Split This Rock at AWP in Tampa - March 7–10, 2018

Split This Rock will be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) taking place March 7-10 in Tampa! 

If you're attending, we hope you'll join us to celebrate Split This Rock's 10th anniversary as we rededicate ourselves to poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. Check out all the details below! (See the AWP website for more on the conference.)

Visit Split This Rock at 

AWP Table #T603

Visit Split This Rock at Table #T603 in the AWP Conference Bookfair, where you can meet and hang out with Split This Rockers, write a haiku post card to elected officials demanding gun control, buy a T-shirt, mug, or notecards with beautiful artwork with Split This Rock co-chair Dan Vera, pictured above and excerpts from poems in The Quarry, and enter a drawing for a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, and Javier Zamora. We look forward to seeing you! 

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Split This Rock 10th Anniversary Reading at AWP!

Thursday, March 8 at 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM

Tampa Convention Center, First Floor, Room 20 & 21

In their last year of leadership, Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning and long-time Board Chair Dan Vera will read with two poets whose work and spirit are central to Split This Rock, Franny Choi and Cornelius Eady. Also performing with Cornelius will be musicians from the Cornelius Eady trio.

Sarah Browning is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness. Author of Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, and co-editor of three special issues of Poetry magazine, she co-hosts Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone. She has received awards and fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Kundiman. She is a Project VOICE teaching artist and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight poetry collections including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize, and Brutal Imagination. He holds the Miller Chair at the University of Missouri and is co-founder of Cave Canem.

Dan Vera is co-editor of Imaniman: Poets Respond to Gloria Anzaldúa and author of two books of poetry, most recently Speaking Wiri Wiri. Winner of the 2017 Oscar Wilde Award and Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, his poetry appears in various publications and university writing curricula. He now co-chairs the board of Split This Rock.

Learn more on Facebook. 

Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology Book Launch & 10th Anniversary Celebration

Friday, March 9 at 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM

The Attic Cafe

500 E Kennedy Blvd, Suite 400, Tampa, Florida 33602

Come celebrate the launch of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology and Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! Hosted by Melissa Tuckey, Editor, and Co-Founder of Split This Rock. This ground-breaking book of poems brings social justice to the forefront of eco-poetry and offers a rich terrain of culturally diverse perspectives. 

Readers include Jennifer Atkinson, Sarah Browning, Camille Dungy, Kathy Engel, Jennifer Foerster, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Allison Hedge Coke, Tiffany Higgins, Brenda Hillman, Philip Metres, Lenard Moore, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Emmy Pérez, Danez Smith, Pam Ushuck, Dan Vera, and Javier Zamora. 

This off-site event is free! Full cafe menu will be available for purchase, including beer and wine. Within walking distance of the convention center and conference hotel. Wheelchair accessible.

Learn more on Facebook. 

The Intersection of Peril & Joy: Sarah Browning introduces Sharon Olds

Sarah Browning moderates conversation with Sharon Olds

From Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning:

I was fortunate to be invited by Teri Cross Davis, Poetry Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to introduce and moderate a conversation with the poet Sharon Olds on Monday, October 17. Below is my introduction. If you're in DC, check out the rest of the season of poetry at the Folger here. Especially next week's reading by Irish poet Eavan Boland and Austin Allen, winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize!

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When I first began writing seriously, in the early 1990s, I felt an immense terror at my own vulnerability. I had routinely heard women’s poetry disparaged as sentimental, confessional, domestic, self-indulgent – and political poetry dismissed as propaganda. I could not free myself from these internal voices and wrote only self-defended dense little nuggets of poems. Shame had my tongue tied in knots.

          Until my friend the novelist Dori Ostermiller introduced me to the work of Sharon Olds, by then already a dozen years in print but brand new to me. I found within these finely crafted poems a wild freedom, a female speaker who owned her own body, who spoke frankly of its sexual desire, who told the sorry tales of its violation.

          This courage struck me then as a radical political act. Today, when hundreds of thousands of women have taken to social media to tell of the men who’ve assaulted them in just the way a presidential candidate brags about doing, this courage is revolutionary.

          Which may be why some critics have been so venomous in their attacks, calling Olds’ work sensationalist, just as some are dismissing the true stories of women’s lived experience as hype cooked up for political gain. But women know better – we have lived at the intersection of peril and joy our entire lives. Olds is our chronicler.

          Sharon Olds is the author of 13 books of poems, which have won her – among other recognition – the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and Britain's T.S. Eliot prize; she is the first American woman to win. She has been the state poet laureate of New York, received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program as well as at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

          Olds’ most recent book is Odes, which critic Alexandra Schwartz in The New York Times called, “perhaps the funniest book I’ve read this year, and also among the most moving and philosophical, charged with the kind of metaphysical self-interrogation that is a central, though often overlooked, aspect of her work.” The work is playful – Olds makes up delicious words: valentinaceous, starvacious, arroyoing… and even includes a few little sketches. I hope you’ll take it home tonight and enjoy its sheer, daring beauty and striking truth telling.

          Olds’ first book, Satan Says, includes a tribute to the poet Muriel Rukeyser, of whom, I’m ashamed to say, I had never heard until those early 90s days when I was devouring Olds’ work. It’s a short poem and I’d like to read it to you now, as it has become a talisman for my own work, both as a poet and in the creation and growth of Split This Rock, now grown to thousands of poets performing the essential task of witnessing that Sharon Olds pays testament to in this poem:

SOLITARY

                    for Muriel Rukeyser

I keep thinking of you standing in Korea, in the courtyard

of the prison where the poet is in solitary.

Someone asked you why not in the street

where you could be seen. You said you wanted

to be as close to him as you could.

You stood in the empty courtyard. You thought

it was probably doing no good. You have written

a poem about it. This is not that poem.

This is another – there may be details

wrong, the way variations come in

when you pass on a story. This is a poem

about a woman, a poet, standing in a courtyard,

feeling she is probably doing no good.

Pass it on: a poet, a woman,

a witness, standing

alone

in a prison

courtyard

in Korea.

I am immensely proud to introduce to you a poet, a woman, a witness: Sharon Olds.

Photo by Chloe Miller.

Split This Rock at AWP in LA - March 31-April 2

Split This Rock will be at Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) taking place March 30-April 2 in Los Angeles! If you're attending, we hope you'll come hang out with us at the Bookfair (table #1317!), at a reception we're co-hosting with CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, AWP LGBTQ Caucus, and at an offsite event La Pachanga 2016! Check out all the details below! (See the AWP website for more on the conference.)

Visit Split This Rock at 

AWP Table #1317

 

Visit Split This Rock at Table #1317 in the AWP Conference Bookfair, where you can write a haiku post card to President Obama, buy a gorgeous T-shirt and special issue of POETRY Magazine, and enter a drawing for a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016 featuring Amal Al-Jubouri, Jennifer Bartlett, Jan Beatty, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Regie Cabico, Dominique Christina, Martha Collins, Nikky Finney, Ross Gay, Linda Hogan, and more!  

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AWP Reception with CantoMundo, 

Lambda Literary, AWP LGBTQ Caucus and Split This Rock

 

Saturday, April 2, 6:30 to 8:00pm

Plaza 3, 3rd Floor
JW Marriott LA

Join CantoMundo, Lambda Literary Foundation, AWP LGBTQ Caucus, and Split This Rock for a mixer to relax and unwind over cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. Follow the signs to "LGBTQ Mixer." 

Learn more on Facebook. 

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AWP Offsite Event! 

  

Thursday, March 31
5:30-8:30 pm

Avenue 50 Studio 
131 N. Avenue 50
Highland Park, CA 90042

Celebrating the Release of Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press), edited by Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez

La Pachanga will also be honoring the following Chican@ and Latin@ writers:
Francisco X. Alarcón, RIP
Juan Felipe Herrera
Lucha Corpi
Luis Javier Rodríguez
Odilia Galván Rodríguez

Readings by anthology contributors including US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning, among many others. 

Learn more about the event on the Facebook event page. 

Split This Rock Takes Part in 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam

Presented by The Beltway Poetry Slam and Poetry Slam Inc. (PSi), the Individual World Poetry Slam (October 7-10, 2015) is a four day poetry slam festival created by PSi giving spoken word poets the opportunity to compete outside of team competition for the title of the Individual World Poetry Slam Champion. The contenders hail from every major North American city including DC, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Vancouver, as well as countries around the world such as Australia, France, and Germany. In addition to two days of competition culminating in a grand finale of the top 12 poets, the event brings world acclaimed feature performers, poetry and performance workshops, specialty slams, open mics, and events for all ages to Washington D.C. Just a few of the many events Splitistas might be interested in include The Queer Kids Table Open Mic on Thursday, Sister Outsider: An Intersectional Conversation with Women of Color Panel & Reading on Friday, and the #BlackPoetsSpeakOut Open Mic on Saturday. For more detailed information on the IWPS schedule and poets participating in the competition, visit the IWPS website.

Split This Rock is pleased to be a sponsor & co-host to the following IWPS events:

WRITING WORKSHOP
Wednesday, October 7 | 6:30-8:15pm 
1112 16th St, NW, 6th Floor Conference Room 
Cost: FREE 
Facilitated by Robalu Gibson as seen on TVOne's Verses & Flow.

THE QUARRY, THE CHOIR, THE BREAKBEATS PART ONE
Friday, October 9 | 1-3 pm 
1112 16th St, NW, 6th Floor Conference Room
Cost: $5 (Get tickets at IWPS website) | Closest Metros: Farragut West or North
A literary craft workshop with Sarah Browning, Mahogany Browne, and Matt Gallant. Our panelists will focus on the importance and possibilities in writing for the page in a way that is authentic to the author and their voice, while exuding mastery of its conventions.

THE QUARRY, THE CHOIR, THE BREAKBEATS PART TWO
Sat., Oct. 10 | 1-3 pm | Split This Rock Office, Institute for Policy Studies 6th Floor Conference Room, 1112 16th St, NW, Suite #600, Washington, DC 20036
Cost: $5 (Get tickets at the IWPS website) | Closest Metro: Farragut West or North
The second portion of this workshop will focus on the do’s and don’ts of submissions, and how to create the best manuscript or submittable piece of work.  Participants will also have the opportunity to engage with panelists with inquiries. Panelists: Safia Elhillo, Matt Gallant, and Katy Richey.

The Quarry & the Poetry of Social Justice

by M. F. Simone Roberts, Split This Rock Poetry & Social Justice Fellow

Split This Rock established its spirit, indeed its name, with inspiration from the Langston Hughes poem “Big Buddy,” at its heart a poem about community and resistance to injustice:

Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.

In the year and a half that I have volunteered with this organization, I’ve found myself welcomed into a community of poets and activists, and activist poets, who support and encourage each other in both word and deed. We do stand by each other’s sides splitting the rocks of recalcitrant social problems and oppressive ideologies, and the rocks of that sometimes recalcitrant white page, the living earth of our languages.

Even the word for unwanted resistance is connected to rocks and mineral world, the “cal” in “recalcitrant” reminds us of calcium – our very bones.

As we mulled names for this database of social justice poetry we kept coming back around to the suggestion of one of our Board members, the poet Dan Vera, who offered “The Quarry” early in these discussions. And then, serendipity told us to stop fighting that first, right instinct when Sarah Browning, our Executive Director, remembered Carolyn Forché’s poem “The Museum of Stones,” read at the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival back in 2008.

In that poem is the line, “all the world a quarry” and it all came together. The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Done. The quarry is a resource we go to build our cities and communities, but it is also the place we are sometimes sent in punishment for our resistance to oppressive regimes. The world as problem, and the solution to the problem, the stone that builds the prison and the stone that crashes a window wrapped in a petition for freedom.

To our joy, those who have visited The Quarry in just its first day have divined its purpose perfectly. Larry Ferlazzo at EDUblogs.org instantly saw its uses as an educational resource. White Cross School quickly discovered the Geography search and located two local North Carolina poets to shout out. Joseph Ross sees The Quarry in several dimensions:

As a teacher, I know I will use this database to share poems with my American Literature students as well as with my Creative Writing students. As a poet, I know I will browse these poems to see what others are writing, how they approach different topics and issues in American life. As a reader of poetry, I will savor these poems as a personal call to work for justice more effectively in the world.

Over at Harriet, the blog of The Poetry Foundation, the staff go right to the heart of our mission: celebrating the enormous power of “the imagination to transform the individual and society.” Poetry, social justice poetry, is where our imaginations do not fail us.

Ron Charles of The Washington Post asked us an important question in The Style blog. Duly impressed with the search feature of the database, he notes  “users can find poems by selecting from a list of more than 40 different themes and issues, such as Animal Rights, Environmental Justice and Police Brutality” and by “ the writer’s identity from a checklist that includes Disability, Race, Gender, Religion and Class.” 

Charles worries, though, that while “It’s a curious idea, helpful on its face,” it may run the risk “of reducing poetry to polemics and biography?”

Bringing poetry to the center of public life means that while we think of it as poetry – indeed, one of our goals at Split This Rock is to expand the notion of what a “political poem” can be even as we think of it as messages to the society, about all its peoples and ways of life. 

So under a category like “LGBTQA,” you’ll find poems that address mild and violent kinds of homo- or trans- phobias, but also vibrant celebrations of love and sex and self and humor from inside the LGBTQA communities, and by their allies, or poems that touch on a number of themes just one of which has to do with identity.

But, Charles’s hesitation is a frequent and common one, that is to say -- real. Political poetry, poetry that does a job like point to injustice or witness human resistance must sound like politics – like argument, like spin, like propaganda. It can, of course. And those poems have their place. Sometimes at the rally, we just need the point to get across. 

But, some poems make their point not by argument, but by affect, by appeal directly to our human being. The recent poem of the week, “Blk Girl Art” by Jamila Woods is one of these, coming as it does in response to the everyday, every day pressures of surviving while black in America:

Poems are bullshit unless they are eyeglasses, honey
tea with lemon, hot water bottles on tummies. I want
poems my grandma wants to tell the ladies at church
about. I want orange potato words soaking in the pot
til their skins fall off, words you burn your tongue on,
words on sale two for one, words that keep my feet dry.

It admits in the same breath that poems need to do work in a world of hardship, and that comfort and kindness are possible in that work. 

Or take the mini-epic of Tim Seibles’s “One Turn Around the Sun,” read at the 2014 poetry festival, which blends the necessity and courage of resistance, “of biting something ten thousand times your own size as if to say ‘get off me!’” into the whole heart of human being.

As the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow at Split This Rock, it was my job, honor, and pleasure to archive and categorize each of these poems, and I know that they are polemics in the way excellent poetry is polemic, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, which meant to “teach the ways of God to Man” by making of the truth an art. There’s more than one clever argument made about power and rebellion in that poem.

The poetry of social justice is poetry. Social Justice poetry exhibits its craft and art on the page, and on the stage.  When Split This Rock says its taste in poetry is catholic, we mean that. Social Justice Poetry comes to us in the lineage of the traditional canons like Forchés “poetry of witness”, from the experimental traditions like the work of Anne Waldman, from the street and spoken word traditions, from the stories of Indigenous peoples…. 

When we begin to look at poetry as people who live for justice, we begin to hear the themes in poems we never thought were so radical, so committed.

These are your poems. You wrote them. Or you will read them. To learn craft. To seek comfort. To confront danger. To learn from difference. To celebrate the radical act of staying alive, joyful, fierce. You will share them with friends, declaim them at demonstrations, croon them at memorials. You will use them to center and inspire your colleagues at work, in community organizing, at worship. 

They are yours. Go, imagine with them. 

M. F. Simone Roberts is an independent scholar of poetics and feminist philosophy, a poet and activist. She is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays and author of the monograph A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray's Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetics. Descendant of aristocrats and serfs, she adventures with her consort, Adam Silverman.

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. 

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.

Our only weapons our feathered selves

Sarah Browning Chooses Her 2012 Poem of the Week Highlights

As Director of Split This Rock I have developed a fairly catholic and expansive aesthetic. I am constantly moved and astonished by the great variety of approaches contemporary American poets are taking as they wrestle with the daunting social and political (and therefore personal) issues of our time – approaches of poetic style and form, of voice, of "take" on the issue itself.

I love every poem we choose for the weekly Poem of the Week series, all 165 since we launched in October 2009. But of course I have secret favorites, too. So this year, I thought I'd review the 50+ poems and remind myself which ones I particularly love. I cite them below with a brief comment and/or excerpt.

I invite you to do the same – type “Poem of the Week” into the handy little search box in the upper left of this screen and skim back through the powerful poems we've been privileged to publish this year. I promise you many rewarding moments. And feel free to post the names of your favorites in the comments here or on Split This Rock's Facebook page here. These are all poems deserving of multiple rereadings.

I am grateful to all of you – all the poets who’ve sent your work to us, those we’ve published, all the readers, all of you who pass the poems along, helping them find the broad readership they deserve.

Special thanks to my colleague Alicia Gregory, who makes the choices with me each week and does all the legwork of communicating with poets, sending the poems out, and posting them here. Praises!

Herewith, then, my subjective list of highlights, in reverse chronological order. You can click on the title to read the full poem:

“Red-Tailed Hawk,” by Patricia Monaghan, December 28

I was deeply saddened when we lost Patricia in 2012. This poem from her book, Homefront, struck me as a perfect elegy: 

hawk,

a word of death and life

in balance, a word of death

and hunger and fierce pain

and beauty and devouring.

“Margins,” by Heather Holliger, November 12

Following an historic election during which voters supported marriage equality around the country, I was excited by Heather's poem, the briefest we published all year, its concision capturing perfectly the hesitations and caution all LGBTQ people still live each day:

We love

at the margins of

democracy – between

a legislative building and

the touch of her hand

on my cheek.

“poppies are not                          (Enough,” by Daniela Elza, November 2

The poem works me over with its suggestion of violence and death. I never tire of this extraordinary line:

my mind quiet as

a book         with a bomb         in its mouth.

 “Skintight,” by Stephen Zerance, October 12

My skin--deaf, the narrator relates, as his family uses the famous Christmas Gift Guilt Trip to force him to conform to their notion of the masculine body. The poem is awkward, familiar, heartbreaking. 

“Faith,” by Tim Seibles, September 28

One week after we featured this poem, the book in which it appears, Fast Animal, was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Deservedly. It’s one of my favorite books of the year. Praises.

Let's stop talking
about God. Try to shut-up
about heaven: some of our friends
who should be alive       are no longer alive.

“barreras,” by María Luisa Arroyo, September 10

A poem of the health and environmental toll we exact from immigrant workers in this country. A poem, too, of – hallelujah – resistance.

For once, though, my mother was proud of my English.

El jefe told me I could have been promoted

to the shampoo line.

“Kandahar,” by Zohra Saed, August 3

I have found myself taken by very short poems this year, and this is another tight lyric that packs it all in.

Kandahar –

............Was once a cube of sugar

Refusing to dissolve in the sea.

It became a city from sheer stubbornness.

“Apiary,” by Carolee Sherwood, July 19

Elaborate, extended metaphor of futility, all in a gorgeous package. What’s not to love?

Rows of veterans lean along the walls,

missing wings they lost in the war. The boys have dyed

their yellow stripes black, applied eyeliner, given into the sting.

“Loss is an art, traversing one world to the next,” by Purvi Shah, May 25

Questions of identity, cultural appropriation, beauty, and the body roil together in this gorgeous poem:

hundreds

of daughters walking towards a foreign

house, parents looking askance, blurred.  

  

They say: absence is a color, the deep

brown of life which is always receding.

“a sentence,” by Kevin Simmonds, April 27

An innovative, playful poem about police violence and racial profiling? This poet pulls it off. An excerpt won’t do in this case; another very short poem – go read it!

“ReadingTranströmer in Bangladesh,” by Tarfia Faizullah, April 20

A model of a poem incorporating the words of another poet to great effect. Tarfia’s book, SEAM, recently won the Crab Orchard First Book Award. We await its 2014 appearance with anticipation!

I let in

the netherworld. Something

rose from underneath. I sit,

wait through my cousin's

sobs.

“Arthritisis one thing, the hurting another,” by Camille Dungy, April 6

Written for Adrienne Rich in 2006, this poem arrived from Camille in our Inbox just days after Rich died March 27. We were coming off Split This Rock Poetry Festival, a monumental undertaking, and I was exhausted, incapable of accepting the fact that we had lost one of my heroes, a poet of great moral clarity and vision. A prophet. I was so grateful to have Camille’s words to honor Adrienne Rich, since I had none of my own at the time.

Last year was no better, and this year only lays the groundwork

for the years that are to come. Listen, this is a year like no other.

“14 haiku,” by Sonia Sanchez, March 21

We finished our run of Poems of the Week by the 15 poets featured in this year’s festival with this poem for Emmitt Till. It was suddenly and tragically also a poem for Trayvon Martin and for all of the Black boys and men who are taken from us.

a mother's eyes

remembering a cradle

pray out loud

“Across the Street from the Whitmore Home for Girls, 1949,” by Rachel McKibbens, February 24

A terrifying poem full of startling imagery. Like so many of Rachel’s poems, it uses the grotesque to expose the inhuman nature of childhood sexual abuse, that it should never feel commonplace or cliché.

In the morning, she is who she is again.

Her hair, a soft black brick, her body held together

by hammers.

“The Street of Broken Dreams,” by Minnie Bruce Pratt, February 17

A poem from Inside the Money Machine, Minnie Bruce’s remarkable book of the American economic crisis and its toll on the working class. This poem is a rallying cry and I flat-out love it:

In another city, some foreclosed people got so angry

the big finance company had to hide its sign, AIG.

The people were so angry. That makes me feel more

safe, the people come out of their houses to shout:

We demand. Not rabble and rabid, not shadow, not terror,

the neighbors stand and say: The world is ours, ours, ours. 

“Uncivil,” by Venus Thrash, February 10

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Venus gave us what I will declare to be a Great Lesbian Love Poem. In a ceremony like but unlike a wedding – a big fuck-you to the state – the beloved is:

showing off

peek-a-boo cleavage & legs with no quit,

& our folks are here with tissues & hankies

bawling the way parents do at weddings

 

“Take a Giant Step,” by Jose Padua, January 6

Waywardness as resistance and triumph. It was a great way to start an extraordinary year.

So go, like everything

that has decayed before us, everything that has

shattered so beautifully, go into that street

like a man crashing a parade with smelly clothes

and dirty skin, go into that building that’s on fire

because the sky is full of smoke and you are water.