Friday, July 30, 2010

Photo of the Day: MS Barrier Islands

This week, leading up to the Broken Gulf benefit on Saturday, I will be posting a picture and some information about the damage each morning.


Image Courtesy NASA (Jesse Allen, Robert Simmon and NASA EO-1 Team)

Slick Around Mississippi Barrier Islands
As of June 27, 2010, the entire gulf-facing beachfront of several barrier islands in eastern Mississippi (offshore of Pascagoula) had received a designation of at least “lightly oiled” by the interagency Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Team that is responding to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A few small stretches of Petit Bois Island had been labeled heavily or moderately oiled. (Caption via Rebecca Lindsey/NASA's Earth Observatory/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

For more NASA images of the oil slick, check out the gallery here.

Help us fight back against the destruction of the Gulf by attending Broken Gulf: A Benefit for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade Saturday, July 31 at Eatonville Restaurant. Tickets are available online and are only $10. A raffle will take place at the event with amazing prizes from local businesses such as ACKC and Fiddleheads Salon, and from a Mississippi Eco-Friendly Clothing Artisan.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Photo of the Day: Barataria Bay

This week, leading up to the Broken Gulf benefit on Saturday, I will be posting a picture and some information about the damage each morning.

Courtesy of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade's Photo Stream on Flickr, an image of Barataria Bay soaked in oil.

Photo Credit: Cesar Harada

Barataria Bay, in Southeastern Louisiana, was used as a hide out for Lafitte's pirates, and before the oil spill, was a rich source of wildlife, including shrimp and muskrat.

Help us fight back against the destruction of the Gulf's wildlife and history by attending Broken Gulf: A Benefit for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade Saturday, July 31 at Eatonville Restaurant. Tickets are available online and are only $10. A raffle will take place at the event with amazing prizes from local businesses such as ACKC and Fiddleheads Salon, and from a Mississippi Eco-Friendly Clothing Artisan.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Poem of the Week: Jody Bolz















MUTANABI STREET


In March 2007, a car bomb exploded in the heart of Baghdad’s centuries-old literary center, igniting bookstores and stationery shops.


Pages flit above the ruined bookstalls.
Blank or dark with words, it doesn’t matter:

paper is as dangerous as ink—as thought.
And as for the student who was reading

in a dim café, the old men buying envelopes
across the lane, flames turned them to light,

then ash, with chemical indifference.
War tossed a match and stayed to watch

the old block burn—journals, histories,
novels, verse, dictionaries, textbooks,

anatomy primers with charts of the body
like maps of a familiar country—shops on fire

with what’s been written and what hasn’t:
the script in which mercy might repeat itself.


- Jody Bolz

Used by permission.

Jody Bolz is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines--The American Scholar, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry East among them--and in many anthologies. She taught creative writing for more than 20 years at George Washington University, and in 2002 became an executive editor of Poet Lore, America's oldest poetry journal, founded in 1889.

Bolz appeared on the panel What Makes for Effective Political Poetry: Editors' Perspectives with Poet Lore co-editor E. Ethelbert Miller 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

Photo of the Day: Memorial for What's Lost

This week, leading up to the Broken Gulf benefit on Saturday, I will be posting a picture and some information about the damage each morning.

 A gathering of crosses memorializes what has been lost to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.


Image Courtesy Michael Rothenberg

To help fight back against corporate greed and the needless pollution of our fragile resources, purchase a ticket now: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/357/p/salsa/event/common/public/index.sjs?event_KEY=61421

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Photo of the Day: Waveland, MS

This week, leading up to the Broken Gulf benefit on Saturday, I will be posting a picture and some information about the damage each morning.




The following photos are links, which I encourage you to visit. Waveland, MS was leveled 5 years ago by Hurricane Katrina. David and Kimberly King documented the damage to their neighborhood here. The pier, a popular attraction, just reopened this spring.

Now, Waveland is seeing destruction of a different kind: fish dying from exposure to oil. This photo from May 9, 2010, shows the environmental costs to Waveland's community of the oil spill. Another photo from the slideshow is captioned in part: Now, in the face of this man-made disaster, we’re utilizing things we learned from Katrina recovery — like directing energy toward volunteer training for eventual clean-up. In ways as diverse as our culture itself, we’re finding comfort and strength in the kinship of community.

Help us celebrate this diversity of culture by purchasing a ticket to the Broken Gulf benefit today.

For more reader submitted pictures, please see the full New York Times slideshow.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Photo of the Day: Pelicans

This week, leading up to the Broken Gulf benefit on Saturday, I will be posting a picture and some information about the damage each morning.

In this image, pelicans sit on oil retention boom. Raccoon Island, the largest pelican rookery in Louisiana, was devastated by the spill, leaving huge numbers of adult pelicans dead, and many immature birds suffering.

Image courtesy Getty Images.

For more images of the horrific toll on wildlife, the Today Show has compiled a grim slideshow. Please note, while informative and urgent, some of these images are graphic.

Friday, July 23, 2010

"Howl" in the City in the Washington Post

Check out David Montgomery's article in the Post about "Howl in the City":

There's a bit of a "Howl" boomlet going on -- books, photographs, an upcoming movie starring James Franco and, most immediately, a "Howl in the City" series of readings and music Friday and Saturday in Washington.

The timing of the convergence is mainly coincidental, the fruit of projects launched around the 50th anniversary of the poem, which Ginsberg first recited to spellbound hipster audiences in the fall of 1955, at the age of 29. He published it in 1956. Then came the obscenity trial in 1957, which Ginsberg's publisher won, a free-speech landmark. Ginsberg died in 1997, at 70.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Brightest Young Things Article about "Howl" in the City"

Check out the Brightest Young Things story about "Howl" in the City http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/articles/howl-in-the-city.htm. An excerpt follows:

In 1955 Allen Ginsberg's therapist encouraged him to quit his day job and devote more of his time to poetry. Experimentations (of all kinds) later, in 1956 he published HOWL, a poem in three parts and a footnote, which caused an unspeakable stir at the time ("so obscene") and often referred to "as the poem that helped change the world", a tall order for sure, and is considered one of the benchmarks of Beat Generation's opus. Many of you have read it, many of you feel like you have heard enough about it that you don't have to read it but this weekend 55 years later DC gets to experience firsthand this piece as it was intented to be experienced: as a performance piece

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Poem of the Week: Carly Sachs














Maine

Where does memory go?

…………Our windows looking out on the bay,

my wet clothes hanging on the antlers

…………of a deer someone else killed,

but Isabelle remembers the trigger,

…………the blood—

The lobster boats, early morning,

…………the buoys marking their traps.

If only it was as easy to find

…………where the hurt sleeps, our secrets,

or our anchors, our cabin on the coast,

…………the mind, a landmine;

my friend’s brother who forced him down,

…………or my own version of the story.

The fog rolls in and behind it

…………the lobster men will come to retrieve

what has been trapped.


-Carly Sachs


Used by permission.


Carly Sachs is a writer, yoga teacher, and bartender who lives and works in New York City. She is the author of the steam sequence (WWPH, 2006) and the editor of the anthology the why and later (Deep Cleveland Press, 2007). For more information, please visit her website: thewhyandlater.com


Sachs appeared on the panel From Survivor to Thriver: Write Yourself 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




Monday, July 19, 2010

Photo of the Week: City Lights Bookstore

Building up to the event "Howl" in the City, the Photo of the Week will feature one of Ginsberg's photographs, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.


Bob Donlon (Rob Donnelly, Kerouac's Desolation Angels), Neal Cassady, myself in black corduroy jacket, Bay Area poets' "Court Painter" Robert La Vigne & poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of his City Lights Books shop, Broadway & Columbus Avenue North Beach. Donlon worked seasonally as Las Vegas waiter & oft drank with Jack K., Neal looks good in tee shirt, Howl first printing hadn't arrived from England yet (500 copies), we were just hanging around, Peter Orlovsky stepped back off curb & snapped shot, San Francisco spring 1956.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Donald Illich at Miller Cabin Tuesday - Check 'em out!

Marie-Elizabeth won second place in this year's Split This Rock Poetry Contest and Don is a local light whose poetry always surprises with innovative and rich imagery. Read Marie-Elizabeth's winning poem here: http://www.splitthisrock.org/contest2010.html

Tuesday, July 20 at 7:30 pm at the Joaquin Miller Cabin in Rock Creek Park, Picnic Area #6, Beach Drive at Military Road Overpass. Sign up for opening reading at 7:15 pm. For more information and rain location, call Kathi Morrison-Taylor at 703-820-8113.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Drinking With Purpose! Tonight at The Passenger

Happy Hour to Benefit Split This Rock

Tuesday, July 13, 5-8 pm
The Passenger Bar
1021 7th St. NW
Washington, DC
Across from the Convention Center
Mount Vernon Place Metro


Come join us at The Passenger www.passengerdc.com on July 13 to celebrate Split This Rock and prepare for "Howl in the City." There's no cover for the happy hour and all are welcome. 10% of the proceeds from the bar will help support bringing amazing poet Anne Waldman and fantastic musician Kyp Malone to DC for "Howl in the City."

"Howl in the City" is a celebration of the National Gallery's exhibit of Allen Ginsberg's photos - a reading of "Howl" with music, to take place at Busboys and Poets, 5th & K, on July 23-24. Details here: http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2010/06/howl-in-city-poetry-music-celebrating.html

Monday, July 12, 2010

Photo of the Week: William Burroughs

Building up to the event "Howl" in the City, the Photo of the Week will feature one of Ginsberg's photographs, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.


We went uptown to look at Mayan Codices at Museum of Natural History & Metropolitan Museum of Art to view Carlo Crivelli's greenhued Christ-face with crown of thorns stuck symmetric in his skull—here Egyptian wing William Burroughs with a brother Sphinx, Fall 1953 Manhattan.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Photo of the Week: Peter Orlovsky

Building up to the event "Howl" in the City, the Photo of the Week will feature one of Ginsberg's photographs, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Peter Orlovsky at James Joyce's grave, Zurich Switzerland December 1980, we climbed up the cemetery and found Joyce's statue snowcovered, brushed it off his head.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

July 18 Sunday Kind of Love - Brian Gilmore Send-Off Reading! With Brian Gilmore & Kenny Carroll


Sunday Kind of Love

Sunday July 18, 2010
4-6 pm

Celebrating Brian Gilmore
With readings by Brian, Kenneth Carroll, and you!

Join us as we raise a toast to Brian, who is moving to Michigan to teach public interest law. His voice and his uncompromising vision will be missed - let's send him off in style!

Busboys & Poets
14th & V Streets, NW, Washington, DC
Hosted by Katy Richey and Sarah Browning
Cosponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock
Bring your DC poem, Brian Gilmore poem, road trip poem, or moving to Michigan poem to read on the open mic! (Or any poem, of course!)

Admission free, donations encouraged
For more info: www.BusboysandPoets.com browning@splitthisrock.org
www.SplitThisRock.org, 202-387-POET


Brian Gilmore is the author of two books of poems, elvis presley is alive and well and living in harlem, (Third World Press 1993) and Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags: Poem for Duke Ellington (Karibu Books 2001). He received an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council in 2001 and 2003; was a Cave Canem Fellow in 1997; and a Pushcart prize nominee in 2007. A public interest lawyer, he has been teaching in the Clinical Law Center at the Howard University, is a columnist for The Progressive Media Project, and a contributing writer for Ebony-Jet online. A lifelong Washingtonian, he will be relocating with his family to Michigan this summer.

Kenneth Carroll is a native Washingtonian. His poetry, short stories, essays, and plays have appeared in Black Literature Forum, In Search Of Color Everywhere, Bum Rush The Page, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. His book of poetry, So What: For The White Dude Who Said This Ain't Poetry, was published in 1997 by Bunny & The Crocodile Press. He is executive director of DC WritersCorps and past president of the African American Writers Guild. He received a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and received the Mayor's Arts Award for Service to the Arts. He was named one of WETA's Hometown Heroes in 2004.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Bid on a Split This Rock 2010 Autographed Poster!



Click here and bid today to take home an intimate piece of the historic 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival!


We have a 24” x 36” poster designed by the fabulously talented Nancy Bratton (www.nancybrattondesign.com), that feature original signatures from most of Split This Rock 2010’s featured poets:

Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Jan Beatty, Fady Joudah, Lenelle Moise, Quincy Troupe, Lillian Allen, Chris Abani, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Cornelius Eady, Martha Collins, Richard McCann, Alison Hedge Coke, Mark Nowak, Nancy Morejón, Francisco Aragon, Natalie Illum, Sinan Antoon, Holly Bass, Beny Blaq, and Derrick Weston Brown, among others.


Spoken word artist Theresa Davis, who appeared on the panel Word Warriors: Women Spoken Word Artists at the 2008 festival, is featured on the poster – along with the late South African great Dennis Brutus. The poster also features a quote from a letter Adrienne Rich wrote to Split This Rock: “May this gathering inspire and affirm the spirit of many…Thank you for your belief in the freeing power of language and action.”

Your bid will help us bring poetry and poets into the public sphere in a variety of exciting ways:

* Biennial festivals – 2012 is just over the horizon. And guess what? We already have commitments from Marilyn Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, and Alice Walker for Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2012! You won’t want to miss it – March 22-24, 2012.

* Poets’ voices in the media – Through our partnership with the Institute for Policy Studies, Split This Rock arranges for poets to write op eds and appear on radio programs discussing critical social issues. In just one example, Mark Nowak’s op ed, “Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners,” appeared in small-town newspapers throughout the country.

* Infusing poetry into political action – Split This Rock poets read at demonstrations, hand out poems, carry poetry signs. Recently, we distributed poems to a fired-up crowd at an immigration justice rally in DC and urged supporters to do so at the many rallies that took place throughout the country. And Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week reaches thousands who might not otherwise be reading poetry of provocation and witness.

* National and community collaborations – Here in DC, Split This Rock will present a reading of the poem “Howl” by poet Anne Waldman at Busboys and Poets in July, to celebrate the exhibit “Beat Memories” at the National Gallery. And next year, we’ll be a literary partner at the conference of the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, AWP, to be held here in DC on Langston Hughes’s birthday in February. We’ll have programs in the conference celebrating Hughes and the poet as public citizen, as well as off-site events, plunging us all into the vibrant life of the city.


This year is critically important for Split This Rock. We’ve received a major grant from the Open Society Institute to build the foundation of the organization so we can keep growing nationally and locally. We can’t do it without you. Won’t you join us?

Poem of the Week: Sholeh Wolpé













See Them Coming


Here come the octopi of war

tentacles wielding guns, missiles

holy books and colorful flags.


Don’t fill your pens with their ink.

Write with your fingernails, scratch

light upon these darkened days.


-Sholeh Wolpé



From The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press 2004). Used by permission.


Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Rooftops of Tehran, The Scar Saloon, and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad for which she was awarded the Lois Roth Translation Prize in 2010. Sholeh is the associate editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East edited by Reza Aslan (Norton), the guest editor of Atlanta Review (2010 Iran issue) and the poetry editor of the Levantine Review, an online journal about the Middle East. Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran and presently lives in Los Angeles.


Wolpé appeared on the panel We Are All Iran: a Group Reading by Iranian-American Poets 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


Thursday, July 1, 2010

Kyp Malone on Allen Ginsberg




I saw Allen Ginsberg give a reading and perform some songs in April of 1994 at some lecture hall on the CMU campus in Pittsburgh. I was 21 and about to move to San Francisco. I was a little confused how this little old effeminate man managed to bring so many people together to hear him sing of sodomy and whatnot. I was fairly enamoured. In my memory it was also the same day that Kurt Cobain was announced dead by his own hand but I could be mixing things up, I was late blooming and much was happening.

A couple of years back in the little town where my kid lives, on the Delaware, the two of us out for coffee and juice, we came across an anthology of American poetry from which she requested I read her something. I found Howl and started in almost immediately translating/editing for my 7-year-old audience, who somewhere along the line picked up on my hesitation and asked if I was changing the words, which I embarrassedly admitted. She wouldn't have my clean version, told me I couldn't censor poetry. So I read. His life and his work are truly inspirational. I'm honored to have been asked to perform and hope to do his spirit justice.
- Kyp Malone

Kyp Malone is the lead singer for TV on the Radio and will close out "Howl in the City" on Saturday, July 24, with a free 10 pm show on the patio in front of Busboys and Poets at 5th and K. Details here.