Thursday, October 29, 2009

November Sunday Kind of Love - Sunday the 15th, Featuring Tara Betts and Luis Alberto Ambroggio with translator Yvette Neisser Moreno

Sunday Kind of Love
Third Sundays of the Month,
4 pm Busboys & Poets
14th & V Streets, NW, Washington, DC

Hosted by Katy Richey and Sarah Browning
Cosponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock
Open Mic at each event! – Admission free, donations encouraged
For more info: BusboysandPoets.com
info@splitthisrock.org
SplitThisRock.org, 202-387-POET

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 4-6 pm
Tara Betts and Luis Alberto Ambroggio with Translator Yvette Neisser Moreno

Luis Alberto Ambroggio, originally from Argentina, is author of 11 collections of poetry published in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. The North American Academy of the Spanish Language has recently released a book on his poetry, El cuerpo y la letra (The body and the letter). His poetry has been translated into several languages and has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US and abroad. His poetry has been recorded in the Archives of Hispanic Literature of the U.S. Library of Congress.

PAISAJES DE USA by Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Si cada ladrillo hablara;
si cada puente hablara;
si hablaran los parques, las plantas, las flores;
si cada trozo de pavimento hablara,
hablarían en español.

Si las torres, los techos,
los aires acondicionados hablaran;
si hablaran las iglesias, los aeropuertos, las fábricas,
hablarían en español.

Si los sudores florecieran con un nombre,
se llamarían González, García, Rodriguez o Peña.

Pero no pueden hablar.
Son manos, obras, cicatrices,
que por ahora callan.

Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her critical work on (and translations of) Israeli and Palestinian poetry have been published in the Palestine-Israel Journal. Moreno teaches poetry and translation at the Writer’s Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

U.S. LANDSCAPES

If each brick could speak;
if each bridge could speak;
if the parks, plants, flowers could speak;
if each piece of pavement could speak,
they would speak Spanish.

If the towers, roofs,
air conditioners could speak;
if the churches, airports, factories could speak,
they would speak Spanish.

If the toils could bloom with a name,
they would be called González, García, Rodriguez or Peña.

But they cannot speak.
They are hands, works, scars,
that for now keep silent.

Translation of the above poem by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Translated by Yvette Neisser Moreno. From Difficult Beauty, published by Cross-Cultural Communications; used by permission of the author and translator, Yvette Neisser Moreno.

Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue, a Cave Canem fellow, and a graduate of the New England College MFA Program. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She represented Chicago twice at the National Poetry Slam, coached youth who went on to Brave New Voices, and appeared on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam". She currently teaches at Rutgers University and leads community-based workshops.


ERASURE by Tara Betts

Every face slowly dropping out of the world
like they never had breath, laughter or tears.
Chunks of history scooped out of the book of life,
burned for kindling, tossed into landfills
buried in chips from obsolete computers.

Too many bodies have been drawn
into centrifugal black holes, never to be seen
before they come clearly into view.

There must be some weathervane willing
to announce a shift in the wind.
There must be a gust of hands willing to turn
the rooster’s iron head away from absence.

History is pulled from my mouth
slow as a string of pearls, one bead at a time.
I stock the shelves with more substance than
porcelain figurines. I am raising my fists,
bareknuckled, tangling with omission.
Or it is an embrace caught again and again
between my fingers.

From Arc and Hue, published by Willow Books; used by permission of the author.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Arthur Sze














Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe

The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed
with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar,
is launched into a bay. A girl watches
her mother fry venison slabs in a skillet—
drops of blood sizzle, evaporate. Because
a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly;
the silence breaks when she occasionally
gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair.
Gone is the father, riled, arguing with his boss,
who drove to the shooting range after work;
gone the accountant who embezzled funds,
displayed a pickup, and proclaimed a winning
flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup
and clothes but never learn if they arrive
at the south end of the city. Your small
acts are sandpiper tracks in wet sand.
Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles
fill the bins along this sloping one-way street.

- Arthur Sze

From The Ginkgo Light, (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), used by permission.

····
Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (2009),
Quipu (2005), The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (2001), and The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), all from Copper Canyon Press. He is also the editor of Chinese Writers on Writing (forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2010). He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he served, from 2006 to 2008 as the city’s first poet laureate.
····
Sze will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.
Split This Rock is co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank.


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
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210


Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Upcoming November Events

Two upcoming events sponsored by Split This Rock:





Poets in the (Think) Tank: ROCKPILE Symposium
Cosponsored by Split This Rock and the Institute for Policy Studies

Tuesday, November 3, noon-1:30 pm
Brown bag lunch
The Institute for Policy Studies
1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600
Washington , DC
Farragut North or Farragut West Metro
For more info: info@splitthisrock.org, 202-787-5210

In anticipation of what is sure to be a music and poetry extravaganza at Busboys and Poets November 4, ROCKPILE artists David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg host an open discussion on Art and Activism, Poetry, Music and The Troubadour Tradition, Censorship and The Academy, Community and Collaboration. With additional guest poets to be announced.

ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer, legendary poet, musician, and essayist, and Michael Rothenberg, poet, songwriter and editor of Big Bridge Press. In the tradition of the troubadour and with the spirit of improvisation and collaboration, the duo will journey through eight U.S. cities and perform poetry, composed on the road, in a spontaneous fusion with local musicians in each city. Washington DC is the 4th stop of the ROCKPILE journey.

David Meltzer was an important figure in the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance and appeared in Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry,” a seminal work of that era. “Beat Thing” a book-length, poetic journal, published by La Alameda Press in 2004, won the Josephine Miles PEN Award in 2005. His books, Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz and No Eyes, Lester Young all reflect his deep connection and dedication to music throughout his career. His complete publication history is at http://meltzerville.com/.

Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, and editor and publisher of Big Bridge magazine online at www.bigbridge.org. His poetry books include The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press) and most recently CHOOSE, Selected Poems (Big Bridge Press). He is also editor for the Penguin Poet series, which includes selected works of Phillip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer and Ed Dorn. He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Phillip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press. Complete publication history can be found at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/Rothenberg m/

******************************

Split This Rock and The Writer’s Center present:

The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah
A Poetry Discussion
Discussion led by poet and translator Yvette Neisser Moreno

Thursday, November 19, 7 pm
The Writer’s Center
4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda , MD
(5 blocks south of Bethesda Metro)
301-654-8664
Free and open to the public. The Writer’s Center is wheelchair-accessible.

The Earth in the Attic is available for purchase for $16 at The Writer’s Center and Busboys and Poets.


Fady Joudah—an award-winning poet, translator of Mahmoud Darwish, and member of Doctors without Borders—will be a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Split This Rock 2010 Poetry Contest

Split This Rock 2010 Poetry Contest
Benefits Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010
$1,000 awarded for poems of provocation & witness
Chris Abani, Judge
Deadline: January 4, 2010

Prizes: First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on http://splitthisrock.org, winners will receive free festival registration, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2010.

Deadline: January 4, 2010 (postmark)
Reading Fee: $25, which supports Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Details:
Submissions should be in the spirit of Split This Rock: socially engaged poems, poems that reach beyond the self to connect with the larger community or world; poems of provocation and witness. This theme can be interpreted broadly and may include but is not limited to work addressing politics, economics, government, war, leadership; issues of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, body image, immigration, heritage, etc.); community, civic engagement, education, activism; and poems about history, Americana, cultural icons.

Split This Rock subscribes to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Contest Code of Ethics. Read it online here.

Submission guidelines:
Send up to 3 unpublished poems, no more than 6 pages total, in any style, in the spirit of Split This Rock (see above). Postmark deadline: January 4, 2010

Include one cover page containing your name, address, phone number, email, and the titles of your poems. This is the only part of the submission which should contain your name.

Enclose a check or money order for $25 (made out to "Split This Rock") to:
Split This Rock Poetry Contest
1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036

Simultaneous submissions OK, but please notify us immediately if the poem is accepted elsewhere. For more information, info@splitthisrock.org, www.SplitThisRock.org

Chris Abani will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2010. His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). His prose includes Song For Night (Akashic, 2007), The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007), and Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the recipient of many awards including the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Award.

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Jan Beatty


Jan Beatty

Zen of Tipping

My friend Lou
used to walk up to strangers
and tip them - no, really -
he'd cruise the South Side,
pick out the businessman on his way
to lunch, the slacker hanging
by the Beehive, the young girl
walking her dog, and he'd go up,
pull out a dollar and say,
Here's a tip for you.
I think you're doing a really
good job today.
Then Lou would
walk away as the tipee stood
in mystified silence. Sometimes
he would cut it short with,
Keep up the fine work.
People thought Lou was weird,
but he wasn't. He didn't have much,
worked as a waiter. I don't know
why he did it. But I know it wasn't
about the magnanimous gesture,
an easy way to feel important,
it wasn't interrupting the impenetrable
edge of the individual - you'd
have to ask Lou - maybe it was
about being awake, hand-to-hand
sweetness, a chain of kindnesses,
or fun - the tenderness
we forget in each other.

- Jan Beatty

From Boneshaker, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), used by permission.

····
Jan Beatty is the author of three books, Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River (winner of the1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, as a waitress, and in maximum-security prisons. She hosts Prosody, a public radio show on NPR-affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers, and directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and teaches in the low-residency MFA program.
····
Beatty will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

This Sunday - October Sunday Kind of Love!

SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE
Sunday, October 18, 2009, 4 – 6 pm
Busboys & Poets, 14th and V Streets, Washington, DC, (202) 387-7638, info [at] splitthisrock.org
Sponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock
Featuring Randall Horton and Emily Warn.
Hosted by Katy Richey and Sarah Browning. Open mike follows. Admission is free with donation.

For bios of the featured readers, complete with sample poems, click here

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Patricia Smith


VOODOO V: ENEMY BE GONE

The storm left a wound seeping,
a boulevard yawning, some
memories fractured, a
kiss exploded, she left
no stone resting, a bone
army floating, rats sated,
she left the horizon sliced
and ornery, she left in a hurry,
in a huff, in all her glory,
she took with her a kingdom
of sax and dream books,
a hundred scattered chants,
some earth burned in her
name, and she took flight,
all pissed and raucous, like
a world-hipped woman
makin’ room.

- Patricia Smith

From Blood Dazzler, (Coffee House Press, 2008), used by permission.

····
Patricia Smith author, poet, teacher, and performer, is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, a National Book Award Finalist. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, Cave Canem faculty member, and four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history. Patricia wowed audiences at Split This Rock’s inaugural festival in 2008.

····

Smith will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism – four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org. Split This Rock is co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank.


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
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210


Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Bruce Weigl





OH NATURE


.....Today some things worked as they were meant to.
A big spring wind came up and blew down
.....from the verdant neighborhood trees,
millions of those little spinning things,
.....with seeds inside, and my heart woke up alive again too,
as if the brain could be erased of its angry hurt;
.....fat chance of that, yet
things sometimes work as they were meant,
.....like the torturer who finally can’t sleep,
or the god damn moon
.....who sees everything we do
and who still comes up behind clouds
.....spread out like hands to keep the light away.


-Bruce Weigl



From Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (Ausable Press, 2006), used by permission.
••••
Bruce Weigl is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, several translations, and a best-selling memoir The Circle of Hanh. He is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County Community College.
••••
Weigl will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism – four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org. Split This Rock is co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank.

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
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Plastique Moves Beyond Publishing’s Bottom Line Toward Innovative Literature

With a plastic card the size of a credit card, Plastique provides an outlet for, and exposure to, innovative works of literature that break the boundaries defined by the mainstream market. Plastique is an independent literary press based in Chicago founded by poet and new media artist Francesco Levato.

Plastique publishes enhanced eBooks distributed in Portable Document Format (PDF) that are viewable and printable on virtually any platform – Mac OS, Microsoft® Windows®, UNIX®, and many mobile platforms, including the Apple iPhone®. “Whereas we love to have a physical book in our hand we believe the old model of publishing will continue its decline and so are focusing on a more decentralized model,” said Levato.

Each enhanced eBook contains the author’s notebook and annotated text links where you can view web sites and download books, audio, and video that inspired and
informed the author’s creative process.

How Plastique Began

Levato, who is also the executive director of the Poetry Center of Chicago, decided he’d heard enough aboutpublishing models, feasibility scales, and the economy as reasons why literature is or is not published. He then proceeded to withdraw his book-length poem “War Rug” from several major publishers who were considering the
manuscript; “War Rug” is Plastique’s first title. War Rug is a work of documentary poetics in the form of a book length poem. Multiple interwoven narratives explore life within zones of conflict as viewed through the lens of current warfare. The narratives range from passages inspired by journal entries, firsthand accounts, and news reports to poetic constructs collaged from military doctrine, Freedom of Information Act released government documents (like CIA interrogation manuals, and detainee autopsy reports), and numerous other sources.

Plastique’s drop cards feature book cover-like layouts such as this card cover for “War Rug.”

As a Plastique book, readers can read the book and access all of Levato’s source materials. Future books will include drawings, movies, animations, and more thereby creating and interactive, multi-media experience from a single book. Books sell for $5 and are available for purchase online or by purchasing a drop card containing the download code at readings, bookstores, and other card carrying locations.

For more information about Plastique, including publication schedules and submission periods, check www.plastiquepress.com or call Lauren Rachel, Plastique public relations, at 773/640-4522.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Up Close and Poetical: Jan Beatty

Welcome to the first in a series of profiles of featured poets here at Blog This Rock. The series, titled "Up Close and Poetical," aims to introduce you to our featured poets and their body of work.

Jan Beatty writes about class, joining poets like Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Jim Daniels among others in a tradition of telling working class stories from lived experience, tackling an American taboo even greater than race. In a 2008 interview, she told Classical QED 89.3 Pittsburgh that class runs through her books, Mad River, Boneshaker, and the latest, Red Sugar, often as an issue of survival. This concern with the lives of those without privilege reflects Beatty’s life and career. Although she currently runs the Mad Women in the Attic writing workshop at Carlow University, Beatty has lived a life of blue collar work. She has been a waitress, an experience that continues to inform her poems, perhaps most famously through “A Waitress’ Instructions on Tipping,” found in 1995’s Mad River. She worked as a rape counselor, briefly in a maximum security prison, and as a welfare case worker. Of the latter, she says, in an interview with KDKA Television, Pittsburgh, it was “tough work,” and she struggled to separate herself from her clients. This connectedness to the lives and battles of others, though, makes Beatty’s poems so moving.

However, when asked if her poems are biographical, or if they tell any one person’s real story, Beatty balks. “Ultimately,” she asserts, “it’s not so important what’s real, supposedly real, what isn’t, but what is the poem conveying.” And her poems convey a sense of the body, of Pittsburgh, and of brutality. There is too much “shying away” from brutality, Beatty told Bill O’Driscoll in an April 2008 interview in the Pittsburgh City Paper, particularly in a world where it is everywhere. She positions her latest book, Red Sugar, as a “tug of war between the romantic and the brutal,” differing from Boneshaker, her 2002 release, in that Red Sugar pushes deeper into the inside of the body. This is what inspires Beatty’s work, this “going deep and looking at the body, a woman’s body, a woman walking around the world.” In her poems, we see the experience of working women walking around Pittsburgh; the city and its economic hardships come alive in her poems, which are filled with such a sense of locality that Beatty might be mistaken for a regional poet. Make no mistake though: the Pittsburgh sensibility has as much to do with Beatty’s working class background as it does with poetic material.

Born in a foundling home, and adopted by a steelworker and his wife, Beatty was the first in her family to go to college. “It took me a long time to get to poetry because of class,” Beatty candidly declares. She wasn’t raised with the idea of becoming a poet or a writer as a career, but as a result, Beatty has made it part of her project to make poetry accessible. Her writing workshop is open to women of all ages, and she teaches at least one student in her 90’s. Her language is straightforward, clear; her poems have working class speakers. “People have a fear of poetry,” she states. “That’s one thing I want to do with Prosody [a poetry radio show and podcast Beatty hosts]… is say, ‘Look, this is for everybody’.”
This move toward accessibility doesn’t result in a reticence about tough issues. A review of Boneshaker in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette claims “rebelliousness becomes the ethos with which Beatty challenges American mores…. [She is] creating a world in which our cultural assumptions don’t hold up.” In Red Sugar, Beatty continues this resistance to norms. She says of her poem “I Saw One of Blake’s Angels,” “I want the speaker of the poems to be indicted most of the time. I hate this idea of the separate observer who’s not involved. I want interaction, I want communication. I want them to ram into each other. I want something to happen.”

Something happens indeed. Beatty’s poems indict the reader as well as the speaker; there’s no slipping away. We remain haunted and changed by what the poems witness.

Jan Beatty will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010. See the website for more details: www.splitthisrock.org.

Katherine Howell is the Blog Goddess and Communications and Development Assistant for Split This Rock Poetry Festival; she lives and writes in Washington, D.C. Her review of Jan Beatty's Red Sugar can be found here. Other reviews by Katherine can be found here.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Artists for Health Care Reform




Art. Activism. A nation in crisis.

MOCA DC Gallery, 1054 31st St NW
Opening Reception: October 2 : 6 -9 pm

Third Friday Reception: October 16 : 6-8pm

Halloween Broken Health Care Costume Party: October 31


On Oct. 2, MOCA DC once more seizes a social issue by the throat and lets community artists do their worst. In October's exhibition, health care reform goes up against the wall, as local and nationally-renowned artists splash their frustrations, heartaches, and struggles into every medium available.

Nationally renowned artists include Micheline Klagsbrun, whose art and collaboration with photographer Alberto Pieczanski (above) inspired billboards currently in use by Heath Care for America's Education Fund in many major US cities, as well as Nora Ligorano/Marshall Reese, longtime arts activists based in NYC. (To see some media response to the billboard, check here. To see Ligorano/Reese's Bottom Line images click here.)

Also participating: noted artists Matt Wuerker and Regina Holliday.

Matt Wuerker has worked as a cartoonist for over 25 years, currently as in-house illustrator for newspaper/website Politico. His deft visual storytelling brings humor and razor-sharp accuracy to often muddled, opaque political and social debates. His recent animated cartoon for health care reform, OPERATION, can be viewed here.

Holliday recently achieved media prominence with her hand-painted mural chronicling her husband's failing battle with kidney cancer, compounded by the uphill struggle against a medical insurance bureaucracy where helping the dying patient seemed to be the lowest priority. To read Regina's story in her own words, click here.

The opening reception will feature live music, wine, and real-time art creation as patrons are encouraged to draw or write their stories digitally, to be uploaded directly to the gallery's website. For those passionate about art and activism but unable to attend, MOCA will also feature a live streaming feed throughout the evening, available at http://www.mocadc.org and mocadc.blogspot.com. MOCA is proud to partner with CrossCurrents Foundation, a DC-based philanthropic organization emphasizing social and economic justice, in this important exhibition.

MOCA DC is the premier gallery in Washington, DC to promote the works of under-served artists and art genres. It also headquarters the Figure Model's Guild, creating a network of figurative artists and professional models within the greater DC area. The gallery is located at 1054 31st Street NW, in Canal Square, in the heart of Georgetown. For more information, please contact Dave Quammen at 202.342.6230 or mocadc01@comcast.net, or visit our websites, http://www.MOCADC.org and http://www.figuremodelsguild.org/

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Sinan Antoon




When I was torn by war

I took a brush
Immersed in death
And drew a window
On war’s wall
I opened it
Searching
For something
But
I saw another war
And a mother
Weaving a shroud
For the dead man
Still in her womb


Baghdad, 1990

- Sinan Antoon

From The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007), used by permission.
····
Sinan Antoon – poet, novelist, and translator – was born in Iraq and moved to the US after the 1991 Gulf War. His work, including Baghdad Blues and a novel, I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, has been widely published in Arabic and English. Antoon is an Assistant Professor at New York University.

····

Antoon will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism – four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org. Split This Rock is co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, the country’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank.

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
http://www.splitthisrock.org/
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210