Friday, August 31, 2012

Poem of the Week: Solmaz Sharif

                                        
Solmaz Sharif
Photo by: Arash Saedinia
  



Mess Hall   

Your knives tip down
in the dish rack
of the replica plantation home,
you wash hands

with soaps pressed into seahorses
and scallop shells white
to match your guest towels,
and, like an escargot fork,

you have found the dimensions
small enough to break
a man--
a wet rag,

a bullet on the back of the cup
the front
like a bishop or an armless knight
of the Ku Klux Klan

the silhouette
through your nighttime window
a quartet
plays a song you admire,

outside a ring of concertina wire
circles around a small collapse.
America, ignore the window and look at your lap:
even your dinner napkins are on fire.

-Solmaz Sharif    

Used by permission.

Previously appeared in conjunction with Craft and Folk Art Museum's "Ehren Tool: Production or Destruction" exhibit.   

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif's first published poem, included in A World Between (George Braziller), was written at the age of 13. Since then, her work has appeared in jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston ReviewDIAGRAM, and others. Between 2002-2006, Sharif studied and taught with June Jordan's Poetry for the People. She is a winner of the "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a former Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012-2014.
 
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If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

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

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Announcing September's Sunday Kind of Love

          September Sunday Kind of Love
featuring
   Tarfia Faizullah & Brittany Fonte

 Tarfia Faizullah Brittany Fonte  
Sunday September 16, 2012
   5-7pm 

Busboys and Poets
2021 14th St. NW
Washington, DC

Hosted by:
Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5
As always, open mic follows!


Tarfia Faizullah’s poems appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and other honors.



Brittany Fonte holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction. She is a prose poet and fiction writer; her work can be found in numerous literary journals such as: Literary Mama, Pemmican Journal, Mat Black Magazine, etc.  She has a chapbook of prose poetry out in the U.K. called Things I Never Want You to Find Out, and a full-length prose poetry book just out called Buddha in My Belly, with Hopewell Publications. Recently she was nominated for "Best of the Web" for a short fiction piece titled, "The Short Story."  She also works as a fiction editor at Best New Writers Magazine, and as a poetry editor for Lowbrow Press.


Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets
&
Split This Rock

For more information:
202-387-POET

Friday, August 24, 2012

Poem of the Week: Zein El-Amine

Zein El-Amine  

How to write a poem, according to Souha Bechara
       

Sit in their circle.
Don't let your eyes linger
on any object in the room.
Extract yourself
from your body. Watch
the man with the hairy hands
describe the rape of your body
to the body. Watch him
as he begins to beat the body.
Focus on the arc
of your liberated lower molar
and make it everything:
try to guess where
it landed, crawl to it,
find it, save it for later.
Think about putting it back
in one day. Ignore
the wheeling of the cart.
Ignore the stripped cable
dangling above you.
Find the tooth.
Make solitary confinement
your longed-for-solitude.
Climb the walls:
Press your palms on one
wall, fingers pointed
to the ceiling. Press
your feet against the other
wall. Build the pressure,
step up with one foot
and up with one hand.
Repeat until your back
is to the ceiling. Now
survey the room. Do this
once at mid-morning
and once at mid-afternoon.
Repeat daily. Do this
for a decade.
Make that crack
under your door
your world: Lie down
and face the door. Look
past the roaches,
the fleas, and the lice,
into the compressed light;
wait for it to be
interrupted. Study the soles
of your captors.
Match the voices
with the soles
match the soles
with the names.
Catalog them:
the pigeon-toed,
the limping soles,
the canvas ones,
the wooden ones.
Delight at new soles.
Now find a piece of graphite.
Separate your toilet paper
into plies. Stretch
your scroll on the floor.
Prostrate yourself.
Grab the graphite
between thumb
and forefinger.
It will feel crippling
at first, your words
will be undecipherable,
but you will
eventually write
your tiny words
with smooth curves.
Set your intentions.
Don't think of meanings,
think of the time
it will take to write
your microscopic epic.
After all, this is about time
not about metaphors
or similes or such.
It's about rhyme
and meter.
So limit hope to the word,
then extend it to the line,
then to the stanza,
then reach out for the winding night.
Now write your first faint line.


-Zein El-Amine  

Used by permission.


Zein El-Amine was born and raised in Lebanon. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland where he teaches Global Literature and Social Change and Arabic. His poems have been published by Wild River Review, Folio, Foreign Policy in Focus, Beltway Quarterly, DC Poets Against the War Anthology, Penumbra, GYST and Joybringer. His short stories have been published by Boundoff and Uno Mas magazines. Zein lives in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC and is a member of the Ella Jo Baker Housing Cooperative.

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!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

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

Friday, August 17, 2012

Poem of the Week: Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che  
          
   
Split      
 
I see my mother at thirteen
in a village so small,
it's never given a name.

Monsoon season drying up--
steam lifting in full-bodied waves.
She chops corn for the hogs,

her hair dipping to the small of her back
as if dipped in black
and polished to a shine.

She wears a side-part
that splits her hair
into two uneven planes.

They come to watch her,
Americans, Marines, just boys,
eighteen or nineteen.

With scissor-fingers,
they snip the air,
repeat cut,

point at their helmets
and then at her hair.
All they want is a small lock.

What does she say
to her mother
to make her so afraid?

Days later
she will be sent away
to the city for safekeeping.

She will return home
only once to be given away
to my father.

Her hair
was dark, washed,
and uncut.
 
-Cathy Linh Che  

Used by permission.


Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, CA. Her first book of poems, winner the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2014. She has received fellowships from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, and Poets House. She is also co-editing an anthology of poetry and prose from the children of the Vietnam War called Inheriting the War.

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!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

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

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Brave New Voices 2012

The 2011-2012 DC Youth Slam Team - San Francisco, CA
(L to R: Asha Gardner, Alexis Franklin, Kayla McAfee, Tiana Minter-El, Lauryn Nesbitt, Kosi Dunn, Jesse Ferrell, Olivia We, Mariam Coker, Eric Powell, Scott Williams)

Brave New Voices 2012: 
A Recap by DC Youth Slam Team Member 
Jesse Ferrell

This year, eleven members of the DC Youth Slam Team and our three coaches attended the 15th annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in San Francisco, California.  We shared our poetry and heard the stories of other young people from around the country and world, had the opportunity to learn from established poets such as Beau Sia and Marc Bamuthi Joseph in a classroom setting, and even made it to semifinals for the first time, placing 2nd in our semifinal bout behind team Philly (last year’s champs).

Our first flight was delayed by four hours, but we took advantage of the time by practicing our performances in the waiting area.  Because of the delay, we arrived in Berkeley, CA after the opening ceremony had already ended, but Youth Speaks staff soon helped us sign in and settle into our dorms.  We attended our first open mic that night, meeting members of team Bermuda and watching our own Kayla Marie perform. 

Day two we all took the BART train over to San Francisco for a day of workshops, starting a cypher with a team from Louisville, Kentucky on the train ride and talking with local residents about Brave New Voices.  The workshops included a range of topics, from beatboxing, to performance, to learning about the education system and ways to use spoken word poetry as a tool for social change.  During lunch break multiple cyphers started up, and we talked to poets from several other teams including New York, Philly, and Baltimore.  That night Kayla Marie represented DC in the individual slam, and Mariam and Tiana performed a group piece they had recently written at an open mic. 

The next day we competed in two quarterfinal slams.  The first was with team Anchorage, AK, team Denver, CO, and team Austin, TX.  It was amazing to hear all their stories and to share ours with them.  We heard poems ranging from political statements to discussions of gender roles to heritage to personal experiences and had the opportunity to talk further after the event.  We were happy to have placed first and spent our lunch break practicing for the second slam of the day.

We competed against Stockton, CA, Louisville, KY, Columbus, GA, and Cleveland, OH, in the next slam, another chance for us to further connect with poets from across the country.  Columbus’s poem on homophobia brought a new presentation to the terror of hate crimes, and Stockton performed a thoughtful piece about the meaning of their city’s declaration of bankruptcy.  We placed third in this bout, qualifying for semifinals for the first time in DC Youth Slam Team history.

That night we prepared for semifinals, polishing our performance and even reworking a few older pieces.  One of our team members, Kosi Dunn, edited a poem he had recently written about the importance of following one’s passion for poetry, and Eric Powell and Lex “Wordplay” Franklin teamed up to create a new group piece cautioning against drunk driving from some of Eric’s old material.  The experience of working together for most of the night helped us form an even closer bond as a team and the next morning we felt prepared to put on a great show, regardless of how we would score.

Our semifinal bout was against teams Philly, New York, Seattle, and Greensboro.  We were excited to hear what new material Philly and New York would bring and to get to know Seattle’s and Greensboro’s teams better.  All of the teams brought remarkable pieces and performances, and our own team performed impeccably, despite the short time in which two of our poems had been memorized.  New York’s team performed an amusing but important piece about body image, Philly presented a comical critique of hipster culture, and team Greensboro addressed family sacrifices. Seattle gave a memorable performance critiquing the Brave New Voices experience and reminding us all of the importance of poetry and the sharing of stories over the importance of the competition.  The love the other teams showed us is something we will not forget, and we had the added excitement of placing second behind team Philly, the reigning champions.

That afternoon we attended the town hall meeting where we had the opportunity to discuss possible improvements to Brave New Voices as well as share suggestions of how to use poetry to achieve broader goals of social justice in our own communities.  As a part of the conversation, we met and talked with young people from many different cities including Tucson, AZ, and Madison, WI, and the conversation was recorded by journalists from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

After the meeting, we walked around, talking to team Leeds, from the UK and getting to know the city of Berkeley.  We all went to dinner together as a team that night to celebrate and talk about what we had gotten out of the Brave New Voices experience so far.

The final full day involved a speak-out in downtown Oakland in front of a government building.  We all brought poems on the topic of the education system to share, discussing our beliefs and concerns with each other through the medium of poetry.  After the speak-out we walked over to the Fox Theater for BNV Finals.  Prior to the show a dance-off started up in the audience.  Denver, Philly, Richmond, and Bay Area were competing in the slam, with showcases from several other teams.  A moment of silence was held to honor those who had died in the Aurora shooting, very close to home for some members of team Denver.  The mayor of Oakland attended and introduced the finalists for Oakland’s first ever youth poet laureate. The performances were all beautiful and inspiring.  Team Denver addressed issues including Pat Robertson’s intolerance and apathy in the face of injustice.  Team Richmond performed a poem about the struggle of identity for both light and dark skinned black youth and about injustices manifested in the sport of football.  Team Bay Area showed the pain of mental illness and the frustration of watching gentrification occur, and Hiwot of team Philly spoke to us about the significance of her name.  The depth and range of the poetry made for an amazing show, with Denver placing first and Philly coming in second.  That night there was a final dance party, and we packed for our departure the next morning.

It was hard to say goodbye the next day, but we left inspired, with new connections to help us build organizational networks in the future, closer as a team, prepared to come home and get to work on social justice issues through the power of our voice.

-- Jesse Ferrell
DC Youth Slam Team intern 2011-12
Member of team 3 Stars 2 Bars, 2012

Friday, August 10, 2012

Poem of the Week: DaMaris B. Hill

DaMaris
        
   
Stewing        
 

Dilapidated conditions magnified sickness, and typhoid, dropsy, and tuberculosis ravaged the institution and resulted in a number of inmates' deaths... Laura Williams, a black woman in her early twenties convicted in 1887, died of tuberculosis one month before her sentence ended.  
 --Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons


I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins.
Their howls consume me. They growl and feast.
She whispers not to run. I can't refrain.

Nightmares of this cell stirring in my brain.
To survive I would suckle possums' teats.
I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins.

Sweat pours from my body. It's heavy rain.
My intestine rotting, rising, my tongue reeks.
She whispers not to run. I can't refrain.

Tuberculosis fevers stew my pain.
Curdle my stomach's bile. Vomit creeps.
I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins

Awake to my own barking. My voice strained.
The nurse's compress grips me like a leash.
She whispers not to run. I can't refrain.

She tells me to hush as I try to explain.
The stale air in this jail folds in, death's crease.
I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins.
She whispers do not run. I can't refrain.


-DaMaris B. Hill  

Used by permission.

Originally published in Reverie: Midwest African American Literature. Ed. Randal Horton. (2010). 5 September 2010. Print. (previously entitled Laura Dreams of Escape)

DaMaris B. Hill has a terminal degree in English-Creative Writing and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.The majority of her poetry stresses connections. Her series of poems entitled boundlibertybelles are influenced by the research of Kali N. Gross in Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910. She is currently writing a novel about two parents' struggle to control their daughter's sexuality during the 1930s.  

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!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

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

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

August Sunday Kind of Love: Slam Season

August Sunday Kind of Love
featuring the

Beltway Poetry Slam Team
& DC Youth Poetry Slam Team Beltway  DCYST 

Sunday August 19, 2012
5-7pm 

Busboys and Poets
2021 14th St. NW
Washington, DC

Hosted by Katy Richey
$5
As always, open mic follows!

Beltway Slam Team:
Twain Dooley, Drew Law, Pages Matam, Clint Smith,
& Slam Master/Founder Sarah Lawson

DC Youth Slam Team: Mariam Coker, Kosi Dunn, Jesse Ferrell, Asha Gardner, Kayla McAfee, Tiana Minter, Lauryn Nesbitt, Eric Powell, Olivia Weltz  

beltwaylogoDCYSTlogo

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets
&
Split This Rock

For more information:
202-387-POET

Friday, August 3, 2012

Poem of the Week: Zohra Saed

Zohra Saed          
   
Kandahar       
 

Behave or the sleeping Alexander will reclaim your lungs.


Kandahar -
............Was once a cube of sugar
Refusing to dissolve in the sea.
It became a city from sheer stubbornness.


Alexander naively said,
"This is my land!"

causing the earth to giggle and birth him a wife
Rukhshana. (Roxanna if you prefer).
This wife refused to dissolve in his sea.

We know how the bright sun found him
The next day - snuffed by an ornate embroidered pillow -
The pillow and the three drops of Alexandrian blood
Have been preserved by the mountains.

Kandahar could never be Alexandria after that delicious murder.
 


-Zohra Saed       

Used by permission.
Originally published in notebook #105 from documenta(13)   
  
Zohra Saed is the co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press). Her poetry has appeared in: Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality Ed. Sarah Hussein (Seal Press); Speaking for Herself: Asian Women's Writings Ed. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh (Penguin India); Seven Leaves One Autumn Ed. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh (Rajkamal Prakashan Publishing: New Delhi, India); and most recently Sahar Muradi & Zohra Saed: Misspelled Cities (Notebook #105, documenta 13).  

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!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

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