#SplitThisRock2016 Sessions: Poetics, Pedagogy and Praxis

We are pleased to present a selection of sessions on themes of poetics, pedagogy, and praxis at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness.

For the full festival program, please visit the program page here.

And hey: Pre-registration is open now until March 31. 

Art n' Fact: The Intersection of Journalism and Poetry
Hodari Davis, Khalil Anthony Peebles
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map] Thursday, April 14 2:00pm – 3:30pm

This interactive workshop will walk poets through the process of turning a long-form investigation into poetry. This section will briefly look at the work of the Off/Page Project (a collaboration between Youth Speaks and The Center for Investigative Reporting) and show how youth poets have worked with journalists to create groundbreaking work. In "This is Home," the project tackled subpar housing conditions of elderly residents in Richmond, CA. The short film "Locked [In]" explores the troubling reality of youth in solitary confinement. Participants will leave with a curriculum to help them recreate this experience in their communities and strategies to build the bridge between journalists and poets locally.

Poetry of Caregiving (of Children & Seniors) – A Writing Workshop
Sunu Chandy
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]

April 14 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Photo by Kristin Adair.

This workshop will allow parents and other caregivers to write and share poems focused on the challenges and joys of raising children or taking care of seniors in our world today filled with beauty and disaster. How do we engage with our children about hate crimes? How do we engage with a grandmother about homophobia? We will share a few poems concerning these themes and then write our own poems about moments related to taking care of our children and/or taking care of our own parents or grandparents or other elderly folks in our lives. We will also think through issues relating to making time for our poetry and some of the additional economic concerns one can have when raising children or having the role of a caregiver. Many of us are already caregivers and may struggle with varying feelings of resentment, joy, and gratitude. This workshop allows its participants to stay in touch as a sort of poetry-based support group for folks who are dealing with these sources of inspiration and obstacles to their poetic work.

Cypher Circle Wisdoms: Healing with Hip Hop & Spoken Word
Tish Jones, Sage Morgan-Hubbard, Moira Pirsch
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Thursday, April 14 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Come join us in interactive praxis and play as we navigate cypher circles and honor our ancestors through critical pedagogy and healing for social justice. We examine spoken word and Hip Hop as methodologies for self and community love and healing. All peoples of all ages are invited to co-create and explore the spaces of healing, arts, and learning within the inclusive sphere of the circle/cypher. Starting with Indigenous healing exercises and ending with modern Hip Hop cypher practices we will explore the continuum from griots to MCs, the wisdom of oral traditions, and how these practices can be used as praxis in our various classrooms and communities. We will work with these questions: How would you define your community? What are your community’s needs? How can you use circles to educate and heal? What are the Indigenous knowledges and practices that already exist in your community? How can you utilize the spoken word and hip hop artists in your community? What cyphers are you willing/able to create?

Writing The Silence: Poetry of Witness
Jen Fitzgerald
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Photo by Kristin Adair.

Thursday, April 14 4:00pm – 5:30pm

What we witness compels us to write, but what triggers this impulse in us? After closely reading some canonical poetry of witness, workshop participants will be given a “Mapping a Moment” chart the presenter has created and used successfully in workshops. This chart helps the writer become entirely, consciously, present and begin to understand where this moment fits in their personal narrative. The group will then follow the mind’s trajectory and create a vertical list of thoughts, impressions, ideas, and images. The list will allow for large synaptic leaps participants will interrogate; it is often in these leaps that we begin to understand how our past experiences inform our present lives. From this vertical list, poems emerge. We may get lucky and find the poem within the list or we may have to continue to mine our moment and think critically about the connections we “instinctively” make. Participants will leave the workshop with a “Mapping a Moment” chart that can be used throughout their writing careers, a packet of canonical poems of witness, a piece they have created and continue to work on, and a deeper understanding of how their personal narrative informs their poetry of witness.

Poetry as Liturgy: Choosing and Using Poems
Karen Escovitz, Elliott batTzedek
AFL-CIO Murray Green Conference Room [Map]

Friday, April 15 11:30 – 1:00pm

This workshop explores ways of using poetry as liturgy in public and private events by learning which poems work and how to use them. Poetry—words that translate the felt into the spoken—is a powerful took for change. But when poetry is used in events it often falls flat because the poems are too heady, or too clumsy, or used in ways that distance or dull them. In this workshop, members of Fringes: a feminist, non-zionist havurah, in which poetry is used as liturgy, will work with participants to explore the elements of successful liturgy, practice these skills by evaluating poems in small groups, learn about and then practice a variety of interactive ways to use poems, learn about ways to use poetry and singing/music interactively, explore the Cento as a way to create new liturgy, and practice building a Cento or writing a liturgical piece in small groups. At the end of the workshop, participants will have new ways of thinking about the role of poetry in events such as protests and memorials. They’ll have criteria to help choose which poems will work, and a set of new ways to use those poems.

Poet’s Forum: How Political Engagement Affects the Writing Process
Presented in Partnership with the Poetry Foundation and POETRY magazine
Jennifer Bartlett, Martha Collins, Aracelis Girmay, Ocean Vuong – moderated by Lindsay Garbutt or Don Share of POETRY magazine
AFL-CIO Gompers Room [Map]

Friday, April 15 11:30 – 1:00pm

Festival featured poets Jennifer Bartlett, Martha Collins, Aracelis Girmay, and Ocean Vuong will each read a poem or excerpt of theirs from the Split This Rock section of the current issue of POETRY magazine and discuss the considerations they brought as writers and politically engaged individuals to composing. One of the editors of POETRY will then moderate a conversation and invite everyone to join a discussion both about those texts and about how writers’ political engagement affects their writing process. What is at stake for us when we write as “political poets”? In a gathering focused for the most part on the finished poem, this session will bring attention to the process by which the poem is created by making featured poets available as working artists to festival participants.

Power of the Pen: Making Books to Empower Communities
Pia Deas
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Friday, April 15 11:30 – 1:00pm

During the 1960s, Dudley Randall created Broadside Press, the first African American poetry press. Broadside Press was essential to providing an outlet for new poetic voices, establishing a collective identity, and empowering a community. Through its example, participants will discuss how making books, either as individuals, as a collective, or as a press, can be essential to lifting up voices of oppressed and marginalized groups. Workshop participants will have an opportunity to examine some sample books from Broadside press. The workshop will include a book-making session during which participants will learn techniques for creating their own books. Participants will consider what current political and social issues they might respond to in their books and what new perspectives they might offer. Ultimately, the goal of the workshop is for participants to create books of their work as an individual and collective response to contemporary issues. The workshop will end with an opportunity for participants to share what they created.

Unlanguaging White Supremacy: Toward a Solidarity Poetics Practice
K. Bradford, Jen Hofer, Kristen Nelson
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Friday, April 15 11:30 – 1:00pm

The world in all its beauty and brutality is made of language. Language scaffolds systems of institutionalized injustice -- and for poets, language is also the tool of our radical art-making and our revolutionary re-imaginings. What language can we use to unwrite white supremacy as it colludes with transphobia, sexism, classism and heterosexism? How to reimagine oppressive modes and syntax in and beyond language? On whose backs are our bridges built and how might we trouble the model of the bridge? What practical strategies and radical awareness about racism, white supremacy, white privilege, and solidarity action can we build without falling into clichés of allyship? This workshop will incite adventurous approaches to poetics as a spark and foundation to imagine otherwise; to conceive language as a tool for forging our way toward transformed community/kinship ties as potential for action. The facilitators of this workshop face daily moments where our gender, race, class or sexuality are "passed." Whether we are white & anti-racist or of mixed ethnicity, we ask: how can we acknowledge the privileges assigned to us while resisting the systems that afford those privileges. We invite a rigorous re-imagining of ways to notice and interrupt oppressive dynamics and structures – internally and externally, personally and systemically: poetically.

Apocalyptic Thinking: How the Poet Constructs a New World
Juan Morales, Lisa D. Chavez, Israel Wasserstein
Institute for Policy Studies Conference Room [Map]

Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

In a recent article in The Atlantic, the authors remind us of the consequences that come with apocalyptic films, shows, books, and media. The fatalistic lens of apocalyptic thinking that can create “[an] Over-reliance on the apocalyptic narrative [that] causes us to fear the wrong things and to mistakenly equate potential future events with current and observable trends.” However, the despair and anxieties of these times can open up dialogue on environmental, political, and social issues today. In this panel, three poets from the states of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico read and discuss how apocalyptic thinking can impact, challenge, and strengthen the poet’s role as an activist on the page and in their communities, when tackling probable scenarios and preventable events and facing fears.

Poetry of Resistance ~ Voices for Social Justice
Carlos Parada Ayala, Sarah Browning, Carmen Calatayud, Martín Espada, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Joseph Ross
AFL-CIO Gompers Room [Map]

Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

In response to AZ SB 1070, a racial profiling law passed in 2010 in Arizona, the Facebook page, "Poets Responding to SB 1070" was created. Poets Responding became a public forum, calling for a humane and just immigration reform, and for social justice for all those racially profiled

Photo by Kristin Adair.

and as a result, who suffer grave injustices, not only here in the Americas, but in other countries as well. With over 600,000 visits and more than 3,000 poems posted to the site, the poet-moderators decided to publish an anthology of featured poems dealing with these issues. The poets will read works from the anthology Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press, 2016) and discuss the lively mixing of poetics and politics, which will serve as a focus for their discussion with the participants on the topic of building a community of writers willing to take action. The discussion will also center on the necessity of writing poetry of witness, as a means of calling out and for action against the injustices being suffered in the most recent upsurge of racially motivated hate crimes facing People of Color across our planet.

Research as Inspiration and Muse
A. Van Jordan, Reginald Harris, Kim Roberts, Frank X Walker, Dan Vera
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]
Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

This roundtable will explore how primary sources, such as historical archives, oral histories, diaries, and newspapers, can be the starting point of poems. We will discuss how we incorporate factual information, how public and personal histories intersect, and how poems can serve as a corrective for stories of forgotten people and events that might not otherwise enter the cultural memory. We will address specific issues of craft: how can we remain true to the facts and not impede our imagination? How do we keep our poems from becoming too didactic? Panelists will give examples from their own work and the poems of others that have inspired them, and talk about their experience as researchers.

Restorative Poetics
Samiya Bashir
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]
Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Humanity on trial in digital space. Inexhaustible violence of -ism and image. We’ll consider the power of poem-making to metabolize aggression out of our bodies, to reclaim and restore humanity, and more. We’ll explore an alchemical poem-making toward transmutation of experience, insight, and approach--collaboratively and individually--toward resolution of swarming aggressions into light, into recognition, into direction, into sustenance. We’ll come with all we carry. We’ll leave with new poems, new maps, new seeds.

Successful Teen Poetry Programs
Elizabeth Acevedo, Michael Bolds, Hodari Davis, Deirdre Love, Jonathan B. Tucker
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Photo by Kristin Adair. 

Friday, April 15 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Across the world, schools and organizations are developing new and innovative ways to create engaging, exciting, and educational poetry programs for teenage students. Spoken word and performance poetry are driving an increase in poetry’s popularity among younger generations. Join in conversation with some of the leading practitioners of this important youth work from across the country, as they discuss the challenges and joys of using poetry to change lives and school communities.

The Drawbridge Collective: Disrupting and Reimagining Aesthetics of the Craft
Elizabeth Acevedo, Amin Law, Pages Matam, Terisa Siagatonu, Clint Smith
University of California Washington Center (UCDC) Auditorium [Map]
Friday, April 15 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Coming from both spoken word and formal literary backgrounds, while pushing back against the notion that these are mutually exclusive, the Drawbridge Collective will give a reading imbued with dynamic performance and literary merit. The reading will serve as an exhibition of new voices that traverse multiple genres and discuss what it means to be young artists of color at a time in America when many young people of color are on the receiving end of ubiquitous, and often state-sanctioned, violence. All under the age of 30, this group represents a new generation of multi-racial artists rejecting the false dichotomy between "the page" and "the stage." Their collective reading will specifically focus on the idea of intersectionality as it relates to racial justice. From illuminating the congruence between the Palestinian Liberation and Black Lives Matter movements to delineating what arts education looks like in a cross-cultural context, each poem is ingrained with critique, vulnerability, and honesty.

Hybrid Poetics: Igniting the Living Text
K. Bradford, Ching-In Chen, Angel Dominguez, Janice Sapigao
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Friday, April 15 4:00pm – 5:30pm

This panel will investigate and activate the cross-hatchings between hybrid bodies and hybridized poetic forms. The core question: how do our bodies, which are marked by multiplicity — mixed race, mixed class, gender variant, queer, polyamorous — call forward unique poetic forms? As poets of radical embodiment, what we do to the sentence, to forms of writing on the page — and how we test the borders of the page itself — are acts of aesthetic and cultural subversion. Our cultural and political hybridity, our refusal to occupy or assimilate to states of singularity, infuses and drives our textual inventiveness. We see the page as a living text that speaks from and to our cultural bodies and collective experiences. Our poetics preach our daily walk, as writers and as community-builders who trace our lineages forward and back across time. Exploring cultural embodiments of text such as choral structures, call & response, field notes, polyvocal assemblages, sonic scores, community ritual & more, the poets on this panel will 1) perform samplings of such work; 2) discuss these techniques/expressions and how they reflect and activate hybrid, halfbreed cultures and politics; 3) engage participants in exercises and community dialogue.

On the Move: Engaging New Poets - Four Milwaukee Social Justice Poetry Projects
Portia Cobb, Freesia McKee, Margaret Rozga, Angela Trudell Vasquez
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Friday, April 15 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Four Milwaukee social justice poet-activists create projects that move, literally and metaphorically. They will engage the audience in discussing and practicing strategies for generating poetry in prisons, community-based workshops, even a bus road trip, and for keeping poetry experiences alive through print, performance, and video projects. Milwaukee’s Freedom Summer 50 project involved students in a semester-long multi-arts study of voter registration struggles and culminated in a bus trip to Mississippi’s Freedom Summer 50th Anniversary conference. Students wrote and read poems in open mics on the bus. At the ACLU of Wisconsin’s annual Youth Social Justice Forum, students learn the importance of free speech and telling their stories. Students hear poets present socially-conscious poetry, write their own pieces, and have the option to perform in this supportive environment. To address Milwaukee’s mass incarceration problem, a community-university partnership heeds Jimmy Santiago Baca’s advice: “If they won’t let our young brothers out, YOU GO IN.” Poets do readings with Prose & Cons in Racine, offer workshops at a men’s work-release prison, and collect books for a women’s prison. UW-Milwaukee’s cream city review’s fall 2015 issue is incarceration themed.

Looking at the Page: Page Considerations for Spoken Word Poets
Elizabeth Acevedo, Regie Cabico, and DC Youth Slam Team alumni Kenya Newsome, Nesha Ruther, and Hannah Smallwood
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

This workshop will provide spoken word poets and performance poets with tools they can use when revising work in the hopes of publication. Some questions we wil be considering: How do spoken word poets prepare their work for viewing on the page? What special considerations should performance poets make when editing work for publication in literary journals, chapbooks, or online? Poet and head coach of Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team Elizabeth Acevedo guides this workshop with help from former students: Hannah Smallwood, Nesha Ruther, and Kenya Newsome.

Photo by Kristin Adair.

POETRY + PASSION = PURPOSE (A Writing Workshop on Community & Personal Visioning)
Richard Love
Foundry United Methodist Church Davenport Center [Map]

Saturday, April 16 9:30am – 11:00am

Poetry + Passion = Purpose is a Teens With a Purpose writing workshop in which participants mindfully manifest what they desire to see happen in their community, their neighborhood, and their lives, through creative expression. Poetry and music are fused throughout the experience. Participants will create a group piece that conveys a shared group value capable of reaching a broad audience, including, perhaps, people who do not share their values.

Riot Playground: Transforming the Politics of Play and Poetry Pedagogy
Danielle Lea Buchanan, Muriel Leung, Grace Shuyi Liew
Institute for Policy Studies Conference Room [Map]

Saturday, April 16 11:30am – 1:00pm

Poetry is serious business. Or so they say. A glance at the history of poetry movements tells us, however, that as serious as poetry can be sometimes, it is actually a poet’s playfulness that has led to innovation and invention in the art. But what does playfulness mean for the poet-teacher invested in a social justice approach to poetry education? How is play relevant to teaching a classroom of second graders newly alert to the powers of metaphor as well as a group of older adult writers who have yet to exhaust the potential of metaphor? What can we do to return play to spaces in which they are no longer welcome as a way of resistance? This interactive workshop will model different lessons and activities that have been successful across different age groups and learning spaces. It will be followed by a dialogue about the connection between artistic practice, teaching, and social justice education.

The Space to Create: Designing Successful Poetry Workshops for Communities
Franny Choi, Phil Kaye, Sarah Kay, Jamila Woods
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Saturday, April 16 11:30am – 1:00pm

Workshops can be the foundation of a thriving poetry community, creating a space for critical dialogue, feedback, and positive growth. But what makes an amazing poetry workshop? How do you create a space that feels safe to explore sensitive issues? How do you build trust among a group of people that may not know each other? How do you put together a workshop that sticks with your participants and gives them tools they can use for years down the road? This workshop will explore best practices for facilitating poetry workshops – and will give you the tools you need to start designing your own. No experience necessary!

Translation Ethics in the Digital World
Katherine E. Young, Patricia Davis, Tanya Paperny
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 C [Map]

Saturday, April 16 11:30am – 1:00 pm

Translators speak for those who cannot express themselves in a given language. For practical reasons, previous generations of translators tended to work with politically powerful, wealthy, and literate elites in source language communities. Thanks to the digital revolution, however, translators can now easily access communities beyond those elites; they also now possess the means to publish and disseminate translated work, including materials subject to censorship in the source language community. What is the proper role of the translator in the digital universe? What are our responsibilities to ourselves, to those we translate, and to the larger communities seeking to transmit and receive information across language, social, and political barriers? Translators also increasingly serve as de facto online publishers and gatekeepers: what ethical questions should we consider in making translated materials public? The presenters – all of whom have translated materials that speak for politically oppressed peoples – will offer three specific, diverse models (activist, curator, and cultural interpreter) as a basis for thinking about the ethics of what translators do. This conversation is ongoing in the translation community: the presenters are actively seeking participant input to help better define an ethical translation practice in the digital world.

Write Now: A Teen-Led Poetry Writing Workshop
Members of the DC Youth Slam Team
Human Rights Campaign Room 105 AB [Map]

Saturday, April 16 11:30am – 1:00pm

Teen poets on Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team lead this writing workshop open to all. Interactive, participatory, and discussion-based, this workshop will include games, analysis of poems, writing prompts, time for sharing, and free pens.

Anne Spencer's Legacy: Home, Community, and the Poetry of Resistance
Claire Hermann, Rashida James-Saadiya, Jaki Shelton Green, Shaun Spencer-Hester, kynita stringer-stanback
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Gallery [Map]

Saturday, April 16 2:00pm – 3:30pm

This session considers how homes, both physical and embodied in community, shape the poetry and activism of marginalized writers. In 1903 in Lynchburg, VA, black poet, librarian, gardener, and activist Anne Spencer’s husband built her a two-story home featuring scavenged materials. In the tumultuous decades that followed, poets, artists, and activists came to stay, write, and recharge in the house and its gardens and writing cottage. Guests included James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Marian Anderson, Zora Neal Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, the Rev. Martin Luther King, and other luminaries. Spencer's granddaughter will offer an intimate description of her grandmother's home and legacy. Panelists will offer short readings and reflections on the theme of home in poetry and change-making. Attendees will then complete and discuss a triggered writing exploring the following questions: How do we understand and honor the stories of our forebears as they are embodied in journeys, landscapes, and homes? How can these stories strengthen us to face challenges as marginalized writers in this society? What does it mean to invite other writers and change-makers into our very personal realm? And how can we use Anne Spencer's model to foster a new paradigm of creative community building?

Unchained Voices: Giving Incarcerated Writers a Voice
Wendy Brown-Baez, Nell Morningstar Ubbelohde
Foundry United Methodist Church Davenport Center [Map]

Saturday, April 16 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Incarcerated writers are a forgotten and invisible voice in the literary world, as well as in the public, and yet the goal of most writers is to have readers. The challenges they face include: lack of access to the internet, inability to create journals, restrictions on ability to form writing groups, and few opportunities to have their work read in public. Wendy and Nell are members of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, which offers writing workshops for beginners to experienced writers already publishing. MPWW coordinates readings inside prisons and for the public, publishes an annual in-house literary journal, holds literary forums, and created a mail mentoring program to support writer development. Our panel will share ideas and practical advice from our own experience for teaching artists to become conduits for incarcerated writers to have a voice, followed by Q & A.