Friday, December 30, 2011

Poetry by and for the 99%!

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

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

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

Here are four easy ways to give:
  • Give online - Click here to give securely using your credit card.
  • Give by mail - Send a check or money order made out to Split This Rock to 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036.
  • Register for Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Add a donation when you register for the festival at SplitThisRock.org, helping others who might not otherwise be able to attend.

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

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


With gratitude and hopes for peace in 2012,

Split This Rock Team

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Some of Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2011

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

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

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

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

Split This Rock

Recommended Poetry Books of 2011

KALSSBAB

NBWT

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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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


Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions)

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


Black Blossoms, Rigoberto González (Four Way Press)

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


Mule & Pear, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (New Issues)

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


The Requited Distance, Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Sheep Meadow)

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


Transfer, Naomi Shihab Nye (BOA Editions)

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


Meanwhile, Kathleen O'Toole (WordTech Communications)

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


Animal Magnetism, Kim Roberts (Pearl Editions)

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


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

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


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

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


Mad for Meat, Kevin Simmonds (Salmon Poetry)

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


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

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


Tropicalia, Emma Trelles (University of Notre Dame Press)

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


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

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


Anthologies


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Holly Bass Reviews Alice Walker

The following review was written by Holly Bass.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do not
regret
that
I am
imperfect

In each crack
there is
an orchid
growing

This we know:
We were
not meant
to suffer
so much
& to learn
nothing.

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

Even So by Alice Walker

Love, if it is love, never goes away.
It is embedded in us,
like seams of gold in the Earth,
waiting for light,
waiting to be struck.

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
Alice Walker
$18.00

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

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

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

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

Melanie Henderson

launching her prize-winning collection:

Elegies for New York Avenue


Sunday January 15, 2012

5:00-7:00pm

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

Hosted by Sarah Browning & Katy Richey


Suggested Donation: $5

As always, open mic follows!


Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets & Split This Rock


For more information:
www.BusboysandPoets.com

www.SplitThisRock.org
info@splitthisrock.org

202-387-POET

Elegies for New York Ave


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

--Joan Houlihan



BORN HOME


To begin at the beginning

& we are not from this place
We know the snow
doesn't fall in January,

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


& we are not from this place

We know the rows of dependent houses
liberated by separating hues of a president,
my alarm clock's muteness, temporary

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


& we are not from this place

We know how to begin at the beginning
when a high school is just a high school
& our rhythm is not smart

and we are not from this place


We know the vacant eyes of our streets,

pots in the pavement sing

from this place we are from--


We know.



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

Friday, December 16, 2011

Poem of the Week: Kim Roberts

Kim Roberts

Portrait of Hippocrates, or Buqrat

from The Falnama of 1703, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul



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

In the book of divination,


Hippocrates rides the simurgh,

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

as he returns to his home


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

With his white turban,


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

he looks over one shoulder


and strokes the bird's

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

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


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

Builder of the first hospital,


Master of alchemy,

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

.....I have prepared myself


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


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

my wounded body, in your hands.



-Kim Roberts


Used by permission.


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


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


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


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

Friday, December 9, 2011

Poem of the Week: Alice Walker

Alice Walker


The World We Want Is Us



It moves my heart to see your awakened faces;

the look of "aha!"

shining, finally, in

so many

wide open eyes.

Yes, we are the 99%

all of us

refusing to forget

each other

no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs

are dropped by

the 1%.

The world we want is on the way; Arundhati

and now we

are

hearing her breathing.

That world we want is Us; united; already moving

into it.


-Alice Walker

Written by Alice Walker specifically for Occupy Writers.


Used by permission.


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


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


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


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

Friday, December 2, 2011

Poem of the Week: Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri

The Wall


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

She holds uncooked rice in one hand waiting.
She's idealized into a picture
............for American Television.

The sirens sound. The child embraces the wall, presses
her lips against stone.

............A dog outside howls its
mortality. And that is all she hears before
the vision comes to mind of a mother
she once knew.

...........The Book of Koran
lies open, naked, and torn in a broken house.
............The child cannot speak, and has
forgotten how language sounds.

Can she run across the open courtyard?
Someone may be there. Her dog? Where?
...........Grandmother? Where? Rubble flies.
That was while she stood there clutching her rice
...........in the origin of silence.

-Grace Cavalieri

Used by permission.


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


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



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