Fabulous Fabulosity: Some Reports on the 2016 Festival

To all who came to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness with your full spirits, we offer our deep thanks for the care and thought you brought to session presentations, your generosity of intellect in sessions and workshops, your energy and attention that infused each reading with magic, and your willingness to get in the moment and make the festival so extraordinary.

The festival reminds us we have a huge, brave, gorgeous kindred of poets and activists, that when we are together everything is possible. Deborah A. Miranda at the blog Bad NDNS summed up her first festival experience saying, “If you don’t hear from me again, know that I went up in flames, willingly.” We know the staff and volunteers felt that way, too. We couldn’t get enough of the poetry, the exploration, the joy of being in such magnificent company.

We'll be posting more photos and reports and video in the weeks ahead. Keep an eye out!

Here’s some of what folks are saying about this year’s festival:

From Dan Wilcox who offered a reflective series of posts on each day of the festival at DWX: “Another fabulous reading, at the end of a fabulous day, at the end of fabulous Festival — Thank you movers & shakers & planners of Split This Rock! (did I say it was fabulous?). Keep at it.” -- Read each day's post, starting with Dan's experience at the Library of Congress kick-off event with Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, at the DWX blog in the archive for April 2016.

 
The word from Isabella Bowker in her post to Poetry & Power in Baltimore:  “After Dominique Christina’s earth-shattering performance, as we streamed out of the auditorium on unsteady feet, I remarked to this woman that Christina’s poetry had left me hollowed out. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘But that just means when we get filled back in, we’ll be a little bit better off than before.’”

From Raye Weigl in a lovely recap at The Writer’s Bloc:

“Each event at the festival buzzed heavily with knowledge and passion.”

If you attended the festival, keep an eye out for the evaluation form. We love and cherish and honor your feedback!  

Karren Alenier also offered daily recaps at Scene4. Here's what she had to say about the festival's public action inviting attendees to counter hate and fear with public displays of poetry: “Sarah Browning and her team organized a group of 50 people more or less into 8 flash mobs whose goal it was to connect with passersby by reading or performing preferably love poetry on street corners in the fashionable/business district of Washington, DC. This was a way to counter the bad political energy now suffusing our airwaves.” 

Chen Chen offered the comments he shared as part of the festival panel "Bois in Color – A Reading on Queerness & Race” on his website.

And in case you missed it, check out this interview

with Ocean Vuong at PRI’s The World.

Follow #SplitThisRock2016 to find other blogs, comments, photos, and more.