Split This Rock 2018 Festival Press Coverage Round-Up!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been just a few weeks since Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018. We are so moved by the outpouring of love, unity, and meaningful conversation that occurred at the festival and has continued in the weeks after. Split This Rock is grateful to stay in conversation with you all as we work toward liberation together.

Have you written about Split This Rock Poetry Festival? Let us know by emailing info@splitthisrock.org.

Below is what attendees, presenters, and media are saying about this year’s Festival. All photos by Kristin Adair.

Special features from Festival sponsor Poetry Magazine

The editors at the Poetry Magazine Podcast discussed a few of the Featured Poets’ poems, Paul Tran’s poem “Scientific Method, Elizabeth Acevedo's “Iron”, Solmaz Sharif's “The End of Exile”, Ilya Kaminsky's “Search Patrols”, and Camille T. Dungy's "Frequently Asked Questions: 10".

Festival Preview Coverage

The Festival led the Washington City Paper’s Critic’s Pick for the weekend, with Alexa Mills encouraging DC residents to check out the Festival: “If you’re looking for some clarity in the chaos, turn to the poets.” Features a great photo of D.C. poet and 2018 Festival feature Elizabeth Acevedo!

In anticipation of the festival, Kathi Wolfe from The Washington Blade underscored the event’s importance to communities speaking truth to power. The article declares, “Poetry isn’t an elite, ethereal art form. It’s as essential as food, water or having enough air to breathe." Then goes on to quote Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning, "Poets have always challenged the powerful and told the suppressed stories of those with little power, which is why our words are on the lips of revolutionaries and why tyrants don’t much like us.” The Poetry Foundation later picked up The Blade’s story on The Harriet Blog, congratulating Split This Rock on our 10th anniversary!

Over on Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary, Executive Director Sarah Browning and 2018 DC Youth Slam Team Member who performed a poem on the festival main stage Mary Kamara joined hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon to discuss Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 as well as the power of poetry to bring hope in times of despair.

Leading up to the festival, Split This Rock’s Sarah Browning joined local radio station WPFW for interviews with David Rabin (April 10) and David Whetstone (April 18) to talk about Split This Rock’s mission and the 2018 Poetry Festival.

Festival Reflections

From Deborah A Miranda reflections in a blog post: "Split This Rock! is not just a place, nor just a literary festival. It is a crucible, an awakening, a cracking open of the heart that has been hardened by oppression, grief, fear, exhaustion. Poetry is the hammer. My heart was the rock." Deborah charges Split This Rock to do better, as well, to build community with Indigenous poets and communities, as we "rebuild the foundations of this nation." Read the full post, Split This Rock! 2018: Three Days in a Poet's (almost) Utopia on Deborah’s blog Bad NDNS.

Dan Wilcox offered reflective recaps of the Thursday workshops, Friday workshops, Thursday Featured Readings, and Friday’s Public Action: “It’s like returning home. Split This Rock Poetry Festival happens every other year & I look forward to it, but this year it fell exactly during Albany’s WordFest, including the Third Thursday Poetry Night that I host, but I had to be here. It was the 10th year of this festival of “provocation & witness,” & I’ve been to all of them.” Read all of the recaps on his blog.

From Karren LaLonde Alenier’s blog The Dresser: “The Split This Rock panels this season make the Dresser groan with pleasure because it is hard to decide which ones to attend. For example, this afternoon April 19 at the 1:30 session, she has to decide between ‘Arabic/English Poetry Game Workshop,’ ‘Seniors for Social Justice,’ or ‘WordPlay: Poetry a self-advocacy for Youth with Autism.’ This is not to mention the panel on the Warrior Writers and two book oriented sessions--one on the letters of Audre Lorde and the other Eco-Justice poetry.” Read Report #1, Report #2, Report #3, Report #4, and Report #5 on Karren’s blog.

Over on the Ms. Magazine blog, Emily Sernaker provides an in-depth discussion of Thursday afternoon's No More Masks! 45 Years of Women in Poetry panel, featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Ellen Bass, Sarah Browning, and Solmaz Sharif as speakers. The panel centered around the No More Masks! anthology, co-edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. In addition to a history of the anthology, Sernaker documents one of the topics that came out of the panel: tokenism. Quoting Acevedo: “I think folks are realizing there are writers that have been previously marginalized and disenfranchised who are writing the best work in the country right now. But I also get reached out to like, ‘because you’re a writer of color who’s writing some of the most exciting work in the country right now, can we just have a poem?'”


Book Riot’s Christina M. Rau highlighted several must-read voices that she felt inspired by after attending the fest: “In the tumultuous socio-political landscape of the United States today, poetry filled the air in DC. Voices rang out, speaking to a vast array of issues...Be on the lookout for Jonathan Mendoza. This young poet is the First Place Winner of the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest. He read a poem entitled ‘Osmosis’ that brought the entire room to silence and then cheers. The poem weaves its way through water and land, singling out instances of injustice regarding immigration and violence.”

Public Action Coverage

At Think Progress, Alejandro Alvarez reported on the festival’s Public Action, in which attendees each brought 12 words each to contribute to a group poem, called a cento, on the topic of gun violence, to join the voices of students for the National School Walkout DC. The article shared: “The White House sidewalk is no stranger to protest. But where you might normally find signs, flags, and hearty chanting, Friday’s activist lineup featured something a bit different: poetry… By gathering socially active poets directly before the National School Walkout, [Sarah] Browning said she hoped to “add voices of witness and imagination” to the conversation for gun control. With roots in the anti-Iraq War movement, she described Split This Rock as a creative force injecting a human perspective into a national push against war, greed, and violence.”

Abby Zimet of Common Dreams also covered the Public Action: “...About two dozen members of Split the Rock climbed a makeshift stage to each add a line to a piece titled “Louder than a Gun.” Their ensuing "tapestry of voices" included the lines, “My country ’tis a quivering child’s breath, held in a closet....Our hearts are less fragile than the nothingness that pulls the trigger...What is it worth? Building graveyards on the backs of our children?” and, from longtime activist Joanne Rocky, “They will beat their guns into poems, and sing out love.”

Read the full poem and see more photos of the public action at Split This Rock's website.

From Festival 2018 Presenters and Readers

On the Kenyon Review Podcast, Featured Poet Javier Zamora spoke with Kenyon English faculty member Andrew Grace about immigration, advocating for undocumented poets, and what Salvadoran poets Americans should be reading. At PRI’s The World, Carol Hills discussed issues of race in America with Featured Poet Kwame Dawes.

Here’s a special treat: Presenters from Brick City Collective filmed and posted their session titled, "Witness and Experience: Luso/ Latinx Poets Voicing Brick City Life." The panel features 7 poets & writers who make up the Brick City Collective, a multimedia arts group whose roots are in Newark, NJ. Take this amazing chance to catch the session if you missed it or want to share it with friends!

Donnie Welch, presenter from the "Wordplay: Poetry & Self-Advocacy for Youth with Autism" workshop, wrote an enthusiastic blog post detailing his experience as a presenter, volunteer, and participant at the festival.

Finally, stay tuned in the next weeks as we prepare video highlights from the featured readings to post on Split This Rock’s YouTube channel. Meanwhile, you can watch videos of past festivals and dream of 2020!

Observing the 25th Anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act

   

By KATHI WOLFE

Twenty-five years ago, on July 26, 1990, a new era began for the nearly one in five Americans who have disabilities. On that day, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a federal law that protects our civil rights, was passed. 

BIG LOVE to Split This Rock – for marking this milestone with a reading on July 19 at Busboys & Poets and a month of Poems of the Week by poets with disabilities. 

Ableism – disability-based prejudice and discrimination – is so intricately woven into our culture that we often aren’t aware of it. Because of this lack of awareness, as poets, we often fail to include ableism in our “poetry of witness.”

Let’s witness ableism:

In 1989, I folded my white cane and sat down at a deli in New York City. “You can’t eat here,” the man behind the counter said, “Blind people will depress people trying to eat.”

Decades earlier, my (late) mother was a lab technician in Philadelphia. Then, she knew she’d have been fired if her boss knew she had diabetes.

Historically, some states denied disabled people the right to marry or forced them to be sterilized. 

Progressives have been no less ableist than conservatives. In the 1930s, disabled people staged sit-ins because they were left out of New Deal job programs.

Whether we’re HIV positive, recovering alcoholics, cancer survivors, wheelchair users, have epilepsy, mental illness, attention deficit disorder or rheumatoid arthritis – to name just a few of the people covered by the ADA – we have civil rights.

“Has the ADA ever truly been enforced? No and no again; yet how lucky we are to have a standard in the books we can fight towards,” Sheila Black, a poet and co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, emailed me. 

Beauty Is a Verb is one of the first collections of poetry in the genre of disability poetics. The anthology’s more than 30 contributors have varied styles and sensibilities. Yet, they share in common a desire to authentically represent disability – to go beyond the ableism that historically has permeated so much of poetry.

“I love that I have the right to protest when I can’t enter a building...that we think about interpretation and sign language,” Black, who has x-hypophosphotemia (formerly known as Vitamin D Resistant Rickets), added.

As a lesbian, well aware that there’s no federal LGBT civil rights law, I, too, love the ADA. Yet, in great part due to lax enforcement, ableism persists. Only 18 of Amtrak’s over 400 train stations are accessible to anyone using a wheelchair, crutches, walker, braces – or even a woman pushing a stroller.  Many employers still won’t consider hiring qualified people with disabilities.  The ADA’s quarter century mark is a time not only for celebration but for poetry of witness.

         

More people in the poetry world than space permits me to name have been respectful toward myself and others with disabilities – from poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Cornelius Eady to Gargoyle publisher Richard Peabody to Grace Cavalieri, producer/host of “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” to Clarinda Harriss, director, of my publisher BrickHouse Books. 

Yet, ableism  runs deep in poetry circles. Poetry festivals and reading series are often not wheelchair accessible to poetry readers or audiences. Software programs used by poets to submit their work and publications’ websites are often inaccessible to blind and visually impaired poets. Frequently, poets with disabilities are excluded when the talk turns to diversity.

Props to Poetry Magazine for its on-going efforts to be inclusive toward people with disabilities. “Change is not just overdue in terms of the reception of work by poets with disabilities,” Don Share, editor of Poetry Magazine emailed me, “but in the very infrastructure of literary publishing.” That said, “we live in a time now when dangerous condescension toward people thought not to matter is eliciting action,” Share added, “...our poets are up to the task of rectifying injustice...”

Diversity isn’t tokenism, deaf-blind poet and Freedom Plow Award finalist John Lee Clark reminded me. “Just one or two of us isn’t diversity,” Clark emailed me, “...We need to see poets with disability in EVERY facet of the literary landscape, top to bottom, sea to shining sea, in all the hidden places and all of the public spaces.”

         

Happy 25^th, ADA!

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her most recent collection The Uppity Blind Girl Poems, winner of the 2014 Stonewall Chapbook Competition, was published in 2015 by BrickHouse Books. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Magazine and other publications. She is a contribution to the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.

Split This Rock Responds to Criticism of Inaccessibility

Stephen Kuusisto has reason to be frustrated with Split This Rock’s website not being accessible to people with disabilities. He pointed out two problems: PDFs of the schedule of the upcoming Split This Rock Poetry Festival are not ADA compliant and emails we send out frequently lack the descriptive tags that should be attached to embedded images.

We didn’t know that PDFs are not accessible, but ignorance is no excuse. When Stephen wrote to me, I immediately wrote back to apologize and tell him we’d rectify the situation. Not labeling images, I’m afraid, is the result of all of us – a tiny staff at Split This Rock – feeling stretched to the limit and cutting corners. I was wrong not to train new colleagues and not to give all of us continual reminders, so that we wouldn’t make these errors.

We are still learning. We sometimes miss things. But when those errors and omissions are pointed out, we are grateful: it offers us the opportunity to improve how we practice what we preach.  

  

I would like to take a minute to share the ways we have tried to make Split This Rock a place that is welcoming to people with disabilities. We were lucky to have the poet and writer Kathi Wolfe on our first festival coordinating committee back in 2008. Kathi is legally blind. A writer and poet, she urged us to include a disability rights and cultural perspective.

We designed our website to be ADA compliant, venues for Split This Rock events are wheelchair accessible, and we make large-print materials available at our festivals. Once we were able to provide ASL interpretation for a festival featured reading and we will strive to do so again this year. I know this is by no means a perfect record, but we are trying.

We have also welcomed and accepted proposals for panels and themed group readings at Split This Rock Poetry Festival on disability poetics, giving festival participants an opportunity to learn from poets and activists about the disability rights movement and about disability culture. We’ve presented poets with disabilities as festival features, including Stephen at our first in 2008 and Sheila Black at the upcoming festival in March.

Accessibility is one of our core values: “Accessibility – Split This Rock values individuals of all abilities and strives to make its programs and materials accessible to all.” We include people with disabilities in the language we use to describe the stunning diversity of American poetry to which we are dedicated.

On this occasion, though, we screwed up. Given the lack of access that people with disabilities face every day, I don’t blame Stephen for being angry that an organization that claims to be dedicated to inclusion excluded him. He is right that we should have built into our schedule – into the daily culture of the organization – periodic check-ups of the website for ADA compliance.

This episode challenges us to rededicate ourselves to accessibility. We are in the midst of a website redesign, for example, which we had hoped to have launched by now. The site will be ADA compliant and we’ll all be able to update it, a huge improvement for the staff, as, at the moment, only one very part-time member of the staff can make changes – very slowly – to the current site. Unfortunately the launch has been delayed, but we are eagerly awaiting the new site and its greater functionality.

I am sorry that Stephen will not be joining us for this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival. We will miss his wisdom and his powerful voice. I hope he will consider being part of future festivals. And we welcome his further engagement – and that of other people with disabilities and advocates for disability rights – as we continue to learn and to build the kind of organization we wish Split This Rock to be, one that is welcoming and accessible to all.

Sarah Browning

Executive Director

Split This Rock

Poem of the Week: Kathi Wolfe

 

Blind Ambition 

I'm in my seat,

averting my eyes,

those funhouse mirrors,

from the numbers

swimming across the blackboard.

Figures are slimy

monsters who slobber

all over your picnic

basket on the beach.

I grab my white cane

and run away from them.

"If you were Helen Keller,"

my teacher says,

"you'd get a gold

star in arithmetic."

Her voice sounds

like she's just

met Prince Charming.

"You would be a perfect

young lady," she says.

I don't want

to make friends

with fractions

or skip rope

with multiplication tables.

I want to chase

lightning bugs,

pull my brother's hair,

open up all the presents

before the company

comes on Christmas morning.

I don't want to be any

Goody-Two-Shoes Helen.

I want to baptize

my new sneakers

in the mud.

-Kathi Wolfe


From The Green Light (Finishing Line Press, 2013)

Used by permission.

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her chapbook The Green Light was published by Finishing Line Press in Summer 2013. Wolfe is a contributor to the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, an American Library Association 2011 Notable book. Her chapbook Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems was published by Pudding House in 2008. Wolfe's poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Review and other publications. In 2008, she was a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow. Wolfe is a senior writer/columnist for the arts magazine Scene4 and a contributor to The Washington Blade.

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!

September Sunday Kind of Love: Carlos Parada Ayala & Kathi Wolfe

 September
Sunday Kind of Love
Featuring

Carlos Parada Ayala &
Kathi Wolfe

    

   

Sunday September 15, 2013

5-7pm

Busboys & 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

Carlos Parada Ayala is the author of the poetry book, La luz de la tormenta/The Light of the Storm (Zozobra Publishing, Maryland, 2013) and co-editor of the anthology Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas hispanos de Washington, DC (North American Academy of the Spanish Language, New York, 2010.) This poetry anthology, co-edited with Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio, was selected by the US Library of Congress to celebrate 400 years of poetry written in Spanish in the United States. Parada Ayala is a recipient of Washington, DC's, Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Award and has received the Commission's individual artist's fellowship.

  

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her chapbook The Green Light was published by Finishing Line Press in Summer 2013. Wolfe is a contributor to the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, an American Library Association 2011 Notable book. Her chapbook Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems was published by Pudding House in 2008. Wolfe's poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Review and other publications. In 2008, she was a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow. Wolfe is a senior writer/columnist for the arts magazine Scene4 and a contributor to The Washington Blade.

Kathi Wolfe in the LA Times: An Editorial on Hate Crimes Legislation

The following is an excerpt from Kathi Wolfe's editorial on President Obama's recent signing into law of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Read the full article here.

In 1999, Eric Krochmaluk, a man with intellectual disabilities from Middletown, N.J., was kidnapped, choked, burned with cigarettes and abandoned in a forest.

Some people worry that the recently signed hate crimes law will inhibit free speech by making it possible to prosecute an individual on the basis of his or her beliefs or speech. Yet, the legislation has provisions that ensure that prosecution would be based only on violent acts based on bias.

Disabled or gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people don't want to hinder freedom of speech. We just don't want to become the victims of hate crimes.

No one will be prosecuted simply for exercising the freedom of speech. And that is how it should be, even if that speech is ugly and bigoted.

But once someone commits a violent crime against us because of who we are, that person's bigoted intentions ought to be penalized. Judges and juries, at sentencing, often take into consideration the frame of mind of the criminal. They should do so with these crimes, too. The community has a right to say that bigoted violence is especially corrosive.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act won't end bias-based crimes. But it will put everyone on notice that such crimes will not be tolerated.

And for those of us who are vulnerable, it makes us a little less fearful today than we were yesterday.

That's something that all Americans should celebrate.


Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine.