himalayas for the world to hear. I could not hold back my tears. As the tears streamed down my face, I told myself, I must be strong, I must be resilient, as we all must be and continue this peaceful fight for freedom and basic human rights.

Photos from the November 2nd ENOUGH: Global Day of Action for Tibet at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.224213620977149.59611.211573215574523&type=3

Stand Up For Tibet Campaign Unites World Wide on Eve of G20 Summit

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-698795

Petition to Free Poet Tashi Rabten: http://www.change.org/petitions/the-president-of-the-united-states-release-tibetan-poet-tashi-rabten-and-end-chinas-censorship-of-writers

A poem read at the protest:

CHINA O CHINA

By Tsoltim N. Shakabpa

You affect democracy

We effect democracy

You bear no criticism

We bare our soul

You prey on the weak

We pray for the weak

You exorcise freedom

We exercise freedom

You complement injustice

We compliment justice

You faze human rights

We phase in human rights

You pair wrong with right

We pare wrong from right

You censor free speech

We censure limited speech

You break laws

We brake to prevent illegality

You go left

We go right

You tell lies

We tell truths

You hate religion

We love religion

You talk crooked

We talk straight

You adore money

We adore God

You act violently

We act non-violently

You promote autocracy

We promote democracy

You restrain free speech

We restore free speech

Your power grows out of the barrel of a gun

Our power grows from the legitimacy of our claim

China O China

Give up your sins

And save your skins

We pray for your soul

Abandon your goal

Give up your wrath

Follow our path

So we can get along

And be true friends life long

Poem of the Week: Jane Seitel

2011-10-28T13:47:00.002-04:00

Suspension of Disbelief

I wake into yet another day of doubt

creeping in as ants through a warped doorjamb.

The morning news brings new atrocities

as I pour milk neither sweet nor sour into the memorial

glass. At breakfast, I read the morning paper.

The Jordan becomes a cesspool, which may run dry given

another year. Half a century of buried landmines

seed her weedy banks, rank pottage strewn

by us, by them, exploding at the lightest step.

Yesterday's fragments shattered the leg of some poor

boy. The radio drones a politician's promises

of peace. While I make my roux, waves bite stagnant air,

on Av's first Friday. It will take chemistry, not miracles,

to proof this challah. I don't believe in miracles, though

in my pre-dawn dream, Elisha visits, bald prophet

who filled empty sinkholes with water and quenched our thirst,

Elisha who sweetened Ein Es-Sultan's poisoned spring.

Now Naaman the Syrian general comes bent, moaning,

greaves cast off, javelin fallen, his skin leprous scabs.

Elisha disobeyed a mighty king: Let him come to me,

and he will learn there is a prophet in Israel. Elisha ordered

Naaman immerse seven times in the Jordan, his savaged

lesions healed, the warrior's body salvaged.

Then in my dream, I see his face; the shattered boy

of yesterday's news. The prophet holds a stick in his left hand,

a prosthetic olive branch. He touches the leg, birthing new bones.

The calf becoming muscular, the thigh again a pillar.

Then in an ordained gesture, Elisha throws the branch deep

into bucking whirlpools, as from the Jordan's silted throne

a mason's ax emerges, bucking on the eddies. On the shore

Solomon's temple rises, beside it a domed mosque rises

from a severed branch-from these ceded waters.

-Jane Seitel

Used by permission.

Jane Seitel is an Expressive Arts Therapist, (Lesley University), who has recently completed her MFA in Poetry at Drew University. Her poetry has appeared in Bridges, Poetica, Prairie Schooner, Midstream, and is forthcoming in The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is the 2010 recipient of The Charlotte Newberger Prize for Poetry. She has worked with children, adults and animals in the spirit of tikkum olam, and has just finished her first poetry manuscript.

Review of The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

2011-10-26T17:02:00.001-04:00

The following review was written by Louise Helferty, Split This Rock intern, Summer 2011.

Nick Flynn is the author of two memoirs, The Ticking Is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He is also the author of two previous works of poetry, Blind Huber and Some Ether.

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is his first new poetry collection in nearly a decade.

From the offset of his latest collection, it is abundantly clear that Flynn’s time spent in Turkey interviewing former Abu Ghraib detainees, has unsurprisingly had a deep and lasting effect. As was the case in his most recent memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010), in which he chronicled his post Abu Ghraib work, collecting the testimonies of Iraqi men who were unjustly detained and tortured, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, is predominantly informed by the subject of torture. In around two dozen poems organized into three parts, Flynn considers the plight of soldiers trained never to question authority and the acute betrayal of trust encoded in orders to commit profound and disturbing acts of torment.

The style employed by Flynn in the captain asks for a show of hands, is often rather abstract. Indeed his content is frequently mimicked by his structure as he parallels the confusion inherent in our relationship to war and torment, with that of distortion of syntax and form. This is vividly portrayed in this opening section from his poem “earth”:

last night I wandered, capt’n, the earth
bright and poison, I

staggered, a forced march, yes, then
digging, a grave, made to dig my own

gave someone muttered ‘kiss
my ass’, a body walked into the

earth, I saw my own body, covering itself
with earth, my body becoming

earth

Indeed, “earth” was one of my favorite poems in the collection. With its potent mix of frustration, urgency and naivety, Flynn’s heavy satire and social critique is somewhat underscored by the genuine earnestness of his speaker:

if I understand the memo right, capt’n, we can use
water, but we cannot use earth–that is,
we can simulate drowning, but not
burial–is that right, sir,
capt’n? I’ve read
the memos &; I want to do
what’s right

This almost blur that Flynn creates between torturer and tortured is further exemplified in his "seven testimonies (redacted)," which was for me, without a doubt, the highlight of this collection. The poem is composed of Flynn’s fragmented redact of testimonies given by Abu Ghraib detainees whereby he uses erasure to manipulate the pre existing words and phrases:

broomstick was I was
you are we want-

one better one blanket
for under & one

& fifteen days of food. One man had
a heart, a pill under

As with the above excerpt, Flynn’s technique paints a most disorienting and ominous picture throughout the entire poem. Figures and objects loom, suggestive of violence and suffering, forcing us to use our imagination to puzzle the pieces together. Flynn also, however, includes the original testimonies in the book’s notes section, where we learn, for example, that the above quoted broom is as reprehensible as suspected: “The broomstick was metal. I was hit in the face, back, legs...” For me this is most important as the knowledge garnered from the original transcripts provides a horrifying and potent depth to the poem, making it, and the voices of the detainees impossible to forget.

Flynn has created in The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, a powerful and important book of poetry. By engaging with the contemporary world, and its atrocities, Flynn faces up to some of the most difficult and uncomfortable questions and confusions of our time, and his devotion to the consideration and confrontation of dark truths, compels the reader to do the same.

Nick Flynn
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands
Graywolf Press
$22.00

Graywolf Press provided a free review copy of this book to Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

All over the world, poets stand up for progressive change

2011-10-24T14:02:00.003-04:00

DC's Walk of Shame Brings Silenced Voices to International Action

“What if we stand outside the embassies of some of those countries and read the silenced poets’ poems so they can be part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change too?”

The Poetry Walk of Shame was born. We chose three countries with egregious human rights records, from three parts of the world, whose embassies were within walking distance of one another. Sadly, this was not a difficult task. The embassies of Yemen and Burma are tucked into a leafy corner of DC called Kalorama, just northwest of Dupont Circle. And just downhill, on a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue known as Embassy Row, stands an unprepossessing row house, the embassy of Turkmenistan.

Read the full article here: http://www.fpif.org/articles/poets_stand_up

Video of exiled Burmese poet Kyi May Kaung (in photo) reading her poems at the Burmese embassy is here, courtesy of This Light: Sounds for Social Change.

Poem of the Week: Claire Zoghb

2011-10-21T13:38:00.005-04:00

WAR STORY

He’s put the war out of his mind. Shelling and murdered relatives behind him. But it lives on in his legs: one limb at a time shakes constantly, even in sleep, as if someone had told him once long ago that he could outrun memory and he half-believed it.

-Claire Zoghb

First appeared in Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America [The Lebanon Issue], 2006

Used by permission.

Claire Zoghb's Small House Breathing won the 2008 Quercus Review annual competition. A chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press. Her work has appeared in Connecticut Review, CALYX, Mizna, Natural Bridge and in Through A Child's Eyes: Poems and Stories About War. Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, Claire won the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition. She lives in New Haven's Morris Cove neighborhood and works as Graphics Director at Long Wharf Theatre.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Nahshon Cook

2011-10-14T15:15:00.002-04:00

From a Conversation-Hour Discussion About Intolerance with Adult English Students

Pak Kret, Nonthanburi, Thailand

Then he explained

how the Buddha

instructed us

to reflect on the body

our skin

our hands and feet

our body hair

our nails and teeth

our noses

our eyes

our minds

our hearts

so that we can see

ourselves clearly

in every person

no matter where

-Nahshon Cook

Used by permission.

A note from Nahshon:

This poem is an offering of

gratitude for the healing power of love

and I hope (with my whole heart)

that you enjoy it

Peace and a smile, beautiful people,

Nahshon Cook

Cook's second collection The Killing Fields and Other Poems will be published in 2015 by Shabda Press.

Review of Collective Brightness

2011-10-13T15:34:00.002-04:00

Review by Katherine Anderson Howell

If prophesy is speaking an idea whose time has come, then Collective Brightness must be prophetic. In a time when the right for all persons to participate in religious freedoms, such as marriage or ordination, is shifting and changing, and when religious groups of all kinds demonstrate their turmoil over sexual identity, the 100 plus poets represented in the anthology write boldly of faith, lack thereof, religion, exclusion therefrom, and spirituality that cannot be taken from them.

The book opens with Franklin Abbott’s “Koan.” Koans are Zen Buddhist stories or sayings that must be understood intuitively – they do not make sense to our rational minds. Abbott’s “Koan” explores history, both global and familial: “my face/ before my birth/ was half/ my father’s face/ looking/ back into/ eternity.” This koan sets the tone for the book – intimate and urgent, these poems speak to a world that see persons who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, or Queer as less than whole people. These poems insist on speaking the experience of poets whose souls are demeaned and damned by people who claim to determine who religion is and isn’t for.

The book doesn’t have a religion agenda; it isn’t an evangelical anthology. Ellen Bass’s poem “Ode to The God of Atheists” insists on a world in which “[t]he plums that bloom extravagantly,/ the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,/ each pebble and fear, pond and fish/ are yours whether or not you believe.” Beauty, spiritual and physical, fills this world, as Robin Becker writes about “peach and azure birds” flying from the mouth of a monk brushing his teeth. God godsself is drawn by this beauty. In the poem “Beetle Orgy,” from which the anthology’s title is drawn, Benjamin Grossberg writes of God looking down on a group of HIV positive men having sex and being “[m]oved to add/ His touch.” God gains from this experience, “comes to some knowledge/ as if for the first time, is distracted and pleased/ by the collective brightness of human skin…”

The anthology does not ignore the other, painful side of faith, religion, and spirituality. Kazim Ali’s “Home” claims that “God’s true language is only silence and breath,” and Jericho Brown, in “Romans 12:1” (the verse in which Paul orders Christians to offer their bodies as “living sacrifices”) observes that people, “[o]n the whole/ Hurt by me, they will not call me/ Brother. …they hate a woman/They smell in me.” Doubt, loneliness, hatred, and rejection are aspects of the spiritual experience of LGBTIQ people that are also explored in the anthology.

As is violence. Late in the book, Joseph Ross’s poem “The Upstairs Lounge, New Orleans, June 24, 1973” brings the murder of the patrons of the Upstairs Lounge, a bar and church where gay men could worship, vividly to life. Ross writes of the patrons singing “like they deserved to.// They prayed like they meant it.” The bar is set on fire, and many of the patrons die, including George, who escapes, then returns for Louis. The two “were found, a spiral/ of bones holding each other…” Ross does not stop with the fire; he continues to the aftermath – the jokes on the radio, the laughter of priests, and the refusal of churches to bury the dead: “Save one: a priest from// St. George’s Episcopal Church, who received hate mail…”

This is the hate and indifference to violence that leads to despair, which is achingly described in Regie Cabico’s “Soul Bargaining”: “By soul,// I mean God make me a wind instrument so I can toss myself/ into the East River. The street lamps are howling for the first// slivers of light. By light, I mean falling off a bridge// wrapped in the arms of a God who knows your name.”

Collective Brightness includes a poem by Azwan Ismail, a Malaysian writer who received death threats for participating in the It Gets Better Project and producing a Malay language LGBT anthology, Orang Macam Kita. Seung-Ja Choe is also included, the first time a Korean poet has been featured in an LGBTIQ anthology in any language. And Japanese poet Atsusuke Tanaka appears translated by Jeffry Angles for the first time.

The anthology is a global effort, and one that again and again gives evidence of what editor Kevin Simmonds claims in the introduction: “Abiding with this faith [which religion scholar Karen Armstrong refers to as the “opposite of certainty”], however, is one very personal certainty: No matter what, as a gay man, I belong.”

This Sunday, October 16, Kevin Simmonds and other poets from the anthology, Collective Brightness, will read at Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Sts, Washington DC. The reading will begin at 5:00 p.m.

Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality

Edited by Kevin Simmonds

Publisher – Sibling Rivalry Press

$24.95

A free review copy of the book was provided to Split This Rock by the publisher.