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 Interview with Ross Gay

Sixth in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 14-17, 2016. Pre-registration for #SplitThisRock2016 is open now until March 31st.

Split This Rock is delighted to congratulate Ross Gay on winning the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Award for his astonishing book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.

by Katy Richey

Ross Gay is the author of three books: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. He is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, River. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. Ross teaches at Indiana University. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. Learn more at Ross Gay’s website.

* * * 

Ross Gay chatted with Katy Richey at Uel Zing, a coffee shop in Bloomington, Indiana where Ross teaches in the creative writing department at Indiana University. They discussed gardening as inspiration, the enacting of love in poems, and which subjects feel necessary to write.

* * * 

Katy Richey’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Fjords Review, Origins, Little Patuxent Review, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, and other journals. She is the recipient of a 2015 Fine Arts Work Center Walker Scholarship and a 2014 Maryland State Arts Council individual artist award for poetry. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow and a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference contributor. She is the co-host of the Sunday Kind of Love reading series and open mic at Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C., sponsored by Split This Rock.

Poem of the Week: Ross Gay

 

A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked

for some time for the Parks and Rec.

Horticultural Department, which means,

perhaps, that with his very large hands,

perhaps, in all likelihood,

he put gently into the earth

some plants which, most likely,

some of them, in all likelihood,

continue to grow, continue

to do what such plants do, like house

and feed small and necessary creatures,

like being pleasant to touch and smell,

like converting sunlight

into food, like making it easier

for us to breathe.

***

Used with permission.

***

Ross Gay is a gardener and teacher living in Bloomington, Indiana. His book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, is available from University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.

***

Please feel free to share Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this post, 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: Ross Gay

To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

Tumbling through the

city in my

mind without once

looking up 

the racket in

the lugwork probably

rehearsing some

stupid thing I

said or did

some crime or

other the city they

say is a lonely

place until yes

the sound of sweeping

and a woman

yes with a 

broom beneath

which you are now

too the canopy

of a fig its 

arms pulling the

September sun to it

and she

has a hose too

and so works hard

rinsing and scrubbing

the walk

lest some poor sod

slip on the 

silk of a fig

and break his hip

and not probably

reach over to gobble up

the perpetrator 

the light catches

the veins in her hands 

when I ask about 

the tree they 

flutter in the air and

she says take

as much as

you can 

help me

so I load my 

pockets and mouth

and she points

to the step-ladder against 

the wall to

mean more but

I was without a 

sack so my meager

plunder would have to 

suffice and an old woman

whom gravity

was pulling into

the earth loosed one

from a low slung 

branch and its eye

wept like hers

which she dabbed

with a kerchief as she

cleaved the fig with

what remained of her

teeth and soon there were

eight or nine 

people gathered beneath

the tree looking into

it like a 

constellation pointing

do you see it

and I am tall and so

good for these things

and a bald man even 

told me so 

when I grabbed three

or four for 

him reaching into the 

giddy throngs of

yellow-jackets sugar 

stoned which he only

pointed to smiling and

rubbing his stomach

I mean he was really rubbing his stomach

like there was a baby 

in there

it was hot his

head shone while he 

offered recipes to the 

group using words which 

I couldn’t understand and besides

I was a little

tipsy on the dance

of the velvety heart rolling

in my mouth

pulling me down and

down into the

oldest countries of my 

body where I ate my first fig

from the hand of a man who escaped his country

by swimming through the night 

and maybe

never said more than

five words to me

at once but gave me

figs and a man on his way

to work hops twice

to reach at last his

fig which he smiles at and calls 

baby, c’mere baby,

he says and blows a kiss

to the tree which everyone knows

cannot grow this far north

being Mediterranean

and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils

of Jordan and Sicily

but no one told the fig tree

or the immigrants

there is a way

the fig tree grows

in groves it wants,

it seems, to hold us,

yes I am anthropomorphizing

goddammit I have twice

in the last thirty seconds

rubbed my sweaty 

forearm into someone else’s

sweaty shoulder

gleeful eating out of each other’s hands

on Christian St.

in Philadelphia a city like most

which has murdered its own 

people 

this is true

we are feeding each other 

from a tree

at the corner of Christian and 9th

strangers maybe 

never again.

From American Poetry Review, May/June 2013.

Used by permission

Ross Gay is a gardener and teacher living in Bloomington, Indiana.  This poem is from his forthcoming book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

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.