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: Pages Matam

  

register now for freedom

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so loud it leaves Jericho shakin' in its overpriced boots

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so late the rest of the world still wanna catch up to its wind

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so wet it makes the hydrants bow in a glimmering reverence

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so coarse a thick forest grows in its name

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so bright it could photosynthesize a heart

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so heavy done turned gravity into a tattle tell

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so fast it got enough horsepower to chariot the sun

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so agile it got its own two step, gave jazz a run for its money

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so dark make all of the brown mamas weep a gospel

ever seen the smile of a brown child
so luminous turns tragedy into a cluster of praise

ever seen the smile of a brown child
make you wanna write a poem

about it not being taken away? 

***

Used with permission.

Photo by Yveka Pierre.

***

Pages Matam is a multidimensional touring artist, residing in the D.C. metropolitan area, but originally from Cameroon, Africa. He is author of Heart of a Comet (Write Bloody, 2014), a playwright, a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and holds various other awards. His passions are in the field of education, violence and abuse trauma work, and youth advocacy. As a teaching artist with the national poetry non-profit Split This Rock, Pages is a coach for the DC Youth Slam Team. Pages is a proud gummy bear elitist, bowtie enthusiast, professional hugger and anime fanatic. When he takes stage -- as a performer, educator, or activist -- be prepared to be taken on an experience of cultural, socially conscious, and personal discovery unapologetic in its silly yet visceral and beautifully honest in its storytelling.  pagesmatam.com

Book Review: "Heart of A Comet" by Pages D. Matam

Pages D. Matam’s new book is a model of becoming the change you want to see, of living as if the revolution is over and a new world needs building -- now!

Much political poetry, and certainly much slam poetry, is structured on the observation-and-complaint model -- witness to injustice. In this age, when we feel as if we should have made more progress for the people and the ecology without which we are doomed, these poems of witness are more needed than we want. These poems turn our gaze out, to a world made accountable: a prejudice hard to escape, a power relation rusted into place, a history none of us can revise. The tensions of these poems are usually between the speaker and the world.

For all that outward gaze, however, the world of spoken word and slam poetry is a real community of mutual encouragement, appreciation of difference -- a culture where we become poetically honest in sometimes indecorous ways. Because safe haven is made for that honesty. The slam is, after all, a game. The poetry is what matters, the heart.

Heart of a Comet is born in slam, where the broken in you is welcome, where you can and must name what is breaking you, make it weak by its naming. The honesty of these poems is scouring-pad-to-skin intense. Even for this context, these poems are permission and challenge to turn the witness a little more inward, and the result is so transparent it almost hurts to read:

When you wake up drenched         in tomorrow’s amnesia,
your pulse still burning                 filled with troubling memories
…

that reminds you that you are still human, that your heart is not a dandelion, so you must stop scattering yourself to pieces …

You’ll feel beaten down by the weight of your own galaxy
The shooting star emptying its clip into the sky on celestial drive-by;
But if we’re going to live on the shoulders of giants,
We will have to stop complaining of our fear of heights.

This poem arrives early in the first section of the book, called “Apology of a Confused Tornado, Part 1,” and it signals much of what is to come: motifs at once cosmic and personal, Matam's wit that interjects traditional and pop cliches into a confession of personal disaster, a sense of form that mixes and mingles elegantly and at will.

These elements mix with lines clearly in the slam form -- “But drinking more Absolute only made me more obsolete” -- that roll onto the more difficult, and arresting, cadence of a “fiendish appetite for earthquakes at the dripping enjambment of a woman.” There are moments in these poems when the onslaughts of linguistic and symbolic bounce are hard to keep up with.

But this brings me to the matter of theme. The poems present us with a man rebuilding his masculinity from one fractured by immigration, linguistic alienation, racism, victimization, and self-punishment to one still mending but radically changed. A man who chooses to father another man’s son, a man who saves himself from his addictions, a man whose god is feminine and for whom women have become whole and human, a man who puts himself up against the imago of corporate hip-hop and burns it to a crisp.

A series of prose allegories cast the poet as Comet, the son as Sol, the woman as Sky, and the larger (unfriendly) culture as the Fog. The tropes are clearly meant to place this personal drama on the cosmic scale, and this conceit is well placed. When it’s your life on the line, the stakes are cosmic, for you, for your little human constellation. The extended metaphor supports the poetic tension of the whole book. We are discrete beings, but we are also completely part of the larger universe, each other. Our being affects all beings.

The allegorical Comet, paradoxically, zooms through the solar system and lives in a city imbued with a fog of wrong ideas and dead or dying hearts. Matam uses this allegory to think through a transformation, the wrenching tear-down-to-studs that we hazily call “personal growth.”

The Fog has a number of problems with black men, with post-colonial black immigrant men to boot, one of the deepest of which is the matter of carnality, of sexuality. On one hand, an Anglocentric culture wants to reduce black men to their bodies, their sexuality or their violence, and then wants to punish them for its own inability to see much else in them. Matam’s honesty addresses this carnality full-on in beautifully rendered metaphors that are impolitely honest about sex, about the gorgeous fall into the Right Here of the body.

But, the Divine Feminine can be an easy ocean in which to drown. This being a complicated masculinity, rather than the consumer-friendly kind, it exposes the abandonment that can hide in the worship of women as source, as mask. Her orgasm can be his false sense of value. These are not things admitted in the larger culture. Poems titled “Lovemaking Is a Flightless Bird in a Burning Pit” are not the kind of poems about sex that men are “supposed” to write.

On the other hand, Matam’s Comet reminds us that a poet bent on seduction, especially for self-deluding purposes, is a dangerous creature. Embedded in the realization story of Comet we are presented with a barrage of compliments few women would dismiss:

The fire in your eyes potty trained the big bang at gunpoint. The wrinkles in your hands taught phoenixes of resurrection. I have a heart full of ashes ready to Holy-Ghost dance anew at your beckoning call … Allow my lips to learn your bow-legged truth, squeezing your parabolas into a symphony of waves … You make me feel like I mean something.                                                                                                                                                                   

These poems render sensuality as spiritual revelation and as addicting escape. We witness a man’s evolution from soul-killing abandon to tentative learning of love, to really, really blowing it, to rebuilding from the atom outward a whole, more engaged self. In charting this exploration, Matam gives us permission to say – out loud -- that we know what That is. We are rebuilding ourselves for the sake of the world we want to live in. Matam's poems are the rebuttal to every thin, easy, profitable lie ever laid over the black male self by an Anglocentric culture jealous of its status.

Matam is not working on the revolution in this book, but on what comes after. He’s got witness, and complaint, and analysis -- he’s a master of his genre -- but more importantly, his poems chronicle a question: If I don’t want to be what they think I am, or don’t want to live my pain as self-destruction; then how shall I love myself in a country that does not love me, and how shall I live my love as a whole life?

This is what I love most in Matam’s poems. Beyond the formal dexterity, the complex echoes and refrains through the book, the bravely (pointedly) incomplete allegories of the prose poems -- I love that this book is a model of becoming the change you want to see, of living as if the revolution is over and a new world needs building -- now! We do need to live as if, and become our selves replete -- or we’ll just make another muddle of it. More poems of evolution, more poems of enjoyment of our new being and living, more witness of what is loving and nourishing and brave.

… poetry is another name for heartbreak

and just like air
  or a home
     or a chorus
         or a memory

it will fill
until there is no more room
to expand

and you must find somewhere new to

inhabit.

Write Bloody publishes many page-stage poets, and page poets, and fiction writers on the condition that they tour hard like an indie rock band to promote their own work. Pages Matam is touring now, so buy his book and help fund the tour!

To purchase a copy of this visionary work, visit Pages’s site here.

Written by Simone Roberts, Split This Rock Poetry and Social Justice Fellow, a feminist activist, and a scholar of post-symbolist / hybrid poetics and feminist phenomenology.

Split This Rock Goes to Seattle!

Join Split This Rock at AWP in Seattle

  

February 27-March 1, 2014

Table BB38

2 Conference Presentations

  

Splitistas Katy Richey & Jonathan B. Tucker sporting their 2012 festival T shirts at AWP 2013

We hope to see many friends at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), February 27-March 1, in Seattle.

Split This Rock will be at Table BB38 in the bookfair with haiku post cards to president Obama and a drawing for a free festival registration.

We'll also be presenting two official conference programs: A 2014 festival preview reading with Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and Wang Ping on Saturday at noon and an interactive workshop on Thursday at 1:30 pm on "Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word," with Elizabeth Acevedo, Josh Healey, Pages Matam,  and Jonathan Tucker. 

Read on for more details. Poetry is everywhere!

Visit us at Table BB38

Splitistas -- like the two friendly and brilliant ones pictured above -- will be on hand to meet you and tell you more about our efforts to bring poetry to the center of public life - where it belongs! 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 2014.

Two Split This Rock Conference Presentations

Intense/Beautiful/Devoted: 

Poems of Provocation & Witness

Saturday, March 1, noon-1:15 pm

Room 301, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3

Sarah Browning, Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Wang Ping

Leonard Bernstein wrote, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." Poets today are looking without flinching at our world of drones, evictions, gun shows, and violence to the earth, as they tell the many stories of our lives. Happily, too, they are imagining alternatives and provoking change. A reading of intense and striking music, in the spirit of Split This Rock, with Patricia Smith providing opening remarks.

Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word

Thursday, February 27, 1:30-2:45 pm

Room 604, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

Pages Matam, Jonathan Tucker, Josh Healey, Elizabeth Acevedo

As performance poetry and slam competition grows in popularity, many organizations are using the energetic and entertaining format of slam to engage, inspire, and motivate young students. In this interactive workshop, leading youth workers will discuss the benefits and challenges of slam poetry programs and facilitate dialogue among participants about best practices and how to reach and motivate more students using poetry. 

The full conference program and schedule are here.

Poem of the Week: Gayle Danley

Become a Slam Poet in Five Steps - Gayle Danley

  

Lesson by Gayle Danley, animation by TED-Ed, narration by Paged d. Matam.

Used by permission.

Gayle Danley's explosive style combines movement and emotion as she performs her magic on the audience, sweeping them up in her words as she addresses and explores contemporary issues.  In addition to her motivational speaking and college performances, she has maintained a constant tour of elementary and secondary schools, helping students with traumatic experiences and teaching workshops on Slam poetry to all age groups. A multi award winning international Slam poet originally from N.Y., but now residing in Baltimore, her accomplishments as an artist, educator, and author are but a small part of her riveting mastery in fusing her poetry with the ability to touch her audience through real life experiences, leaving a lasting emotional message.

Pages d. Matam is a multidimensional creative writing and performance artist, residing in the D.C. metropolitan area, but originally from Cameroon, Africa. Author, educator, activist, playwright, host, event organizer, Award Winning slam poet, and his greatest accomplishment, being a father. A proud gummy bear elitist, bowtie enthusiast, professional hugger and anime fanatic, be prepared to be taken on a journey of cultural and personal discovery unapologetic in its silly, yet visceral and beautifully honest in its storytelling.  

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.   

Workshop with Gayle Danley and Pages Matam!

Pastries & Poetry: 

An Intergenerational

Writing Workshop

with Gayle Danley & Pages d. Matam

 Saturday August 24

2-5pm

1112 16th St. NW

Suite 600

Washington, DC 20036

   

Watch Gayle Danley's "5 Steps to Slam Poetry"

 ~

Register now! 

In the TED Ed animated video "5 Steps to Slam Poetry," author, educator, and internationally acclaimed poet Gayle Danley describes the process of creating a "slam poem" with narration by Pages d. Matam. What is slam? Slam combines movement, voice, drama, and the written word for an unforgettable spoken word experience. It is a competitive poetry event in which the audience plays a central role. Join Gayle and Pages for pastries and poetry as they facilitate an inter-generational writing workshop that expands on the "5 Steps to Slam Poetry" - from writing to editing to reciting - and delves deeper into what ingredients are essential in baking the perfect poem. In this experiential workshop, participants will share their stories, engage in writing exercises, and discuss both the technical and emotional aspects of creative writing and performance.  

All levels welcome! Limited to 25 participants.  

All participants must register.  

$25 registration fee

Scholarships available -  

contact Elli Nagai-Rothe for details  

Registration Deadline: Thursday August 22 

Register now! 

About Gayle & Pages 

Gayle Danley's explosive style combines movement and emotion as she performs her magic on the audience, sweeping them up in her words as she addresses and explores contemporary issues. In addition to her motivational speaking and college performances, she has maintained a constant tour of elementary and secondary schools, helping students with traumatic experiences and teaching workshops on Slam poetry to all age groups. A multi award winning international Slam poet originally from N.Y., but now residing in Baltimore, her accomplishments as an artist, educator, and author are but a small part of her riveting mastery in fusing her poetry with the ability to touch her audience through real life experiences, leaving a lasting emotional message.

Pages d. Matam is a multidimensional creative writing and performance artist, residing in the D.C. metropolitan area, but originally from Cameroon, Africa. Author, educator, activist, playwright, host, event organizer, Award Winning slam poet, and his greatest accomplishment, being a father. A proud gummy bear elitist, bowtie enthusiast, professional hugger and anime fanatic, be prepared to be taken on a journey of cultural and personal discovery unapologetic in its silly, yet visceral and beautifully honest in its storytelling.