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: Wang Ping

  

Photo by Yu Jian          

Tsunami Chant

I'm not a singer, but please

let me sing of the peacemakers

on the streets and internet, your candles

in this darkest moment of night,

your bodies on the steps of government buildings,

your voices from the roots of grasses and trees,

from your pit of conscience.

I'm not a prayer, but please,

please give my voice to the children

in Baghdad, Basra, Afghanistan,

and every other bombed-out place on earth,

your crying out in pain and fear;

please give my hands to the mothers

raking through rubble for food, bodies;

my sight to the cities and fields in smoke;

my tears to the men and women who are brought

home in bags; and please give my ears

to those who refuse to hear the explosions,

who tune only to censored news, official words.

I'm not a citizen, but please

count my vote against the belief

that the American way is the only way,

count it against the blasphemy of freedom,

against a gang of thugs who donned crowns

on their own heads, who live for power

and power only, whose only route is

to deceive and loot, whose mouths move

only to crush, whose hands close

only into a grave.

I'm not a worshiper, but please

accept my faith in those

who refuse to believe in painted lies,

refuse to join this chorus of supreme hypocrisy,

refuse to sell out, to let their conscience sleep,

wither, die. Please accept my faith

in those who cross the bridge for peace,

only to be cursed and spat upon, but keep crossing

anyway, every Wednesday, in rain and snow,

and my faith in those who camp out night after night,

your blood thawing the frozen ground,

your tents flowers of hope in this bleak age.

I don't possess a bomb, don't know

how to shoot or thrust a sword.

All I have is a broken voice,

a heart immense with sorrow.

But please, please take them,

let them be part of this tsunami

of chanting, this chant of awakening.

-Wang Ping 

Used by permission.

From The Magic Whip (Coffee House Press, 2003)  

Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and came to USA in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, which builds a sense of kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze Rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food. Publications include short story collections, novels, and the poetry collections Of Flesh and Spirit and The Magic Whip, as well as Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translated with Ron Padgett. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. Wang Ping has had many multi-media exhibitions and collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves, a film installation about the illegal Chinese immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship.

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.

Are you ready? Tomorrow's the day!

Tomorrow, the festival begins!

For a detailed schedule, click here.

We'll see you at Check-In at Busboys and Poets 14th and V Langston Room between 2 and 5:30 p.m.

Get pumped with our opening ceremonies at 6:00p.m., also in the Langston Room. Featuring young DC voices, including the Young Women’s Drumming Empowerment Project, the Shakti Brigade, winners of Split This Rock’s World & Me Youth Poetry Contest, and members of the DC Youth Slam Team. With readings of poems by Dennis Brutus, Lucille Clifton, and Mahmoud Darwish, plus the inspiring words of Howard Zinn.

The Opening Night reading takes place at 8:00 PM at Bell Multicultural High School.
Featuring Andrea Gibson, Wang Ping, Cornelius Eady and Busboys and Poets Poets in Residence Holly Bass, Beny Blaq, and Derrick Weston Brown.

Andrea Gibson, a powerful live performer, was the winner of the 2008 Women of The World Poetry Slam (Detroit), and has placed 3rd in the world for the last three years by the iWPS. She won a DIY Poetry Book of the Year and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her first book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns. She has been showcased on Free Speech TV, the documentary Slam Planet, NPR, Air America, and Independent Radio Stations nationwide. She has recorded four full-length albums of poetry, the most recently, Yellowbird, in which her poetry is accompanied by piano, global drums, dobro, violin, and music by Kim Taylor, Chris Pureka, and Devotchka. The Denver Westword has said, “If slamming were professional boxing, Andrea Gibson would be the light weight you don’t think much of until she’s knocked you flat on your ass.”

Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1985. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House Press. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. In 2002, Random House published its paperback. She had two solo photography and multi-media exhibitions--“Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges” at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and “All Roads to Lhasa” at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Cornelius Eady's latest book of poems, Hardheaded Weather (Marian Wood/Putnam, 2008), was nominated for an 2008 NAACP Image Award. He is co-founder (with Toi Derricote) of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets, and Associate Professor of English at The University of Notre Dame. He is the author of six other books of poetry. His Victims of the Latest Dance Craze won the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and his The Gathering of My Name was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. Additional honors include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, a 2002 Oppenheimer Award for the best first play by an American playwright, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. [Photo credit: Chip Cooper]

Holly Bass is a writer and performer. Her most recent body of work explores the endless allure of booty—from the Venus Hottentot to video vixens. A Cave Canem fellow, her poems have appeared in Callaloo, nocturnes (re)view, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Role Call, and The Ringing Ear. Her work has been presented at the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, the Whitney Museum, and the Experience Music Project in Seattle. She is the Cullen Poet-in-Residence for Busboy and Poets' 5th & K location in Washington, DC, where she coordinates open mic nights and writing workshops for the public. She has received grants from the DC Arts Commission and a 2008 Future Aesthetics grant from the Ford Foundation/Hip Hop Theater Festival. [Photo credit: YTanou Photography]

Brooklyn, NY, native Beny Blaq discovered he had an interest in poetry at the age of 13. Inspired by the art form of poetry and spoken word, which he calls the "greatest forum of expression," he decided to give his writing life. He has performed and featured nationally at open mic venues and community events and at more than 50 colleges and universities. Beny has conducted writing workshops in public schools, headlined in the play, "Prison Poetry," at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC, and appeared on radio and TV outlets such as BET's Lyric Cafe, TV One and WHUR, as well as HBO’s hit series “The Wire.” He is the Poet-In-Residence at Busboys and Poets in Shirlington, Virginia.

Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He has participated in VONA and is a Cave Canem fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ginosko, Mythium, The Columbia Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and MipOesia. In 2006 he released his first chapbook of poetry, The Unscene, and has recently completed a full-length manuscript, Wisdom Teeth. He teaches poetry at Hart Middle School in Washington, DC. He is the Poet-In-Residence at Busboys and Poets' 14th & V location in Washington, DC, and the bookstore, which is operated by the nonprofit Teaching For Change.

Poem-of-the-Week: Wang Ping

Solstice in Lhasa


What more can you say
Nomad daughter of glaciers?
City has bleached the sun from your face
18 years old with a freckled nose
Hides of yak, barley, sandy wind
Knees stiff from scrubbing toilets
What dreams keep you alive
On the marble floor of Gangkar Hotel?

Drunken tourists and their nightingales
Money is the moon on Lhasa's holy streets
In Beijing a storm drops 36 tons
Of dust upon the city of concrete
Nomad daughter from the Black River
What more can you say?
The wetland is becoming a desert
Home for rats, carcass of yaks

The salted tea you brought to my room
Yellow butter afloat from a distant factory
"It's fake but tastes okay.
The real is gone, like snowcaps."

Wind, breath, naked river beds
At dusk, a boy on motorcycle
Comes home with his last herd
Nomad daughter from the Sacred Lake
What dreams keep you going
In the glass cage of illusion?

Before the clouds
Cabs, trucks, mobs of fortune seekers
Behind the clouds
Patola Palace absent of its Buddha

Your ancestors are on the road
Nomad daughter from the Blue Treasure Plateau
Wooden gloves and padded knees
Long prostrations into the thin air
Their cry of never-perish ghosts
Calling you to keep the lamp burning, burning

And you shout to me across the street
"Sister, please find me a rich husband in America."

-Wang Ping

····

Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1985. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House Press. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. She had two solo photography and multi-media exhibitions--"Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges" at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and "All Roads to Lhasa" at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College. www.wangping.com
····

Wang Ping will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism-four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

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!