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. 

Poem of the Week: Kevin Simmonds

Ars Poetica

I can write a poem

to the limbs of a grandmother

seeded in a scorched field

where her house stood

before the drone

I can write as her left arm singing

to its hand

Calm now, she's gone

Some man

I'm almost certain

it's a man

can write a memo

about this field

left foot tapping impatiently

His memo isn't a poem

but who said it had to be

  

-Kevin Simmonds 

  

Used by permission.

From Bend to it (Salmon Poetry, 2014)  

Kevin Simmonds is a writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His books include the full-length collections Bend to it (Salmon Poetry, 2014) and Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry, 2011), and the edited works Ota Benga Under my Mother's Roof (University of South Carolina, 2012) and Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press,  2011). He has composed numerous musical works for voice and chamber ensemble, as well as for stage productions such as the Japanese-Noh inspired Emmett Till, a river and the Emmy Award-winning documentary HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica. His films have been shown at international festivals, including MIXNYC, SF Frameline, Provincetown International Film Festival, Barcelona's MiMi Festival and Hong Kong's InDPanda. A recipient of fellowships and commissions from Cave Canem, Creative Work Fund, Fulbright, the Pulitzer Center, San Francisco Arts Commission and the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner, he divides his time between Brooklyn, Japan and San Francisco.

***    

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: Kevin Simmonds

                                  

a sentence        

  

needs

at least one subject

and one verb

(though sometimes the subject

is unnamed it's understood

nevertheless

objects must be named)

...........Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III.

subject: Johannes Mehserle

verb: shot

object: Oscar Grant III

a sentence becomes sophisticated

when it includes complexity and detail

...........Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III who was restrained faced ..............down

           on the ground surrounded by three police officers.

subject: Johannes Mehserle

verb: shot

object: Oscar Grant III

...........A white police officer shot a black man faced down on the ground

           and will spend less than two years in jail for his criminal conviction.

what is the object

of that sentence?

object? anyone?

  

-Kevin Simmonds           

   

Used by permission.

 

Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat and two edited works: the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the late poet Carrie Allen McCray's Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof. He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey in Verse, both commissioned by the Pulitzer Center. His genre-defying films, including feti(sh)ame and Singing Whitman, have screened internationally.

 

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.    

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Kevin Simmonds on Split This Rock and the transformative power of poetry:

"Split This Rock is unapologetically committed to the idea that much of the most important and lasting poetry comes out of a struggle against power structures that have oppressed women, minorities and LGBTIQ people. "Political" poetry isn't this short-sighted hackneyed genre bereft of style and craft. STR lifts the work of those who've gone on like June Jordan and Langston Hughes alongside contemporaries like Naomi Shihab Nye and Homero Aridjis. Poets like these consider messy subjects that, when amplified by poetry, can have a civilizing effect on us. I'm also thinking of luminaries like Nazim Hikmet. These are poets whose work has been translated, spoken through microphone and bullhorns at rallies, banned from classrooms and constantly stolen from bookstores.

As I see it, good poetry concerns itself with magnanimity, laying aside purposely divisive bullshit and looking again at a thing, a situation, an idea. Looking at what in it is worth knowing, worth cherishing and aiming for. That's a generosity I find unique to poetry. LGBTIQ people are drawn to that and have clung to poetry to "rewrite, reinvent and reify" their lives, as critic and poet David Eye wrote about Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, the anthology I recently edited for Sibling Rivalry Press. Consider this: the LGBTIQ community can boast about a poetic ancestry that includes Sappho, Virgil, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico Garcia Lorca, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Mutsuo Takahashi, Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo and so on. I know poetry has saved me and saves me to this day."

Thank you, Kevin! Check out the Collective Brightness reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2012, Thursday March 22nd - 4:00pm, True Reformer Building Auditorium (1200 U St. NW)

Review of Collective Brightness

Review by Katherine Anderson Howell

If prophesy is speaking an idea whose time has come, then Collective Brightness must be prophetic. In a time when the right for all persons to participate in religious freedoms, such as marriage or ordination, is shifting and changing, and when religious groups of all kinds demonstrate their turmoil over sexual identity, the 100 plus poets represented in the anthology write boldly of faith, lack thereof, religion, exclusion therefrom, and spirituality that cannot be taken from them.

The book opens with Franklin Abbott’s “Koan.” Koans are Zen Buddhist stories or sayings that must be understood intuitively – they do not make sense to our rational minds. Abbott’s “Koan” explores history, both global and familial: “my face/ before my birth/ was half/ my father’s face/ looking/ back into/ eternity.” This koan sets the tone for the book – intimate and urgent, these poems speak to a world that see persons who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, or Queer as less than whole people. These poems insist on speaking the experience of poets whose souls are demeaned and damned by people who claim to determine who religion is and isn’t for.

The book doesn’t have a religion agenda; it isn’t an evangelical anthology. Ellen Bass’s poem “Ode to The God of Atheists” insists on a world in which “[t]he plums that bloom extravagantly,/ the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,/ each pebble and fear, pond and fish/ are yours whether or not you believe.” Beauty, spiritual and physical, fills this world, as Robin Becker writes about “peach and azure birds” flying from the mouth of a monk brushing his teeth. God godsself is drawn by this beauty. In the poem “Beetle Orgy,” from which the anthology’s title is drawn, Benjamin Grossberg writes of God looking down on a group of HIV positive men having sex and being “[m]oved to add/ His touch.” God gains from this experience, “comes to some knowledge/ as if for the first time, is distracted and pleased/ by the collective brightness of human skin…”

The anthology does not ignore the other, painful side of faith, religion, and spirituality. Kazim Ali’s “Home” claims that “God’s true language is only silence and breath,” and Jericho Brown, in “Romans 12:1” (the verse in which Paul orders Christians to offer their bodies as “living sacrifices”) observes that people, “[o]n the whole/ Hurt by me, they will not call me/ Brother. …they hate a woman/They smell in me.” Doubt, loneliness, hatred, and rejection are aspects of the spiritual experience of LGBTIQ people that are also explored in the anthology.

As is violence. Late in the book, Joseph Ross’s poem “The Upstairs Lounge, New Orleans, June 24, 1973” brings the murder of the patrons of the Upstairs Lounge, a bar and church where gay men could worship, vividly to life. Ross writes of the patrons singing “like they deserved to.// They prayed like they meant it.” The bar is set on fire, and many of the patrons die, including George, who escapes, then returns for Louis. The two “were found, a spiral/ of bones holding each other…” Ross does not stop with the fire; he continues to the aftermath – the jokes on the radio, the laughter of priests, and the refusal of churches to bury the dead: “Save one: a priest from// St. George’s Episcopal Church, who received hate mail…”

This is the hate and indifference to violence that leads to despair, which is achingly described in Regie Cabico’s “Soul Bargaining”: “By soul,// I mean God make me a wind instrument so I can toss myself/ into the East River. The street lamps are howling for the first// slivers of light. By light, I mean falling off a bridge// wrapped in the arms of a God who knows your name.”

Collective Brightness includes a poem by Azwan Ismail, a Malaysian writer who received death threats for participating in the It Gets Better Project and producing a Malay language LGBT anthology, Orang Macam Kita. Seung-Ja Choe is also included, the first time a Korean poet has been featured in an LGBTIQ anthology in any language. And Japanese poet Atsusuke Tanaka appears translated by Jeffry Angles for the first time.

The anthology is a global effort, and one that again and again gives evidence of what editor Kevin Simmonds claims in the introduction: “Abiding with this faith [which religion scholar Karen Armstrong refers to as the “opposite of certainty”], however, is one very personal certainty: No matter what, as a gay man, I belong.”

This Sunday, October 16, Kevin Simmonds and other poets from the anthology, Collective Brightness, will read at Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets, 14th and V Sts, Washington DC. The reading will begin at 5:00 p.m.

Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, & Spirituality

Edited by Kevin Simmonds

Publisher – Sibling Rivalry Press

$24.95

A free review copy of the book was provided to Split This Rock by the publisher.