“the beautiful, needful thing”: in memory of Dr. Dorothy Height

This morning in the nation’s capitol, mourners said farewell to Dr. Dorothy Height, a life-long Civil Rights activist to whom this nation owes a debt of thanks. Rather than end my blogging stint on Harriet describing some of the revolutionary things that National Poetry Month has allowed this nation and its poets to accomplish, as I had originally planned, I have decided to dedicate this space to the memory of Dr. Dorothy Height. This is fundamentally about poetry, too, because I am curious about the ways we have and can and will memorialize the women and men who make this world the sort of place in which I want to live.

- Camille Dungy on Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation - read the full piece here, including a nice shout out to Split This Rock.

Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners

What happened earlier this month happens almost every day somewhere in the world: Miners are killed at work. And why do they die--or for whom? Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China's Shanxi province die, in part, for us. As consumers who walk the aisles at WalMarts, dollar stores, and suburban shopping malls, we fuel the extraction of coal and other minerals every time we purchase items that are intimately connected to miners around the world.

- from "Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners," by Split This Rock 2010 featured poet Mark Nowak, published yesterday in Common Dreams. Read the full piece here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/26-7 and add a comment or link to your FB profile to get the word out. Thanks!

Poem of the Week: Ocean Vuong

Kissing in Vietnamese

My grandmother kisses

as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,

where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes

through the kitchen window,

as if somewhere, a body is falling apart

and flames are making their way back

through the intricacies of a young boy’s thigh,

as if to walk out the door, your torso

would dance from exit wounds.

When my grandmother kisses, there would be

no flashy smooching, no western music

of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe

you inside her, nose pressed to cheek

so that your scent is relearned

and your sweat pearls into drops of gold

inside her lungs, as if while she holds you

death also, is clutching your wrist.

My grandmother kisses as if history

never ended, as if somewhere

a body is still

falling apart.

-Ocean Vuong

Used by permission.

Ocean Vuong emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 at the age of one and is currently an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appear or are forthcoming in the Connecticut River Review, North Central Review, PANK, and Asian American Poetry among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and lives with an 84 year old roommate in Brooklyn, NY.

Vuong appeared on the panel Children of Warriors: Inheriting War Anthology Reading during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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 urges DC City Council to Resist Arts Funding Cuts

I urge the Council to resist the cuts to the Commission’s budget proposed by the Mayor and to recognize the essential role that arts and culture play in the life of the District of Columbia and its residents, whose poetry explores the city’s past, negotiates its present, and imagines its future. Without poetry, we are a city without a story.

From Split This Rock Co-Director Sarah Browning's testimony in support of arts funding at the DC City Council hearings April 27, 2010. Read her full testimony on the web site of DC Advocates for the Arts here.

Photo of the Week: Colorado T. Sky

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Poet Colorado T. Sky reads at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival's Friday Open Mic.

Photo Credit: Daniela Schrier

Poem-of-the-Week: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

After The UPS Man Shouted "Feed Your Baby At Home" Through His Truck Window

.......Beauford, North Carolina May 2007

Bionic Feeding Woman

whips breasts out, sprays

privacy netting over him,

through the window. She slays

public ignorance. Offensive,

angry and green, she stays

right where she is, extensive

superpower network plays

the news: Continental Airlines,

2003, Deborah Wolf charged

a terrorist during times

of war for milky discharge

in the face of passenger

complaint; Toys R Us

September 2006, stranger

for a children's store to fuss

when Chelsi Meyerson

busted out her right to feed

in the store's corner, shunned

by five harassing employees

who called security. Cover-up!

Applebees' manager told

Brooke, mother of 8. Cover up!

insisted the United steward,

throwing a used blanket across

Alina and her baby Rose.

Captain Areola, Boob Boss,

Mutant Nipple, each goes

on nursing, fighting the disease

of propriety like diaper rash,

growing muscles, curing degrees

of fever with a stubborn milky cache.

-Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Used by permission.

Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor is the co-author of Teachers Act Up! Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre (2010, Teachers College Press) and Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice (2008, Routledge) and has published poetry and reviews in many journals including APR, Alaska Quarterly, Georgia Review, Barrow Street and Quarterly West. She won the 2004, 2005, and 2008 Dorothy Sargent Prizes. Cahnmann-Taylor is Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.

Cahnmann-Taylor appeared on the panel Birth and the Politics of Motherhood in Poetry during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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

More Haiku for President Obama

you don't ask or tell
reform of health a victory?
i still have cancer
--Paul Zaic

way to go, big guy
hang tough on corporate monsters
care for the children
--Terry Ansbro

In a bright spring
clear sky
clean path ahead
--Judy Halebsky

don't let them shame you
you are sun and rain and flesh
like us, your people
--Vanessa Villareal

Haiku to President Obama

At our table at AWP, we asked visitors to write Haiku postcards to President Obama. It was (and still is) an opportunity to let him hear the voices of poets and writers and all those who have the ability to imagine a world that is better.

Despite my best intentions, I was too exhausted at the end of each day to post during the event. Here are some of my favorite Haiku from AWP. I hope to post more soon. If you're interested in writing a Haiku postcard to the president, please email me.

asked "how long" -
the general's hands spread
wider
-Barry George

Promises burn wide.
My health diminishes you,
You of your questions.
- McKenzie S.

Health care flashing on
cherry blossoms unfold now
rose flushed with vigor
- Joanie Mackowski

You aren't much better
cause you're still beholden to
capitalism

- Lauren Eggert-Crowe

Photo of the Week: Stephen Kuusisto

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Featured poet Stephen Kuusisto reads at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival

MLK National Memorial

This month of April marks the 42nd anniversary of the death of Dr. King and we are commemorating his life and work by creating a memorial in our nation's capital. The Washington, DC, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial will honor his life and contributions to the world through non violent social change.

Build the Dream.org has put together this micro-site to help get the message out - there are videos, photos, banners, and even a web toolbar that, when used, donates money to the creation of the memorial:

http://mlkmemorialnews.org

After many years of fund raising, the memorial is only $14 million away from its $120 million goal. Check out the site to see how you can help build the dream.

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: John Murillo

Enter the Dragon

.....Los Angeles, California, 1976


For me, the movie starts with a black man
Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons

Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops

On their backs. It starts with the swagger,
The cool lean into the leather front seat

Of the black and white he takes off in.
Deep hallelujahs of moviegoers drown

Out the wah wah guitar. Salt & butter
High-fives, Right on, brother! And Daddy

Glowing so bright he can light the screen
All by himself. This is how it goes down.

Friday night and my father drives us
Home from the late show, two heroes

Cadillacking across King Boulevard.
In the car’s dark cab, we jab and clutch,

Jim Kelly and Bruce Lee with popcorn
Breath, and almost miss the lights flashing

In the cracked side mirror. I know what’s
Under the seat, but when the uniforms

Approach from the rear quarter panel,
When the fat one leans so far into my father’s

Window I can smell his long day’s work,
When my father—this John Henry of a man—

Hides his hammer, doesn’t buck, tucks away
His baritone, license and registration shaking as if

Showing a bathroom pass to a grade school
Principal, I learn the difference between cinema

And city, between the moviehouse cheers
Of old men and the silence that gets us home.

-John Murillo

From Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010). Used by permission.


John Murillo is the current Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is a two-time Larry Neal Writers Award winner, a former instructor with DCWritersCorps, and the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie.

Murillo appeared on the panel Aqui Estamos: A Sampling of Poetry from the Inaugural Acentos Poetry Festival during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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: Dan Vera

Judicial Temperament

Thurgood whispers in Sonia's ears

You know they said the same things about me?
Master two languages, graduate at the top
They still sneer and drawl
about how 'qualified' you are."

Si, asi siempre es. she sighs.

The only quality the senators want is a mirror on the bench.

I await the sounds of Sotomayor
Rolling her Rs through oral arguments
Putting the Latin tenses in all the right places
Ruffling the feathers of the old birds
who learned their pronunciation second hand.

Inter rusticos
In forma pauperis
In flagrante delicto.

-Dan Vera


Used by permission.

Dan Vera is the author of a book of poems, The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books, 2008). Poems of his have appeared in Delaware Poetry Review, The Amistad, Konch, and the anthologies DC Poets Against the War and Shaping Sanctuary. He is co-founder and co-publisher of Vrzhu Press, managing editor of the gay culture journal White Crane, founder of the Brookland Area Writers & Artists (BAWA), and co-hosts the monthly BAWA reading series.

Vera appeared on the panel Gay and Lesbian Poetry in the 40th Year Since Stonewall: History, Craft, Equality during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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

We're off to AWP!

Split This Rock will be hangin' at AWP, the annual mash-up of Associated Writers and Writing Programs, taking over the Colorado Convention Center in Denver this week.

If you'll be there, check us out at the following spots:

Come say Hi and write a haiku post card to President Obama at Split This Rock's table at the bookfair. We'll be at Table #I21. (That's the letter "I," followed by the number 21.) You know the good man needs to hear fro...m you!

Then check out the Split This Rock panel, "Don't You Hear This Hammer Ring? Socially Engaged Poetry in the Age of Obama," Saturday, April 10, 9-10:15 am, Colorado Convention Center, Street Level, 103-105. Discussing the current state of poetry of provocation and witness will be 2008 featured poet Naomi Ayala, John Murillo, and Split This Rock Co-Directors Sarah Browning and Melissa Tuckey.

Sarah will also be on an encore of a panel that was part of Split This Rock 2010, "The War Is Not Over: Writing About Iraq and the Case of the Mutanabbi Street Coalition," organized by Persis Karim. This panel takes place on Thursday, April 8, at the more civilized hour of 4:30-5:45 pm, Mineral Hall, Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor. Other panelists are Beau Beausoleil, 2010 featured poet Sinan Antoon, and Evelyn So.

And another reprised panel from Split This Rock:

Event Title: Birth and the Politics of Motherhood in Poetry
Event Participants: Melisa ‘Misha’ Cahnmann-Taylor, Alicia Ostriker, Beth Ann Fennelly, Diana Garcia
Scheduled Day: Thursday, April 8
Scheduled Time: 1:30 PM to 2:45 PM
Scheduled Room: 205 - CCC

You can check out the entire AWP schedule here: http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2010sched.php

We'll be blogging from the conference, including posting some of our favorite haikus written to President Obama each day, so keep checking back.