Martín Espada Workshop & Reading in NYC Feb 8

MEDICINE SHOW THEATRE - WORD/PLAY READING SERIES

Saturday, February 8:
POETS TAKE THE STAGE: Martín Espada and Lauren Schmidt

2-5 pm: POETRY LIKE BREAD: A POETRY WORKSHOP
with Martín Espada

This is a generative workshop, rather than a workshop for the critique of poems. Participants will generate new work based on the distribution and discussion of poems by Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Grace Paley, Roque Dalton, Marilyn Nelson and Claribel Alegría. Workshop participants will write on the spot, then share their work, reading aloud to the group (for thunderous applause only). Together we will speak for the rights the others are down upon, prophesy like Cassandra (but be listened to this time), catch sight of the promised land, and prove Dalton’s proposition that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

Fee: $25, payable by cash or check (made out to Medicine Show) at the door
Reservations: cbrandt@medicineshowtheatre.org or 212 262-4216.

7-9 pm: THE MEANING OF THE SHOVEL: A READING

Martín Espada will be reading from his newly-released collection, The Meaning of the Shovel (Smokestack Books, UK). This collection brings together, for the first time, all of Martín Espada’s poems about work. Espada has worked as a bouncer in a bar, a primate caretaker, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, a gas station attendant and a tenant lawyer. As a poet, he acts as an advocate for the Latino community, particularly the immigrant working class, from farm workers sprayed with pesticides in the field to the kitchen staff who died in a restaurant atop the World Trade Center on 9/11. This is a book that explores the emotional and often invisible landscape of labor: the church janitor who quits in the middle of the night, the cab driver who wants to write a love poem to win back his estranged wife. The title poem, based on the poet’s experience digging latrines in Nicaragua, embraces the vision of revolutionary change.

Schmidt will be reading from her collections, Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (Main Street Rag) and Psalms from the Dining Room (Wipf and Stock). Jim Daniels says of Psalms, based on the poet’s experience working in a soup kitchen: “Lauren Schmidt lays down riffs like a fierce blues guitarist, one who knows the power of each carefully chosen note. These poems explode with tough
compassion. They sting a little bit—they make us flinch in recognition. Schmidt's sharply etched details tell the powerful stories of her characters' struggles to be seen, to be acknowledged as human. These poems remind us of how close we all are to each other, despite efforts at denial and distance, despite how violence can erode the human spirit. Her characters fight for dignity in the face of everything rigged to keep them down.”

Admission: $7

Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble
549 W. 52nd St
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10019
www.medicineshowtheatre.org

Poem of the Week: Danez Smith

               

juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet  

one is hard & the other tried to be

          one is fast & the other was faster

                    one is loud & one is a song

                    with one note & endless rest

           

                     one's whole life is a flash

        both spend their life

        trying to find a warmth to call home

both spark quite the debate,

some folks want to protect them/some think we should just get rid

                                      of the damn things all together.

 

-Danez Smith 

Used by permission.

Danez Smith is a Cave Canem Fellow, Pushcart Nominee, Survivor & Black Queer from St. Paul, MN. Danez was featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith & was a finalist for the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize. Danez is the author of hands on ya knees, a chapbook published by Penmanship Books. His full-length collection, ‘[insert] Boy, will be published in 2014 by Yes Yes Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Devil’s Lake, The Cortland Review, Anti-, & elsewhere. Danez started writing because of slams & necessity, & placed 6^th in the world at the 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam & is the 2013 Rustbelt Midwest Regional Slam Champion. Danez twerks with the best, has no time for the rest. He writes & lives in Oakland, CA.

 

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.

In Memory of Pete Seeger, 1919-2014

Split This Rock mourns the loss of Pete Seeger, folk singer, organizer, voice for all of us in the struggle for justice. We celebrate his extraordinary life and courage.

Below, we are proud to republish a poem in Pete's honor by 2012 featured poet Kathy Engel. Please feel free to pass it on.

A radio documentary of Pete's life is here.

From an interview on Democracy Now! -

AMY GOODMAN: And for someone who isn’t so hopeful, who is listening to this right now, trying to find their way, what would you say?

PETE SEEGER: Realize that little things lead to bigger things. That’s what Seeds is all about. And this wonderful parable in the New Testament: the sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousand fold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

— Interview, Democracy Now, May 4, 2009

Dad, Pete and Obama                                                           

When Pete sang at the Lincoln Memorial I called to ash.

I had played Pete as your last breath slipped out, 

the rest of you already gone.

Pete ushered you; your hero sang for the man

whose name you spoke the week you died:

Obama, you said, sipping water,

I believe something is happening, don’t you?

Pete with his grandson who lived in Nicaragua,

the country we loved in its burning birth, Pete

who wouldn’t testify, Pete Civil Rights, Pete Peace,

Pete 1199, Pete this land, our land—

Pete Clearwater, Pete and Toshi, Pete and

Brother Kirkpatrick, Pete and June reading poems

at the UN Rally circa 1983, Pete the unwavering

for all who were taken, all who picketed and as Pete said

for the young people who taught us not to be afraid

those Montgomery sit-in days, Pete in his power,

in the place of power, suspenders and banjo, train

chug of workers belting out a new old gusty day, ghosts

of resistance swaying past the monument, feeding

the hungry crowd, this day when Pete sang

at the Lincoln Memorial I called to you

who took a bus alone to D.C. at 80 to protest:

I called to your ash, Dad, who took me there first.

                                                                                    Kathy Engel 2009

Originally published in Adanna. Used by permission.

Split This Rock Goes to Seattle!

Join Split This Rock at AWP in Seattle

  

February 27-March 1, 2014

Table BB38

2 Conference Presentations

  

Splitistas Katy Richey & Jonathan B. Tucker sporting their 2012 festival T shirts at AWP 2013

We hope to see many friends at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), February 27-March 1, in Seattle.

Split This Rock will be at Table BB38 in the bookfair with haiku post cards to president Obama and a drawing for a free festival registration.

We'll also be presenting two official conference programs: A 2014 festival preview reading with Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and Wang Ping on Saturday at noon and an interactive workshop on Thursday at 1:30 pm on "Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word," with Elizabeth Acevedo, Josh Healey, Pages Matam,  and Jonathan Tucker. 

Read on for more details. Poetry is everywhere!

Visit us at Table BB38

Splitistas -- like the two friendly and brilliant ones pictured above -- will be on hand to meet you and tell you more about our efforts to bring poetry to the center of public life - where it belongs! Stop by to write a Haiku Post Card to President Obama and to enter a drawing for a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014.

Two Split This Rock Conference Presentations

Intense/Beautiful/Devoted: 

Poems of Provocation & Witness

Saturday, March 1, noon-1:15 pm

Room 301, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3

Sarah Browning, Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Wang Ping

Leonard Bernstein wrote, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." Poets today are looking without flinching at our world of drones, evictions, gun shows, and violence to the earth, as they tell the many stories of our lives. Happily, too, they are imagining alternatives and provoking change. A reading of intense and striking music, in the spirit of Split This Rock, with Patricia Smith providing opening remarks.

Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word

Thursday, February 27, 1:30-2:45 pm

Room 604, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

Pages Matam, Jonathan Tucker, Josh Healey, Elizabeth Acevedo

As performance poetry and slam competition grows in popularity, many organizations are using the energetic and entertaining format of slam to engage, inspire, and motivate young students. In this interactive workshop, leading youth workers will discuss the benefits and challenges of slam poetry programs and facilitate dialogue among participants about best practices and how to reach and motivate more students using poetry. 

The full conference program and schedule are here.

Poem of the Week: Anne Waldman

             

excerpt from Manatee/Humanity 

the aquarium deserted now,

this is the song at dusk I write in the notebook:

strange skin

not quite seal

not quite dolphin

inchoate

texture like

something you forget

something you didn't even see

the first time

old shoe

sentient being with others in watery caves

lights off

with motive & mind up a ladder

mouth moving

quixotic mind

quick flick

who are me

who haunt me

please haunt me

summoned by the dream

the kusha grass instructs

you might say a kind of ceremony

gather up these nightmares

this in a public space

where many minds meet

& pass around the objects of this dream

a blindfold, a crystal, a card with a bodhisattva upon it

gather them up & making an offering

all the bikkus going down on their knees for this

in this world marked out by the augur

interstices between living & dead

an initiation on the nature of time

& of continuity in a dark time

mean world: humanity

dream world: manatee

secret world: om mani padme manatee hum

om mani humanity padme hum

the center of reference becomes movement in this ritual

-Anne Waldman

Used by permission.

From Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Books, 2009)

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and poetics, and an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997). Waldman is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks's Church and she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in NYC, and has recently been involved in projects around the theme of Symbiosis, which studies the interaction between two or more different biological species.

Announcing Split This Rock's 2014 Contest Winners!

   

First Place

"At the Mall, There's a Machine That Tells You if You Are Racist"

Karen Skolfield

Karen Skolfield's book Frost in the Low Areas (2013) won the First Book Award for Poetry from Zone 3 Press. She is the poetry editor for Amherst Live, a quarterly production of poetry, politics, and more, and she's a contributing editor at the literary magazines Tupelo Quarterly and Stirring. Her poems have appeared in Best of the Net Anthology, Cave Wall, Memorious, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, West Branch, and others. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts.  

  

Second Place 

"School of the Americas" 

Rebecca Black

 

 

In 2011, Rebecca Black, was a Fulbright distinguished scholar at the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  She is the author of Cottonlandia, winner of a Juniper Prize. A former Wallace Stegner and NEA fellow, her poems can be found in Poetry, New England Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, Agni, and many other magazines.  She has taught at several universities, most recently in the MFA Program at UNC-Greensboro. 

 

Third Place

"My Father's Hands"
Alison Roh Park 

 

Photo by: Yoon Kim

 

Alison Roh Park is a Kundiman fellow, Pushcart nominated poet, and recipient of of the PSA New York Chapbook Fellowship, Poets & Writers Magazine Amy Award and Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She teaches ethnic studies at Hunter College and is founding member of The Good Times Collective of emerging poets writing in the tradition of Lucille Clifton. 

Poem of the Week: Tess Taylor

           

Eighteenth Century Remains

            Albemarle County

The ridge a half mile down from Monticello.

A pit cut deeper than the plow line.

Archaeologists plot the dig by scanning

plantation land mapped field

for carbon, ash, traces of human dwelling.

We stand amid blown cypresses.

Inheritors of absences, we peer

into the five-by-five foot ledge.

Unearthed painstakingly, these shards:

two pipe stems, seeds, three greening buttons.

Centuries-old hearthstones are still charred,

as if the fire is only lately gone.

"Did they collect these buttons to adorn?" But no one knows.

"Did they trade, use them for barter?"

Silence again.

Light, each delicate pipe stem,

something someone smoked at last

against a sill-log wall that passed as home,

a place where someone else collected

wedges of cast-off British willowware.

Between vines, a tenuous cocoon.

A grassy berm that was a road.

A swaying clue

faint as relief at finding something left

of lives held here that now vanish off

like blue smoke plumes I suddenly imagine--

which are not, will not, cannot be enough.

 

-Tess Taylor 

Used by permission.

From The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013)

Tess Taylor's chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America's inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. She reviews poetry for NPR's All Things Considered. In The Forage House, her first full length book, she examines sometimes painful family and national histories -- looking at what such stories contain, and what they leave out. The San Francisco Chronicle called The Forage House "stunning." The Oxford American says, "On their own, the poems are visceral, densely detailed, and frequently playful... Read together, in order, the details are illuminated by context and gain historical sweep." Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She now lives in El Cerrito, California. 

 

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. 

Poem of the Week: celeste doaks

         

Single Twin Band Crush

--inspired by Joe Millar's Losers and Winners

Aaron and Anita, the first real twins I ever personally knew,

drum majored our ragged band in high school called--

the Marching LaSalle Lions. Anita was the outgoing,

mouthy one, but I was star-struck by Aaron, the brooder.

I adored his strange pink olivey skin--always tan,

even in bitter Midwest winters--and his black spikey hair.

Of course those were the late 80's, and the whole world reeled

from Reaganomics, bad pop icons like Robert Palmer and his red-lipped

dames, and the Challenger crashed down on us like hail pelting

car hoods. Even my parents cautiously skated on the thin ice

of their marriage. No music could change America's forecast then.

But when Aaron coached me on flute, he calmed this confusing

world. He was the one who taught me the crescendos and intermezzos

of John Philip Sousa. As the world stammered on off-beat,

he was the one teaching me delicate rhythms

of quarter & eighths marching on regardless.

-celeste doaks 

  

Used by permission.

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the recipient of a 2012 Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her work has garnered a variety of accolades including the 2009 Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize and the 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship; she has also been awarded residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). Celeste received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2010 and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective(CAAWC). Her poems have been published in multiple on-line and print publications such as Asheville Poetry Review, Obsidian, Beltway Poetry Quarterly,and forthcoming in the new anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Doaks currently teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.

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. 

January Sunday Kind of Love: celeste doaks & Tess Taylor

8th Anniversary
Sunday Kind of Love
Featuring

celeste doaks &
Tess Taylor 

    

   

Sunday January 19, 2014

5-7pm

Busboys and Poets

2021 14th St. NW
Washington, DC 20009

Hosted by

Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5 online or at the door

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets

& Split This Rock

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the recipient of a 2012 Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her work has garnered a variety of accolades including the 2009 Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize and the 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship; she has also been awarded residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post,Village Voice,Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). Celeste received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2010 and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective(CAAWC). Her poems have been published in multiple on-line and print publications such as Asheville Poetry Review, Obsidian, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and forthcoming in the new anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Doaks currently teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.

Tess Taylor's chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America's inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. She reviews poetry for NPR's All Things Considered. In The Forage House, her first full length book, she examines sometimes painful family and national histories -- looking at what such stories contain, and what they leave out. The San Francisco Chronicle called The Forage House "stunning." The Oxford American says, "On their own, the poems are visceral, densely detailed, and frequently playful... Read together, in order, the details are illuminated by context and gain historical sweep." Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She now lives in El Cerrito, California.

Poem of the Week: Natalie Diaz

       

Why I Don't Mention Flowers When Conversations with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing

                              flowers home.

--Wislawa Szymborska

In the Kashmir mountains,

my brother shot many men,

blew skulls from brown skins,

dyed white desert sand crimson.

What is there to say to a man

who has traversed such a world,

whose hands and eyes have

betrayed him?

Were there flowers there? I asked.

This is what he told me:

In a village, many men

wrapped a woman in a sheet.

She didn't struggle.

Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.

They laid her in the road

and stoned her.

The first man was her father.

He threw two stones in a row.

Her brother had filled his pockets

with stones on the way there.

The crowd was a hive

of disturbed bees. The volley

of stones against her body

drowned out her moans.

Blood burst through the sheet

like a patch of violets,

a hundred roses in bloom.

-Natalie Diaz

  

Used by permission.

From When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)  

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She was awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency, as well as being awarded a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Mohave Valley, AZ, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.

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.

Deadline Extended for 3rd Annual Abortion Rights Poetry Contest

Deadline Extended 

to January 10!

Lighting the Way: The 3rd Annual Abortion Rights Poetry Contest
Sponsored by the Abortion Care Network & Split This Rock

EXTENDED Deadline: January 10, 2014 - Free to enter

The Abortion Care Network (ACN), a national organization of independent providers and prochoice supporters, and Split This Rock (a national group bringing poetry to the public realm) is pleased to announce our third annual poetry contest, to be held in conjunction with ACN's annual meeting in March 2014.

The experience of women who seek abortion and other reproductive services is as varied as the individuals involved. For some, there is safety, relief, and good medical care. For others, there is doubt, harassment, and stigma. For all, health care takes place in a politicized context in which even the most basic choices about our bodies, sexuality, and childbearing can be scrutinized. Reproductive rights are also linked to a whole host of other social issues, such as women's economic status and the accessibility of safe, affordable health care.

ACN and Split This Rock welcome the submission of poems on these themes. We will award the following prizes: First ($100), Second ($75) and Third Place ($50), and Honorable Mention. Judging will done by Split This Rock and ACN.

The first-place winner will be invited to read the winning poem at ACN's annual meeting. The prize-winning poems will be published in the ACN's quarterly newsletter, The Provider, in the conference program distributed to all meeting attendees, and on Split This Rock's website at www.SplitThisRock.org.  Poets from any part of the U.S. may submit poems, but we regret that no travel funds will be provided so that the winning poet may read at the meeting.

Read last year's winning poems here: http://www.abortioncarenetwork.org/news/2013-poetry-contest-winners

Submit Online!

Submission Guidelines:

*  Submit up to 3 poems (6 pages maximum) by midnight, January 6, 2014 via our Submittable site: https://splitthisrock.submittable.com
*  One entry per poet, please.
*  All styles and approaches accepted.
*  Free to enter.
*  Previously published in print is acceptable, but, please, not on the web.
*  Simultaneous submissions accepted. Please withdraw your poem/inform us immediately if the poem has been accepted for publication elsewhere.