The Split This Rock Interview with Sharon Olds

By Danez Smith

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 19-21, 2018.

The festival is three days at the intersection of the imagination and social change: readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, activism, a book fair, and a party. Celebrating Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! The poets to be featured are among the most significant and artistically vibrant writing and performing today: Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora.

On-site registration is available every day during the festival at the festival hub: National Housing Center, 1201 15th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005. A sliding scale of fees is available for full registration, beginning at $200. Student registration (with ID) is $75. One day passes are $85. Two-day passes are $170.

Full festival schedule available on the website. The Festival Mobile App is Live! Download the free app  for iOS and Android today for easy access to the schedule, session descriptions, presenter bios, and more! Just search your app store for Split This Rock.

Events Open to the Public

• Nightly Free Poetry Readings: National Housing Center Auditorium
• Social Change Bookfair, Saturday, April 21, 10 am-3:30 pm, National Housing Center (Free)
• Poetry Public Action: Louder Than a Gun – Poem for Our Lives, Friday, April 20, 9-10 am, Lafayette Park (Free)
• Open Mics, Thursday, April 19 & Friday, April 20, 10 pm-12 am, Busboys and Poets, 5th & K, Cullen Room, 1025 5th St NW, Washington, DC 20001 ($5 at the door)
• Closing Party, Saturday, April 21, 10 pm-1 am, National Housing Center Auditorium ($10 online and at the door)

Open mics and the closing party are free to festival registrants.

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Sharon Olds is most recently the author of Stag’s Leap (2012), recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S Eliot Prize (UK), and Odes (2017). She teaches in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at New York University where she helped found the original outreach program at Goldwater Hospital, a 900-bed state hospital for people with physical disabilities. These programs at NYU now include a writing workshop for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. She lives in New York City. Photo by Hillary Stone. 

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Danez Smith (DS): In an interview by Michael Laskey for the Academy of American Poets, you said the psalms and hymns of the Bible were your first examples of good vs. bad writing. From those early moments, through a lot of your books and most recently your collection, Odes, you seem to have long understood and been a master of the relationship between language and worship, words and praise, both sanctified and secular. If I may ask you, what do you find yourself praising these days? Also, how has the language of your praise or adoration in poetry changed over time?

Sharon Olds (SO): What a cool question! For so long I thought of myself as a whiner, not a praiser. But of course, I wanted to praise the people I most loved–husband, children, friends.   

These days I sometimes say that I first learned about art when I was inside my mother. I experienced meter, I heard and felt her heartbeat and the rhythms of her breaths. Two meters: one faster, louder, more regular; one slower, softer, more improv. So I started with counterpoint.

           

Now I want to riff a little! I see myself as someone who has “never understood anything,” and I don’t see myself as a master, so much as as (“as as”!) an amateur.

           

So I would love to embody, in a poem, with some accuracy – with lots! – what is lovable to me about someone. And what love is, what it feels like. And how it is different from idealization – lord knows, in my heteromania, I have worshipped (swooned over) the beauty of men I have loved. And felt inspired to try to describe the qualities of particular children, a particular child. Love drives us to this!  The life-force desires this. And I’m moved to praise whenever violence is not a part of a child’s life. As if non-violence should be a sort of (godless) sanctified civil right. (Animal right.)
           

And I want to know what happens to kids afflicted by personal and/or communal destructiveness – so we can know each other and ourselves. (Isn’t that one of the species-survival purposes of art – pleasure and empathy?)

           

I write so many poems which fail – due to sentimentality, grandstanding, self-pity, cliché . . . I want to praise courage (a single mother, say, dealing with poverty and violence.)  (I have tried to write that, but I don’t know enough about it to help the poem work.)
           

And I would like to praise myself, insofar as I deserve it – this to counter the inner negative self-image I have, which so many of us have.

           

DS:  Your poem “Silver Spoon Ode,” which I love, wrestles with legacies both private and intimate before turning to a Miss Lucille (who I believe is Lucille Clifton?) that seems to offer both the speaker’s conscience and the poem’s tone a kind of peace, but offers the speaker guidance. I want to ask you about friendship. What have you learned via your friendships, maybe your friendships with other writers, that has shaped you as a poet?  As a citizen/community member?

SO:  I love this dialogue with you. This question seems to be the size of my life. Joy in friendship! The joy of intimacy, of deep, humorous, grateful, honest knowledge of each other.

           

Friendships with writers: relishing the intense pleasure, stimulation, and ease of heart of being in their presence. And they like! us, they (may) love us as much as we love them!  And they don’t agree with the negative bullshit we sometimes believe about ourselves – but they know our faults! They don’t idealize us, or us them. They mean the earth to us, they mean our life to us.

           

And Lucille – so smart, so touching, such a pioneer – I remember once she said something (not mean) about how needy I was – obvious, right? But I hadn’t used that word about myself before. And it wasn’t long after that that some small way came up that I could be of use to her in her own need. The insects is an example. Little did I know, when I was working as a child insect-catcher, that I was in training to serve our sister, our progenitor Lucille of the light!

DS:  I often get approached by white writers nervous to write about race, more accurately their own racial understanding of themselves and their people. I sometimes will just send them your poem “Ode to My Whiteness” (after Evie Shockley’s “ode to my blackness ”). What advice would you offer to white writers about writing whiteness?

SO:  I could offer what Lucille would offer, at Q and A time, in answer to this question. She’d say, in that rich, musical, not high, voice – voice with a lot of warm throat in it –like a contralto, resonant, not actorly or “important,” but sensual and full of meaning, and empty of portentousness –

suddenly as I’m writing this (in my apt in N. Y. C.) I feel so grateful that it came to me, in “Silver Spoon Ode,” to turn to Lucille, and speak a critical truth to myself in her voice. (And as I write this sentence the first Red-tail Hawk I’ve seen in three months just flies from behind a thirty-story building across the street!). I learned so much from Lucille. She pointed out the connection between privilege and sacrifice – my privilege and others’ sacrifice – that those doing the heavy lifting for a society “pay for” the art-making privilege of the writer. There is some kind of see-saw effect between haves and have-nots. (Also, I felt blessed that Lucille called me by my childhood name.)

           

Her advice to a mostly white audience?  “When you write about me, write about you and me. Then you’ll know something about at least part of what you’re writing about.”

DS:  What have you learned about writing poems from reading them to an audience?  When does the question of audience come into your mind and what do you do with it?

SO:  When I’m giving a reading, I’m listening, and looking. I want to put the poems out there clearly – not seductive, not too needy, not with too much emotion or too little.

           

And I get a feeling from the room – I read a poem, and I read the room. The company of others helps me recognize some of the baloney in my poems. And sometimes, after I read a poem, I’ll say, Well, that needs work, doesn’t it?! And we laugh. That’s a pleasure. And a debt I owe any hearer for the psychic help with the poem, the vibes I feel when I first put it out in a communal space. I’m often not confident in my poems. But I think art is important, powerful. I think poetry has to do with our species’ chance to last a little longer. So all poems are potentially valuable.

           

When I’m writing a first draft, I am too focused to be conscious of who besides me might eventually read it. But my unconscious is probably thinking a lot of things while I’m writing! And one could probably tell from reading the draft whether my unconscious image of a possible reader is of someone “smarter” than I or “less smart.”

           

Does the audience a poet’s first-draft unconscious is addressing have an age, a race, a gender, a gender preference, an E. Q., a dance style? How much tolerance/appetite does the imaginary audience have for overt (traditional) form, how much for “secret” (newer) form?

           

I think if we look at our poems we can see who they were written “for.” Mine? Not someone with necessarily a lot of school learning, but someone with a high tolerance for wacky words!

DS:  I want to ask you about poetry as a tool to witness. Often times your poetry has been about you being a witness to yourself, but your poems also witness people in your life, people in the larger world. What has writing about yourself taught you about writing about others?  What has being a witness taught you about your own confessions?

SO:  I grew up without newspapers or T.V. On the radio, I heard not news, but music and “Let’s Pretend” and “Queen for a Day.” 

When I was 14 (1956), I happened upon a picket line in front of a Woolworth’s (I “tell” (sing) this story (image) in a poem called “Secondary Boycott Ode”).

           

When I went to college, the frosh class was shown a documentary about the Holocaust, and my best friend, a Jew, sitting next to me, rushed away out of the auditorium so she could go throw up.  

           

When I was in graduate school, I slept one night on the cobbles of West 116^th Street to protest the mounted police patrols, who were not allowing the community to walk through the Columbia University campus (horses were stepping between our sleeping bags) (“May, 1968”).

           

Then at 22 I began to build a family with someone who read The New York Times every day. News photos came into the apartment and many of them had a haunting effect on me. They terrified and depressed me. It was years before I decided it was O.K. for me to try to write about photos. After all, no one would ever see the poems. It felt worse not even to try. Gradually a few of the many “public” poems I wrote seemed to me O.K. enough to send out, get back, send out. Then, once my first book was out (1980, age 37), I half agreed with the “crickets” (Phil Levine’s word for them) who were disgusted by the personal quality of my poems about family. It took me ages to understand that family poems are political.

           

All along I have written “personal” and “political” poems, maybe roughly 2 to 1 (2/3 close family, 1/3 world family – “strangers”). And I know – it’s like “narrative” and “experimental” – both of them are often present in a poem. But I tend to like a higher percentage of my “apparently personal” ones. They seem to me to work better, they are engaged with something I know a bit about.

DS:  What has being a poet taught you about being a citizen? Are the two things related?

SO:  It is very lucky to have enough time to write. For me it’s been an unearned privilege. It’s also lucky to have enough confidence to write – to believe, at least maybe 51%, that you have the right to try to know what you feel and think, and to try to make a little or big song and dance of it, a story, an anti-story, a dream, a paper dollhouse, an antimacassar with a poem embroidered on it.

             

I am possessed of a lust, a longing, for any poem of mine, any line, any image, to be useful to anyone. If you grow up thinking you are “worse than useless” (i.e. harmful), then having any value to anyone is a HUGE SPARKLING DEAL!!!!!

DS:  I love how you write about any and everything to do with the body. Silly question, is there any weird thing the body does that you really like? What grosses you out?

SO:  Dear Danez!  Thank you for this question! Which worked on me a few days, and then I wrote a grosser than usual poem!  First time I had thought of writing about a recurring childhood nightmare. Thank you, Poet Friend, for keeping me such good company with your great poems and with your kind and relevant energetic questions, so that you pointed me back in time and space to attempt a dis-haunting, and to try for a small new truth.

           

DS:  What advice would you offer to anyone who is hesitant to allow themselves to show up in their writing?

SO:  I might say to them, to us: we are out here longing for you to show up. We need to know who we/you are. Someone said there is one poet for every 100,000 Americans (i.e. Immigrants). I know it can feel self-indulgent to write – nar-KISS-ass – but why not (“Anal Aria”, new poem) – but it’s also the news we otherwise die for lack of.

             

I love your poems, Danez Smith. We so need them, and we need the poems of anyone who is reading this. A poem of yours (whoever you are holding me now in hand) is a call to me. Then mine is a response to you, and a call to your next one!

           

And I’d add my usual advice – take your vitamins, dance, sleep, don’t take any drug or drink too strong for you, take care of your body. It is the temple, the factory, the dance-hall of your art! We love you and we need your poems.

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Additional Links

Olds and all the festival feature poets’ poems in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine

“Calvinist Parents” by Sharon Olds (The Quarry)

Sharon Olds Sings the Body Electric, a review of Odes, by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

Kaveh Akbar interviews Sharon Olds at Divedapper

Poetry of the In-between, Olds’s TEDxMet talk

“Sharon Olds, America’s Brave Poet of the Body” in conversation with John Freeman (Literary Hub)

Episode 38: Sharon Olds from the Commonplace podcast by Rachel Zucker (Commonplace)

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Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the John C. Zacharis Award from Ploughshares. Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, black movie (2015, Button Poetry), winner of the Button Poetry Prize, and hands on your knees (2013, Penmanship Books). They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the  National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including in Buzzfeed, Blavity, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, 3-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion, and a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective. Smith is a member of the Split This Rock Board of Directors. Photo by David Hong.

2018 Pushcart Nominations from Split This Rock!

Split This Rock is very pleased to announce our nominations for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. We are inspired by these six poets and their poems of witness! 

These poems -- some which were published as part of a special Inauguration Day Poem of the Week collection -- offer fuel for truth-telling and protest, for beckoning a new world that celebrates us all, for the rally and comfort of solidarity. 

.......... Richard Blanco, Declaration of Inter-Dependence
              Aracelis Girmay, YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
.......... Minal Hajratwala, ‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’...........
.......... Danez Smith, Our Moveable Mecca
.......... Vincent Toro, Vox Populi for the Marooned
              Sally Wen Mao, Aubade with Gravel and Gold

The selected poems, like the six we nominated for Best of the Net 2017, are poems we return to over and over to keep us refreshed, focused, and awake to possibility in these difficult times. We hope they nourish you as well!

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You may visit these and over 475 other poems of provocation and witness in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database -- a searchable collection of poems by a diverse array of contemporary socially engaged poets, published by Split This Rock since 2009. Like all of Split This Rock’s programs, The Quarry is designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life.

Searchable by social justice theme, author’s identity, state, and geographic region, this database is a unique, rich resource. The Quarry offers poems that will inform and inspire you, your peers, and all with whom you work and collaborate. 

You might not only read these poems but use them to keep yourself grounded, to open meetings, to share among discussion groups, to email to representatives to encourage them to keep working for the general welfare, or to share with those who might benefit from perspectives different from their own. 

Statement by Split This Rock in Solidarity with Charlottesville and All Those Working to End White Supremacy

At Split This Rock we are heartsick at the murder and other violence committed by white supremacist nationalists over the weekend in Charlottesville, VA. We know these actions are of a piece with our nation’s long bloody history of genocide and exploitation. And we know that one of the powerful tools of repression is silencing, in this case insisting that the American story is the story of whiteness.

As ever, poets are rewriting that narrative.

The poets of the Split This Rock community come from the groups white supremacists aim to silence, dominate, or destroy outright: we are queer, we are people of color, we are people with disabilities, we are women, we are people of many faiths and no faith, we are white allies, and we are progressives. 

We are powerful visionaries and chroniclers, we are fierce advocates and activists. Split This Rock poets have long offered necessary poetic witness of, and protest against, both the oppression advocated by racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis and their ilk and the harm we suffer at the hands of racist institutions.

In this terrible moment, in support of all who seek a world free of hatred and oppression, we offer selected poems from The Quarry, excerpted below, in praise of resistance and social justice movements -- tinged with hurt, hope, and joy -- reminders of our communities’ resilience. 

Photo by Eze Amos: ezeamosphotography.com

We offer these poems to nourish liberation and justice movements and to sustain you, the brave Americans who join them and lead them. We offer these poems as a call to renew and deepen -- yet again -- our commitments to each other and to our claims to the American story.

Should you want them as well, The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database is also home to many powerful poems that address themes of racism, violence, police brutality, and the several intersecting injustices that affect our communities and our earth. We offer too the YouTube channels of Split This Rock and the DC Youth Slam Team, where you’ll find performances of striking power and beauty. Please feel free to share all these resources.

Solidarity events are everywhere this week. Find one near you at the website of Indivisible. You can organize your own and register it on their website as well. Bring a poem to read – one offered below or one of your own or any that speaks the grief, power, and resilience you seek and find in speaking out and acting against injustice. Jewish Voice for Peace lists several places to donate on their website. 

With poetry on our lips and our fists in the air,

Split This Rock

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Poems in Solidarity With Charlottesville from The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database

NOTE: In most cases these are excerpts. To read the full poem and to learn more about the poet, please click on the link below the excerpt.


Vox Populi for the Marooned     
By Vincent Toro

We will break nothing when we leave, bind ourselves like cloth around
a fevered chest, float across plazas like a warm sponge over a sore shin,
and become a shameless shore of sin carousing, a flesh tinted mandala

of static bribing the sky with the promise that we will gather here each
day until fear is in need of hospice. And we will come bearing incense
and peach pie. And whenever the wounds of injustice are salted in our

favelas we will gather again in the squares of Tiananmen and Taksim,
of Tahrir and Trafalgar, of Bolivar and Union. Like barnacles or fluorescent
algae, we will gather… we will gather… we will gather…

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/vox-populi-for-the-marooned


YOU ARE WHO I LOVE    
By Aracelis Girmay

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/you-are-who-i-love


Our Movable Mecca
By Danez Smith

    we who were born into conundrum, came into the world as the world was leaving, children of the ozone, the oppressed, the overlooked, of obtuse greed, of oil overlords, of oblong definitions of justice

    who asked for water & were given a border, a wall in the ocean, a wall in the air, a wall right down the middle of our bodies, bodies left to sun dry, bodies
told they were barely bodies, bodies emptied of blood & rights, bodies whispered into rumor

    who were hungry & were given a cell to hunger in & sometimes saw our own flesh transfigured into prisons, running in circles trying to escape ourselves

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/our-movable-mecca


Declaration of Inter-Dependence
By Richard Blanco

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…

We’re the living who light vigil candles and the cop who didn’t shoot. We’re the inmate with his volunteer teacher diagraming sentences, the Buddhist alongside the stockbroker serving soup at a shelter. We’re the grandfather taking a selfie with his grandson and his husband, the widow’s fifty cents in the collection plate and the golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for a cure.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

We’re them. They’re you. You’re me. We’re us: a handshake, a smile good morning on the bus, a door held open, a seat we give up on the subway. We tend restrooms or sell art, make huevos rancheros or herbed salmon, run for mayor or restock shelves, work a backhoe or write poems. We’re a poem in progress.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/declaration-of-inter-dependence


Ode To What We Make
By Kathy Engel

and praise the longed for moon
casting the night, the heaving rain,
its wet coat, praise each alphabet’s
lonely letter clamoring for light,
resisting the end of memory, the
end of touch, each cell and clot
still alive in any language,
still gorgeous, to be invented,
praise the clumsiness of this
word sharpening its animal teeth
for the love of the cub.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/ode-to-what-we-make


‘I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me’
By Minal Hajratwala

Your rage is the fulcrum of your desire, chimaerae busting out of cages, heart-sparks flying. Your rage gets shit done & it is no joke. Your rage is the luminous gold truth of sunrise, what you sit with long enough to dissolve your fear. Your rage is a checkmate to your compromise. Your rage is heat from a magnifying glass, focused, bursting into flame.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/i-am-broken-by-the-revolt


Til the Taste of Free in Our Mouths (Brown Baby
Lullaby)
By Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

      Wake baby, wake child, this lullaby will break the cage

You will taste the blood of your brothers in our milk, remembering

their glorious beauty as it warms your throat, you will

not know the cold of the concrete that swallowed them whole.

We are a swarm, a pride, a righteous and thick army

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/til-the-taste-of-free


Stand
By Ruth Forman

why so afraid to stand up?
someone will tell you
sit down?

but here is the truth
someone will always tell you
sit down

the ones we remember
kept standing

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/stand


Hold
By Gowri Koneswaran

hold hands when
they come calling,
when they threaten,
"this is necessary to
teach you a lesson" or
"this is necessary
to protect you"

hold hands when we stand still,
when we walk, when
we run
when they tell us to
surrender
when they tell us
to do anything

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/hold


The World We Want Is Us
By Alice Walker

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

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/the-world-we-want-is-us


from Say Yes
By Andrea Gibson

‘cause tonight Saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more.
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before.
Pull all your strings.
Play every chord.

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/from-say-yes

THE QUARRY Turns One: Reflections & Top 20 Poems

A poem moves through a constant cycle of renewal. Each time a reader flips to it in the pages of an anthology, each time an artist shares it to her social media feed, it is born again, as new eyes, new pasts, and new souls imbue it with a new life.

A little over a year ago, Split This Rock took a major step in answering a pressing question. Since 2009, we had collected poems from our festivals, our contests, and our Poem of the Week series. These poems, in particular, demanded attention; they bore witness to injustice and, in doing so, were written to provoke transformative change within our society. How to ensure that they did not lie fallow? How to move their artists’ messages into disparate settings and different struggles, yielding dynamic interpretations that would inspire others to resist oppression?

The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database was our response. An ever-expanding central hub of over 350 poems, searchable not only by name, but by theme, language, geography, and poet identity. Designed to bring poetry fully to the center of public life, we had high hopes for how The Quarry would be used. A church group struggling with community poverty, a Black Lives Matter organizer seeking strength, a transitioning adolescent wrestling with isolation, could utilize the poems collected in The Quarry for inspiration, for solidarity, for solace. 

The Quarry’s launch received a warm reception. Split This Rock held an amazing party! An article by The Washington Post highlighted ways to use the The Quarry as a tool. The Poetry Foundation directed readers to the site. Tweetspeaks named The Quarry one of its top ten poetry picks. Poets.org integrated poems from The Quarry into their website, pointing their readers back to Split This Rock’s website for the original. Still today, new people tweet love to us having just discovered the database or a new poem they adore. And if that weren’t enough, we’ve had the pleasure of nominating poems from The Quarry for awards with the happy result of Rachel Eliza Griffith’s Elegy being selected for the 2015 Best of the Net Anthology.

As we head into The Quarry’s second year, we checked to see what poems have been viewed most. And after falling in love with them all over again, we decided to post them below. Of the 34,728 views to all the poems in The Quarry since it went live on June 24, 2015, these 20 poems have garnered a combined 10,049 page views (and counting)!

Of the top 20, two poems have not only been viewed most in The Quarry, but are also the top two poems viewed at Split This Rock’s blog, Blog This Rock, where we posted poems before the birth of The Quarry. Ross Gay’s A Small Needful Fact, the most viewed poem on both the blog and in The Quarry, has been viewed 21,640 times combined! Danez Smith’s not an elegy for Mike Brown, the 2nd most visited poem on the blog, has had a total of 19,980 views! Written in response to the killings of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, respectively, both allow us room for grief, for rage, for reason to act. This is the work poems can do and we return to them because mournfully these are the times we need them most.

We look forward to expanding The Quarry’s reach, introducing new ways in which it can continue to function not only as a repository of excellent poetry, but as an active tool for those who seek to make justice present in our time. Towards that end, we’d love to hear ways you’ve used The Quarry – for organizing, teaching, worship, reflection. Email your story to us at info@splitthisrock.org. 

And now, we proudly introduce the Top 20 Poems in The Quarry! We hope that the poems below serve as a gateway to hundreds more, that you become lost for hours (or days!) in The Quarry, searching by title, author, identity, and theme, and that you pass on to your friends in struggle those poems that mean the most to you. And most importantly, may these poems offer you inspiration and fire in your efforts building a better world. Happy reading!

Top 20 Poems Viewed Most at The Quarry

As of August 18, 2016

1. A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
2. america by Fatimah Asghar
3. Your Rapist is on Paid Administrative Leave by Tafisha A. Edwards
4. Ode to the Chronically Ill Body by Camisha Jones
5. What I Mean When I Say Truck Driver by Geffrey Davis
6. The Transkid Explains Gentrification, Explains Themselves by Taylor Johnson
7. For the City that Nearly Broke Me by Reginald Dwayne Betts 
8. Photo Albums by Fatimah Asghar
9. The Last New Year's Resolution by Kazumi Chin
10. The Newer Colossus by Karen Finneyfrock
11. The Opposite of Holding in Breath-- by Hari Alluri
12. not an elegy for Mike Brown by Danez Smith
13. Leaving My Childhood Home by Zeina Azzam
14. Dear American Poetry, by Jan Beatty
15. Too Pretty by Sunu P. Chandy
16. dear America by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
17. WITNESS by Ariana Brown
18. #flyingwhileblack by Imani Cezanne
19. Faith by Tim Seibles
20. Pomegranate Means Grenade by Jamaal May

Gratitude to Eric Eikenberry, Split This Rock Poetry Database Intern, as lead writer for this article. Continued gratitude as well to Split This Rock's Poetry & Social Justice Fellow Simone Roberts for her constant care & effort setting up and maintaining "The Quarry." 

Split This Rock goes to AWP!

                

We hope to see many friends at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), April 8 - 11, in Minnesota. Information on our involvement is below -- including a panel discussion featuring Split This Rock's Executive Director, Sarah Browning. Visit the AWP website for full details on the conference schedule.

Come visit us at the Bookfair!

Splitistas Katy Richey & Jonathan
Tucker at AWP 2013

Split This Rock will be at Table 551 -- Please

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 2016 featuring Jan Beatty, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Nikky Finney, Ross Gay, Juan Felipe Herrera, Linda Hogan and many more! 

Conference Presentations

This Poem Has Multiple Issues: Reimagining Political Poetry
Room 101 H&I, Level 1
Friday, April 10, 2015
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Featuring Kathryn Levy, Samiya Bashir, Sarah Browning, Mark Doty, Rowan Phillips. Wikipedia's entry for Political Poetry begins, "This article has multiple issues." Precisely. Such lack of consensus could stem from the contentiousness of politics itself, but it might also be a product of conceptual neglect: when we think of a conventional political poem, what example springs to mind? And how current is it? This panel considers a diversity of approaches to the political poem -- in its subject, poetics, or call to action -- to update our understanding of its multiple issues.

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Reception with CantoMundo, Lambda Literary & Split This Rock

Room 212 A&B, Level 2

Friday, April 10, 2015

6:30 pm to 8:00 pm

Join three great organizations as we celebrate the power of poetry and literature to make a difference in the world. Free drink for the first fifty guests.

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For All Who Leave Their Pens Weeping So Others May Write

Room L100 B&C, Lower Level

Saturday, April 11, 2015

12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

How do organizers and presenters of other writers keep our own creative lives alive? Leaders and staff of CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Lambda Literary Foundation, and Split This Rock discuss the challenges and joys of maintaining a writing life that's often fit in around the edges of demanding leadership roles within literary organizations. Are we writers? Are we administrators? We are both! We prove it to you by reading some of our own poems and memoir excerpts as part of the discussion. Featuring Sarah Browning, Celeste Guzman Mendoza, Vikas K. Menon, Tony Valenzuela, and Nicole Sealey.

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Poetry and the New Black Masculinity, Part Two 

Danez Smith, Tim Seibles, Pages Matam & Kevin Simmonds (not pictured)

Room L100 F&G, Lower Level

Saturday, April 11, 2015

1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

The work of contemporary black male poets reflects assertions and disruptions often missing from mainstream black male representation. As a continuation of the seminal panel at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014, five noted black male poets -- at various stages in their careers and representing a wide range of genre-defiant aesthetic and performative practices -- reconvene to discuss themes and conventions emanating from their own social, artistic, and political narratives. Featuring Kevin Simmonds, Danez Smith, Tim Seibles, and Pages Matam.