Sarah Browning Reads Lenelle Moise's "Mud Mothers"

From the January 15 Confronting Climate Debt panel at Busboys and Poets Washington D.C. (14th and V) featuring Naomi Klein, Bolivian Ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon and activist/spoken word artist Michele Roberts.

Social Change Book Fair

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness is gearing up for our second festival March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. In addition to readings, panels, workshops, and opportunities to build community across barriers this year, we also want to showcase the significant role of publishers and those who bring us the kinds of writing Split This Rock celebrates: impassioned, visionary, and truth-telling. And we want to bring the critically important work of social change groups to poets, activists, and the public.

With this in mind, we're introducing a Social Change Book Fair to Split This Rock 2010. This will be an opportunity to further our mission of getting the critical work of socially engaged poets, writers, organizations, progressive presses, literary magazines, and independent newspapers the attention of our festival participants.

Won't you join us? The Social Change Book Fair will take place on Saturday, March 13, 9:30 am to 4:30 pm, at the Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage (the old 12th Street Y) at 1816 12th Street, NW, Washington, DC. Split This Rock workshops and panel discussions will be taking place in the same building, ensuring plenty of foot traffic. The Book Fair will also be free and open to the general public and we will promote it widely.

You can download the form from our website here. The deadline for registration is Monday, February 15, 2010.

Also, we are pleased to announce that Split This Rock's "official" hotel, The Beacon, has extended the reduced rate deadline - book by February 5th to take advantage!

And if you have not already done so, register for the 2010 festival to take advantage of our early-bird rates, good through February 10th.

Please feel free to contact Program Associate Abdul Ali with any questions: ali at splitthisrock dot org or 202-787-5210.

Benefit for Capturing Fire: National Queer Slam and Summit

January 31st
Benefit for Capturing Fire: National Queer Slam and Summit
Featuring Tara Hardy & Tristan Silverman
with "Brothertongue" (Gay Male Poets of DC)
$10 suggested donation

Doors open at 7:30 PM, Show starts at 8:00 PM
@ The Rabbit Room
Studio of Lisa Marie Thalhammer, Thom Flynn, DJ Natty Boom, and Danielle Evennou
52 O St, NW #100
Washington, DC

For more information, e-mail Capturingfire@gmail.com or call Natalie E. Illum at 202.518.8410
Directions: www.ostreetstudios.org

Tristan Silverman is trained as a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist, business owner, educator, and activist poet Tristan Silverman has become one of the top lecturers, teaching artists and performance poets for subjects ranging from gender, class and the social-political implications of branding identity.

Tara Hardy, a working class queer femme poet who founded Bent, a writing institute for LGBTIQ people in Seattle, WA, holds an MFA from Vermont College. Her work focuses on class, race, sexuality, gender identity, and interpersonal violence.

Register for Split This Rock!

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, invites poets, writers, artists, activists, dreamers, and all concerned world citizens to Washington, DC , for poetry, community building, and creative transformation as our country continues to grapple with two wars, a crippling economic crisis, and other social and environmental ills.

The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, parties, and activism -- opportunities to speak out, make common cause, imagine a way forward, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change.

Featuring these visionary voices and many others: Chris Abani, Lillian Allen, Sinan Antoon, Francisco Aragón, Jan Beatty, Martha Collins, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Andrea Gibson, Allison Hedge Coke, Natalie Illum, Fady Joudah, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Richard McCann, Jeffrey McDaniel, Lenelle Moïse, Nancy Morejón, Mark Nowak, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, and Bruce Weigl.

Register today! Rates rise February 10.

Details at: www.SplitThisRock.org

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

"Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse."

- Howard Zinn, who died today at the age of 87. Howard Zinn lifted our spirits. We lift a glass to him.

Poem-of-the-Week: Quincy Troupe

The Hours Fly Quick

the hours fly quick on wings of clipped winds
like nonsense blown from mouths of hot air—
people—including my own—form syllables, suds,
words shot through pursed lips like greased sleaze
& bloom inside all these rooms dominated by television’s
babble sluicing idiot images invented in modern test tubes—
clones—blinking, slathering all over controlled airwaves
of an up-for-sale world, blinking a paucity of spirit,
so dance you leering ventriloquists, marionettes,
you greedy counterfeits, dance, dance, dance


-Quincy Troupe

From The Architecture of Language (Coffee House Press 2006)

Buy The Architecture of Language from our friends at Teaching for Change!


Quincy Troupe is an award-winning poet and author. He has written 18 books that include poetry, children’s books, and non-fiction works. His books of poetry include Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2002); Choruses; Avalanche; Weather Reports: New and Selected Poems; Skulls along the River; Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969-1977, which received an American Book Award; and Embryo Poems, 1967-1971. He has written two best-selling biographies: Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (Simon & Schuster 1989), and The Pursuit of Happyness (HarperCollins/Amistad 2005). He has written the screenplay for Miles and Me: A Memoir (University of California Press 2000), which is scheduled for production in 2009.

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Troupe 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.

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

Photo of the Week: Alix Olson and Theresa Davis

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Poet Alix Olson reads from Word Warriorsas poet Theresa Davis listens.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Review of Bruce Weigl's Latest Book of Poems, Declension in the Village of Chung Luong

Language falls short of truth. In Declension in the Village of Chung Luong, the most recent book of poems by Bruce Weigl, as the poems explore the pain of the Vietnam war and its aftermath, language cannot do what it claims to do, and words, though the medium of expression, are ever cut down as poor and flimsy representations of reality. In the poem “Poor Excuse,” Weigl writes “We try and try/ but the word can never be the thing,/ and only nothing comes… .” This nothing, these “highly suggestible nerves in fits of lonely laughter” serve as markers of identification: “I am/ open to the raw sky. I am spinning planet and solo flight. I am/ sacrifice, and poor excuse.” The highly abstract representation of the word becomes the only thing left to the speaker to claim, and in claiming identity in word images, the speaker claims nothing and tells us nothing. This realization that language cannot fully name or express fills the poems throughout Declension in the Village of Chung Luong with an aching sense that something cannot be said, and yet must be.

The poems seem restless and searching. There is a longing in them to move beyond language and into truth, but their abrupt endings and emotional distance indicate that the search is painful and, perhaps, fruitless. This longing for some truth or goodness beyond language is crystallized in “The Abandonment of Beauty at Allen Memorial Hospital.” Death lies in a corner, waiting, and the medical staff do not need words to convey to the patient what is coming: “they said it with their grim countenance,/ and with the weight of their bodies in the space we shared. “ The truth, that death is coming, is lurking nearby, is not spoken “because words make you accountable.” The truth or falsehood of words requires evidence, but knowing and showing what is known through the body are proof, and so the knowledge of death’s coming is transferred to the patient, who longs for protection, for there to be a need for beauty in this stark reality.

“Oh where was beauty when I needed it.
How it had turned away;
how it had loved me through my life like no one else,
then in the end meant nothing.”

Beauty here is artifice – the words we create to both shield ourselves from darkness and to reveal it to others – and when it is needed, it evaporates. The poem “Le Filme” examines war both in art and in memory, both individual and collective. The war in the poem could be any war, with guided missiles, screaming children, and missed targets. The bodies “pile up/ as if on my shoulders/…We can’t keep up with the names anymore.” The universality of loss and violence live in our collective memories. As a society, we know on some level that this is what war is. To those who have experienced war, the individual memories can cut deeply:

“I am pulled inside the war. I am pulled inside the war.
Nothing I can do
Can stop even one fucking death; not one.”

The hopelessness that marks these thoughts reflects the feelings of powerlessness on the part of the speaker, who cannot write war away, and who cannot save its victims through his words. Finally, art enters the picture, a black and white war movie that shows clearly the consequences, but “one day will be ‘lost.’” The benefits of the collective knowledge, of the voice of the veteran, and of the advocacy of art seem to be ignored in the final moments of “Le Filme.” Once again, beauty, in the form of art, fails us.

Declension spans decades and continents. It is politically relevant and urgent, with poems like “The Prisoner of Ours,” and “Iraq Drifting, July 2003.” It has moments of playfulness, particularly in “How I Like It.” It pushes for connections between cultures, and mediates on moments in those cultures (“Departing Galway,” “Elegy for Biggie Smalls,” and “Say Good-Bye”). It is intensely personal, with poems like “My Uncle Rudy in Sunlight” providing a devastatingly beautiful background for the more recent tragedies the book explores. But mostly, Declension searches. It searches for justice, for truth, and for a beauty that does not fade, but remains faithful, never meaningless, never lost.

Declension in the Village of Chung Luong is the subject of a poetry discussion this evening at the George Washington University, sponsored by Split This Rock and the Writer's Center. You do not need to have read the book to participate in the discussion. For details, click here.

Bruce Weigl—an award-winning poet, translator of Vietnamese poetry, Vietnam War veteran, and Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Ohio—will be a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Declension in the Village of Chung Luong is his 13th book of poetry.

Katherine Howell is a poet, the Communication and Development Assistant and Blog Goddess for Split This Rock, and a Lecturer in Writing at the George Washington University. She lives, writes, and teaches in Washington, D.C. You can read her reviews of Split This Rock featured poets here.

A review copy of Declension in the Village of Chung Luong was provided by Copper Canyon Press. You can purchase the book at Copper Canyon Press for $14.00.

Poem-of-the-Week: Toni Asante Lightfoot

What The Liberal White Women Didn’t Know

If you came to see Moms put your clothes in the hamper
If you won’t do that then you best well scamper
Moms Mabley at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival

Look a here. I know why they called me.
Looking for a little dark meat like all White folk.

They didn’t know I old enough to come like I come.
Brought my “All Girl Nudey Review”.

A few Steinem types showed up at my trailer fence.
They was well meaning. Probably to tell me some shit

I wasn’t gonna listen to no how.

They wouldn’t come naked

so they left with their words
tucked neatly inside their pursed lips.

When I got on stage was like crickets
was the only ones in audience.

They didn’t know I got up in the funny
bone of harder company.

Sho nuf by the time I crossed the stage twice
them women was putting up their hands

either in joy
or testimony.


-Toni Asante Lightfoot



Toni Asante Lightfoot is a poet, teacher, performer, and activist. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she started hosting poetry readings in 1993 at Soul Brothers Pizza and moved to It's Your Mug in early 1994, where it hosted Saul Williams, Willie Perdomo, Miguel Algarin, The Darkroom Collective from Boston, Rhoma Spencer of Trinidad & Tobago and some of the best poets in DC. She is living in exile in Chicago, Illinois. She first left DC in 2000 to be artistic director of The Haven, an artistic retreat and bed & breakfast in Trinidad & Tobago. From there she joined the Blackout Arts Collective of Boston and became their artistic director in 2002. After realizing Boston what not her cup of tea, she packed up a truck and headed west to the Third Coast. Chicago has been a home sometimes cold, sometimes hot, but full of opportunism. Lightfoot is now the Director of TEACH Program at Young Chicago Authors. www.myspace.com/toniasantelightfoot

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Lightfoot 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.

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

Poetry Discussion Tomorrow

Come out to Split This Rock and the Writer's Center's discussion of Declension in the Village of Chung Luong tomorrow at 7:15 pm at The George Washington University, Rome Hall, Room 351. No advance reading is necessary. The discussion will focus on invidual poems, copies of which will be provided. If you'd like to buy the book, copies will be available for purc...hase at the event, or in advance for $14 at The Writer's Center and Busboys and Poets bookstore.

For more details, click here.

Poetry & Possibility: Remarks by Co-Director Sarah Browning

The following are opening remarks by Split This Rock Co-Director Sarah Browning at Poetry & Possibility, the benefit party held for Split This Rock at the home of board member Micheline Klagsbrun Monday, January 18, 2010.

Thank you all for coming and for your support of Split This Rock. Two things happened this week that reminded me of the critical importance of poetry in our Balloon Boy’d world: First, we helped organize a memorial event at Busboys and Poets for the rebel South African poet Dennis Brutus, who had died at the end of December. Dennis had been featured at the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival in March 2008 and he was the conscience of the festival, telling us that of all of us there, he was probably the only one who’d spent any substantial amount of time splitting actual, and not just metaphorical, rocks – which he did while imprisoned on Robben Island in the early 1960s with Nelson Mandela.

The event was joyous and celebratory, even as we mourned. Dennis continued to split countless rocks after his release from prison, this time the metaphorical kind: Injustice, apartheid, war. His was a singular voice of resistance. Martín Espada, who will read at this year’s festival in two months, wrote “Stone Hammered to Gravel” for Dennis in honor of his 80th birthday five years ago:

Did you know, slamming the hammer into the rock’s stoic face,
that a police state is nothing but a boulder
waiting for the alchemy of dust?...
South Africa knows. Never tell a poet: Don’t say that.

Poetry as resistance – and imagining another possibility, as we celebrate with today’s event, that a police state is just a boulder waiting to be turned into dust. Imagine! As Dr. King, whose life we remember today, reminds us, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

But then, just two days later, came the news of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. And we are faced again with the unimaginable suffering of millions of people and with our own sense of helplessness. Of course we’ve all been giving what we can for immediate and essential relief efforts. But this week as we saw wave after wave of images of suffering Haitians, it seemed essential to remember, as always, that the people of Haiti are not only victims, though they are, of course – of this disaster and of centuries of oppressive US foreign policy – they also are a people with a long and proud history, a rich culture. Poetry reminds us of the full humanity of others.

And so we circulated a poem by a Haitian American poet who will be reading at the festival in March, Lenelle Moïse, and I want to share the second half with you. The poem is titled “Mud Mothers.”

is haiti really free
if our babies die starving?
if we cannot write our names
read our rights keep
our leaders in their seats?

can we be free
really? if our mothers are mud? if dead
columbus keeps cursing us
& nothing changes
when we curse back

we are a proud resilient people
though we return to dust daily
salt gray clay with hot black tears
savor snot cakes
over suicide

we are hungry
creative people
sip bits of laughter
when we are thirsty
dance despite

this asthma
called debt
congesting
legendarily liberated
lungs

Thousands of people read the poem – on our blog, on Facebook, on list servs and web sites. Split This Rock brings essential voices such as Lenelle’s to a broad, diverse public hungry for authentic voices. It supports and encourages the poets who write poems that look directly at our world and struggle to understand, to bridge differences, to imagine other possibilities. We organize local programs and events, including readings and discussion series – and youth programs, including an annual contest for DC youth, The World & Me, and programs in schools and community settings.

And of course the capstone of our programs is the biannual poetry festival, the second of which is coming up very soon, March 10-13. Voices of dissent, beauty, imagination, and vision will be featured for four days of readings, workshops, discussions, open mics, a film program, and an opportunity for all who gather to speak out for a more just ordering of our nation’s priorities. I hope you’ll join us.

Of course, all of this work costs money and so we are very grateful for your support. We are still so young. If you know of others who would like to hear about Split This Rock, please let us know and we will contact them. There are festival sponsorship opportunities for businesses and organizations, too. Please see me after the program for more information. Thank you.

Photo of the Week: Martín Espada

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



2008 and 2010 Featured Poet Martín Espada reads at the 2008 Festival.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Reflections on Somehow Tenderness Survives: Remembering Dennis Brutus

Dennis Brutus at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival
Photo credit: Jill Brazel

Split This Rock's new intern, Scott Zimmerman, contributed this post. Enjoy Scott's reflections on Somehow Tenderness Survives: Remembering Dennis Brutus and welcome him to the Split This Rock team.

This past week has thus far been an amazing first step in what will be a wonderful two and a half month journey in D.C. Little more than seven days ago I boarded a plane from a familiar 75-degree Southern California and landed in the midst of a frigid East coast winter. From the time of my arrival I have been absorbing the many different facets of D.C. So far the city has reached a point of personal familiarity, but yet there lies level a culture almost foreign to me. Diving head first into a new urban lifestyle, I find myself welcomed as the newest intern at Split This Rock Poetry Festival. The program, which greeted me with open arms, is already a place I may call a home away from home.

Last Sunday (Jan. 10th), I found myself in awe, listening to the tales of a captivating poet, an enduring activist, and an inspirational leader, a man by the name of Dennis Brutus. Personal accounts of Mr. Brutus’ closest friends and acquaintances were joyfully shared with me by a lovely memorial event at local restaurant and cultural gathering place, Busboys and Poets. First arriving to the event, I had little to no knowledge of what a powerful person Dennis was and continues to be.

Photo Credit: Karren Alenier

The evening progressed with an exciting line-up: poetry, engaging chants, and testaments of an enthralling man who lived courageously, and we left admiring Mr. Brutus. I have heard the tales of activists, poets, and even teachers, but never have I heard the story of man influencing so many people in all three areas. Though I feel wronged for not knowing Dennis Brutus personally, I am thankful for now learning about him.

The thoughtful anecdotes and the words of Mr. Brutus’ poetry spoken throughout the evening helped me piece together a portrait of Dennis Brutus. I saw the image of a tall slender framed man who spoke compassionately of the world injustices. Dennis was as wiry in character as his beard that adorned his face. The empowering lyrical mantras and songs of global and South African activism was spot on, as the room packed with more than one hundred people chanted a powerful saying: Keep the oil in the soil, Keep the coal in the hole, and keep the tar sand in the land!

Photo Credit: Karren Alenier










In keeping with the mood of the event, an insightful 50-minute film by Vincent Moloi, fittingly named “I am a Rebel,” was screened by one of Mr. Brutus’ dear friends, Patrick Bond. The documentary of Dennis’s life helped solidify the passionate words spoken earlier throughout the evening. Words reverberated around the D.C. and back to South Africa during the tribute, originated by Split This Rock and Busboys and Poets, as well as other organizations. The tribute appropriately honored a tall poet with a slight frame.

To define is to limit, and I do not wish to put such an injustice on a man like Dennis Brutus. He touched the hearts of many and each heart has a voice of their own.

Viva Dennis Brutus Viva!!!

Isla Negra: For Neruda

Now
the earth that loves you
and that you loved
welcomes you again at last
its dark brown arms
open to embrace you:

the crowds that swarmed the streets
at your funeral
shouting “Chile is not dead”
will shout your return
crying amid tears and laughter
“Presente!”

“We were waiting for you here on Isla Negra.”

The sea, the brinky kelp, the seagulls
will know that a lover has returned
the scrawled messages to Pablo
on the walls of your shattered house
—all will fill the air with chants and poems
and songs that sing you home.

1993 (Written by Brutus for Neruda upon learning that Neruda was to be reburied at his home)


Scott Zimmerman is presently interning for the Institute of Policy Studies under Split This Rock Poetry Festival. He is pursuing his BA in International Sociology and an AA in Film and Media at the University of California Irvine. Scott is currently working through UCDC, a program that allows students to experience D.C. and intern at a local organization, which appeals to their interests. He has been an active leader in Global Connect, which utilizes college students in teaching local high schools on the importance of global issues. In late March, Scott will be working with local communities in Honduras, through the Public Health Brigade.

Poetry and Possibility Tonight!

Poetry & Possibility

A party to benefit
Split This Rock Poetry Festival:
Poems of Provocation & Witness
Co-hosted by Micheline Klagsbrun and Andy Shallal

featuring R. Dwayne Betts
and the DC Youth Slam Team

At the home of Micheline Klagsbrun and Ken Grossinger
3025 N Street NW * Washington , DC

Monday, January 18, 2010
6 pm – 9 pm


Suggested donation: $100 to $1,000

As a token of gratitude for your gift, Split This Rock will give all donors of $100 or more a copy of A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison,by R. Dwayne Betts.

Please RSVP to
Split This Rock or 202-787-5210

Aragón to receive national Latino literary award

The following is an excerpt from an announcement from University of Notre Dame regarding 2010 Split This Rock Featured Poet Francisco Aragón. To read the full announcement, click here.

Francisco Aragón, director of Letras Latinas, the literary program of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), has been selected to receive the Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Arts, Literary Arts and Publications Award given by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE). Aragón will receive the award in March during the association’s national conference in Costa Mesa, Calif.

The award recognizes Latinos who have contributed significantly to increasing understanding of the Hispanic community and/or culture through literary arts, scholarship and publications.

A member of the ILS since 2003, Aragón is the author of the poetry collection “Puerta del Sol” and editor of the anthology “The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry,” which earned first place in the Poetry in English category at last year’s International Latino Book Awards. He also is the author of a forthcoming collection of poetry, translations and prose titled “Glow of Our Sweat.”

Haiti Quaking in Our Hearts: By Lenelle Moise

The following is an excerpt from a blog post by Lenelle Moise, a 2010 Featured Poet at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Click here to read the full post.

Nearly 30 years ago, I was born in Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital; in General Hospital, one of the many buildings this terrible earthquake has destroyed. Many Haitian friends are writing to me, calling for comfort and prayers. They cannot find or connect with their loved ones on the island. They are at wit's end. My own grandparents live down the road from the partially collapsed National Palace. We have not heard from them. We wait, horrified. Thousands have died. Millions are displaced, injured, traumatized and wailing. Haiti needs our collective cri de coeur, our respect, our love, our magic and our energy. Haiti needs immediate international support.

The following are Lenelle's suggested ways to help.

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 to musician Wyclef Jean's earthquake relief effort. Yele is an effective grassroots organization that brought fast, direct assistance to the people during Haiti's recent hurricane/flooding crises.

For those who can give more, journalist Rachel Maddow has compiled a list of links.

Medical professionals can call 212-697-9767 to volunteer.

To read Lenelle's poem "Mud Mothers," our November 25, 2009 poem of the week, click here. Please circulate the poem and Lenelle's blog post.

Poem-of-the-Week: Mark Nowak

From Francine Michalek Drives Bread

Note: “Francine Michalek Drives Bread” is a fictional work. Resemblances to characters living and dead, fictional and non-fictional, are (just) coincidence. Textual samplings from speeches by the protagonist in Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother and Mary Ann Landis’s interview with Theresa Pavlocak (published in Thomas Dublin’s compendium of oral history interviews, When the Mines Closed: Stories of the Struggles in Hard Times: Cornell U.P., 1998) provide historical underpinnings for this fictional tale.

ACT/SEVEN

They took me right down
.........the hill, and
pulled up in front

of the hospital. The Piggly
.........Wiggly, outside of
Union, is Francine’s

last stop of the day.
.........Outside Eleanor
smokes a Slim.

And humming, Francine to
.........Francine.
I never dreamed

I would have to pass
.........my last years
like this. Before

they took me in the see him,
.........Doctor Steel
was the doctor

at that time, they took me
.........into a little
room

and they told me exactly
.........what’s wrong
with him.

Her father was a preacher,
.........miner, and
union organizer

who taught her to stand up
.........for the rights
of common people.

She was writing tunes
.........by age four,
walking

picket lines with her father
.........at age five,
and by ten

she’d spent time in jail for her
.........family’s union beliefs.
They make sure

to let us know when our time is
.........past. We have
nothing

to look forward to. Everything
.........we’ve learned
belongs

to the past. He told me
.........he wouldn’t
live,

the two hips were crushed
.........and one arm
was practically

mangled. And our experience
.........means nothing.
And maybe

that’s why Francine was
.........humming
them songs.

-Mark Nowak

From Shut Up, Shut Down (2004), used by permission

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Mark Nowak is the author of Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009) and Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004). For the past several years he has been designing and facilitating “poetry dialogues” with Ford autoworkers in the United States and South Africa (through the UAW and NUMSA), striking clerical workers (through AFSCME 3800), Muslim/Somali nurses and healthcare workers (through Rufaidah), and others. Nowak’s writings on new labor poetics have recently appeared in Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke, 2007), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007), The Progressive, and elsewhere. A native of Buffalo, New York, he now directs the RoseO'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. http://coalmountain.wordpress.com

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Nowak 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

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: Wang Ping

Solstice in Lhasa


What more can you say
Nomad daughter of glaciers?
City has bleached the sun from your face
18 years old with a freckled nose
Hides of yak, barley, sandy wind
Knees stiff from scrubbing toilets
What dreams keep you alive
On the marble floor of Gangkar Hotel?

Drunken tourists and their nightingales
Money is the moon on Lhasa's holy streets
In Beijing a storm drops 36 tons
Of dust upon the city of concrete
Nomad daughter from the Black River
What more can you say?
The wetland is becoming a desert
Home for rats, carcass of yaks

The salted tea you brought to my room
Yellow butter afloat from a distant factory
"It's fake but tastes okay.
The real is gone, like snowcaps."

Wind, breath, naked river beds
At dusk, a boy on motorcycle
Comes home with his last herd
Nomad daughter from the Sacred Lake
What dreams keep you going
In the glass cage of illusion?

Before the clouds
Cabs, trucks, mobs of fortune seekers
Behind the clouds
Patola Palace absent of its Buddha

Your ancestors are on the road
Nomad daughter from the Blue Treasure Plateau
Wooden gloves and padded knees
Long prostrations into the thin air
Their cry of never-perish ghosts
Calling you to keep the lamp burning, burning

And you shout to me across the street
"Sister, please find me a rich husband in America."

-Wang Ping

····

Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1985. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House Press. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. She had two solo photography and multi-media exhibitions--"Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges" at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and "All Roads to Lhasa" at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College. www.wangping.com
····

Wang Ping 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.

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!

Poem of the Week - Francisco Aragón

Torso


Despite the absent head (whose eyes

were the green of apples)
the supple flesh hums
with the afterglow

of those eyes
which is why the curve
of chest shimmers which is why

the twist of loin turns
that look into a smile, snaring
your eyes, leading

them slowly to regions
below the waist...That block
of stone more than a figure

disfigured and short; cascade
of shoulder glints
like a sinewy beast

of prey, whose edges blink
like stars-that torso:
gazing on its own. Step closer:

go blind


after Rilke

from Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, forthcoming March, 2010)
····
Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press) and editor of the award-winning The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press). Among his limited edition chapbooks are, Tertulia, (BOOKlyn). He is also the editor of Canto Cosas, a book series out of Bilingual Press that publishes Latino poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in various anthologies and in print and web journals. He directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He resides in Arlington, VA and works out of the ILS' offices in Washington, DC. www.franciscoaragon.net
····
Aragón will be featured at Split This Rok 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.

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

Karren Alenier Write-Up of Dennis Brutus Memorial

The following is an excerpt from Karren Alenier's blog discussing the Dennis Brutus event last Sunday. To read the full article and see more pictures of the event, click here.

The occasion of the Dresser meeting the venerable Brutus was the 2008 Split This Rock poetry conference. As a keynote speaker, Dennis Brutus viscerally made real what conference organizer Sarah Browning meant by naming her conference Split This Rock. What was especially moving to the Dresser was how such a modest and giving person could stand and suffer great hardship in the name of social justice and good common sense. Without hearing him speak, the Dresser would not have attended the LaFayette rally that crisp Sunday in March. The Dresser told those assembled that she was inspired to speak because of what Dennis Brutus said at the Split This Rock conference and she saw that Mr. Brutus who was standing in front of the crowd was moved by that confession. Afterwards, she spoke with him face to face and he embraced her. He said he was hoping people would be moved to action.

Photo credit: Karren Alenier

Celebrate Four Years of SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE

Celebrate Four Years of SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE
With Young DC Poets Abdul Ali, Danielle Evennou, and Adam Pellegrini
Sunday, January 17, 2010, 4-6pm
Langston Room - Busboys and Poets
@ 14th & V Streets NW

Abdul Ali is an alumn of Howard University where he edited The Amistad and became a writer. Since then, he has organized readings, exhibits, radio programming, and most recently joined the staff of Split This Rock Poetry Festival. He resides in Ward 6 but used to live in Ward 1. "Poems are all about breath. The breath will take care of form."

Danielle Evennou is the recipient of a 2010 Young Emerging Artist Grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is board president of the DC women's spokenword organization, mothertongue, coordinating/hosting regular spokenword events and projects. She also serves as a co-host for Sparkle: a queer-driven reading series for all, at Busboys & Poets 5th & K. Danielle was a featured reader at Queering Sound 2009, Capital Pride 2009, and Poetic Situations, as well as at Sparkle.

Adam Pellegrini is currently working on an MFA in poetry at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's lived in DC for the past year and a half with his beautiful girlfriend. His poetry has recently been published in the new anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC. Adam is also the co-editor of Cartographer Electric, an online journal of poetry and fiction.

Sunday Kind of Love takes place the 3rd Sunday of every month in the Langston Room at Busboys and Poets' 14th & V location. The series is co-hosted by Sarah Browning and Katy Richey and co-sponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock.

As always, bring a poem for the open mic! For more information: browning at splitthisrock dot org.

Photo of the Week: Abdul Ali

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Abdul Ali, Split This Rock Program Associate, at the 2008 opening ceremony in Busboys and Poets. Abdul will be reading at Sunday Kind of Love this Sunday, January 17.

Photo Credit: © jill brazel photography
To contact: jill at jillbrazel dot com

Activist Vital Stats: Laura Craig Mason, Updated

This new feature will showcase activists that embody the spirit of Split This Rock in the world. If you would like to suggest an activist to feature, please contact me at khsplitthisrock at gmail dot com.

Activist Vital Stats: Laura Craig Mason

Name: Laura Craig Mason

Location: Montgomery County, MD.

Causes: Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force: The Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force is an all-volunteer, non-violent group founded in the 1980s to promote peaceful and safe access to women's health clinics in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. I have been lucky enough to work with them for 5 years, and it has been both challenging and rewarding work.

Visions in Feminism: Visions in Feminism is a local conference held annually in the DC area since 2001. Each year Visions in Feminism seeks to provide a forum for diverse perspectives on feminist praxis. Last year I taught at the conference, and this year I am lucky enough to be on the collective that is putting it together.

Personal website: My podcast ‘Fully Engaged Feminism’ is now 1 year old!!

Inspirational Quote: "My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you...We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."- from “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action “by Audre Lorde. I have the inside of my arm tattooed with ‘Your silence will not protect you.’

A favorite poem or poet: There are too many poets & poems to single out as ‘the one best’ but time and again I turn to the writings of Marge Piercy. I really love her poem ‘For Strong Women’ from The Moon is Always Female.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

why aren't you feminine, why aren't

you soft, why aren't you quiet, why

aren't you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined

to do something others are determined

not to be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

to butt her way though a steel wall.

Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding

inside. A strong woman is a woman making

herself strong every morning while her teeth

loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

a tooth, midwives used to say, and now

every battle a scar. A strong woman

is a mass of scar tissue that aches

when it rains and wounds that bleed

when you bump them and memories that get up

in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love

like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

A strong woman is a woman who loves

strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;

she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf

sucking her young. Strength is not in her, but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

A Poetry Discussion: Declension in the Village of Chung Luong

Split This Rock and The Writer’s Center present:

A Poetry Discussion:
Declension in the Village of Chung Luong by Bruce Weigl
“The book's locus is Chung Luong, birthplace of Weigl's Vietnamese daughter, Hanh, and one of the poorest and most beautiful places on earth.”

Discussion led by Katherine Howell and Yvette Neisser Moreno

Thursday, January 21, 7:15 pm
at the George Washington University
Rome Hall Rome 351
801 22nd St. NW, Washington, DC
(1 block East of Foggy Bottom Metro at I and 22nd Sts; For a campus map, click here.)

Free and open to the public. Rome Hall is wheelchair-accessible.


Declension is available for purchase for $14 at The Writer’s Center and Busboys and Poets.

Bruce Weigl—an award-winning poet, translator of Vietnamese poetry, Vietnam War veteran, and Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Ohio—will be a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Declension in the Village of Chung Luong is his 13th book of poetry.

The Writer's Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers. www.writer.org

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness invites poets, writers, artists, activists, dreamers, and all concerned world citizens to Washington, DC, for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation, March 10-13, 2010. Featuring Sinan Antoon, Jan Beatty, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Andrea Gibson, Fady Joudah, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, Bruce Weigl, and many more. Readings, workshops, panel discussions, film, a book fair, and public action. www.SplitThisRock.org

For more information: yvettenm at verizon dot net or 301-879-1959

Critical Exposure

Critical Exposure teaches youth to use the power of photography and their own voices to become effective advocates for school reform and social change.

The organization was founded in 2004 by a former educator and an education policy analyst in response to the drastic disparities that exist among public schools.

By empowering young people to develop skills as documentary photographers and advocates, we expose citizens and policymakers to the realities of our current two-tiered education system as seen through the eyes of the students who confront those realities each day.

Through this approach Critical Exposure works to secure policy changes in order to ensure that all children have access to an excellent, equitable public education, fulfilling this nation's promise of providing all children with an opportunity to succeed.

Critical Exposure will have a presence at Split This Rock's upcoming benefit party featuring Dwayne Betts and the DC Youth Slam Team. The party is January 18, and donations of $100-1000 are accepted. For more information and to RSVP, contact ali at splitthisrock dot org.

To see some of Critical Exposure's galleries, click here.

Stone Hammered to Gravel

Head over to Foreign Policy in Focus to read "Stone Hammered to Gravel" a poem by Martín Espada, a featured poet at the 2008 and 2010 Split This Rock poetry festivals, for poet Dennis Brutus, who died at age 85 on December 26, on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

Somehow Tenderness Survives: Remembering Dennis Brutus, January 10

Sunday, January 10, 2010, 4-6 pm
Langston Room, Busboys and Poets

14th and V Streets, NW
Washington, DC
www.busboysandpoets.com
202-387-POET

Please join Busboys and Poets, Split This Rock, TransAfrica Forum, Africa Action, Foreign Policy in Focus/Institute for Policy Studies, and Haymarket Books as we celebrate the life and work of South African poet and pioneer for justice Dennis Brutus (1924-2009).

Featuring poetry and remembrances by poets Kenny Carroll, Elen Awalom, Holly Bass, and Sarah Browning, Sameer Dossani, former director of 50 Years is Enough, Zahara Heckscher, Emira Woods of Foreign Policy in Focus, Neil Watkins of Jubilee USA Network, Dave Zirin, author of What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and others. Audience members will also have an opportunity to offer their memories or to read a favorite poem by Dennis Brutus. Program to be followed by a screening of I Am a Rebel, a 50-minute documentary of Brutus' life by the South African filmmaker Vincent Moloi.

A world-renowned political organizer and one of Africa's most celebrated poets, Brutus was a life-long champion of peace and social justice. As an early opponent of Apartheid in South Africa, he spent years in prison on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. Upon his release and exile, Brutus successfully organized an international sports boycott of South Africa. Among his many books are Poetry & Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Haymarket Books, 2006).

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Photo of the Week: Kim Roberts and Regie Cabico

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Kim Roberts, editor of Beltway Quarterly, celebrating 10 years, and Regie Cabico, Split This Rock Youth Educator, at the Sunday March at the 2008 festival.

The Art of Extraction article at FPIF

The following is excerpted from a Foreign Policy in Focus article on The Art of Extraction event in November. Read the full article here.

It's a vision of heaven and hell worthy of a medieval painter. Indeed, with their monumental black-and-white works, the Collective has updated the art of the triptych. Like Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, the coal graphic is crammed with imagery that requires careful scrutiny and an accompanying guide to decode the symbolic content. It offers a three-part narrative of paradise, temptation, and damnation. And it is infused with a moral fervor that confronts the viewer with stark choices about how to live one's life.

For more information on Mark Nowak, check out his blog, Coal Mountain. For more information on The Beehive Collective, check out their website, BeehiveCollective.org.

2010 Adult Poetry Contest Deadline Extended to January 22!

2010 Adult Poetry Contest - Deadline extended to January 22:
Split This Rock has extended the deadline for our third annual poetry contest, to be judged by Chris Abani, one of the 2010 festival's featured poets.

First place $500;
2nd and 3rd place, $250 each.

Winning poems will be published on SplitThisRock.org, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read the winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in March 2010. We're excited to announce that the winning poem will also be published in Potomac Review.

NEW Deadline: January 22, 2010.

See the website for guidelines: SplitThisRock.org

Happy Tenth Birthday, Beltway Poetry Quarterly!

Beltway Poetry Quarterly Celebrates Ten Years of Publication!

Announcing Volume 11.1: Winter 2010
Beltway Poetry's Tenth Anniversary Issue:
A Celebration of Guest Editors

Beltway's newest issue features poems and reminiscences from the 15 talented people who have generously served as guest editors since the journal's founding: Merrill Leffler, Brian Gilmore, 2008 Split This Rock Featured Poet, Hilary Tham, Saundra Rose Maley, Grace Cavalieri, 2008 Split This Rock Featured Poet, Naomi Ayala, 2008 Split This Rock Featured Poet, Sarah Browning, Split This Rock Co-Director, Andrea Carter Brown, Kwame Alexander, Teri Ellen Cross, Split This Rock advisory board member, Regie Cabico, Split This Rock core leader, Katie Davis , Maureen Thorson, Toni Asante Lightfoot, 2010 Split This Rock Featured Poet, and Dan Vera, key Split This Rock activist. Editor Kim Roberts is also a member of the Split This Rock advisory board.