Another Inauguration Poem

FOR OUR NEW PREZ

another Inauguration poem


Got up this morning, doffed my pyjamas


And penned this poem for Barack Obama's


Oodles and oodles of happy fans


Leaping and shouting their "Yes, we can!"s....


"Und so weiters" (Berlin), "et ceterae" (old Rome),


"Et plus encore"s! (Paris)---until I got home


& found that our porridge had been quite et up


By Bushes and Madoffs in Goldilocks get up!


The Bull Market now has turned to a Bear


& the Bankers are saying there's nothing there


For the homeless, the sick and the heart-broken poor


Who patiently stand by the Great Golden Door


That sweet Emma said would be opened to all.


Remember them, Barack, at your Inaugural


& save ‘em a dance at the President’s Ball.


Henry Braun & Jim Watt

TAKE ACTION: ONE PERCENT FOR THE ARTS

Happy solstice! As Santa makes his rounds this year, Congress too, is gearing up to pass a $600 billion stimulus plan, with the goal of creating jobs. The stimulus package will pass with or without our support. The question is, what will it contain?

Split This Rock has joined up with Institute for Policy Studies to call on Congress to include the arts in its stimulus package. We need your help!

We're asking that one percent of the stimulus plan be dedicated towards support for the arts in a program modeled after the WPA program that employed thousands of artists and writers during the 1930s.

Artists and writers are part of the economy and the work we do changes lives, unfortunately, artists and writers also tend to be underemployed and undervalued for their work. This is an opportunity to restore NEA funding, get artists and writers back into our schools, libraries and other public spaces, and create new opportunities for the arts.

Take a moment, please, and sign our petition and send word along to friends. I apologize for giving you work to do during the holidays but Congress aims for the stimulus plan to be on Obama's desk his first day in office.

Sign our petition today and share it with friends.

Thanks and best wishes,

Melissa Tuckey

SARAH, BLOGGING IN FROM ITALY

Greetings from the still-unliberated Republic of Italy! I have missed terribly not being in the States for the election and aftermath, but so many Italians have ObamaMania, it compensates a bit. You can read my account of election night itself — crammed into a cavernous bar at Rome’s main train station with hundreds of other joyous, sweaty expatriates at 4:30 am — on my blog at sarahbrowning.blogspot.com.

Obama’s election has given the Italians hope that they can kick Berlusconi and the neo-fascists out next. There are demonstrations here in Rome almost every week — against cuts in the education budget, the national research budgets, against racism and anti-immigrant sentiment… Political posters are everywhere — it’s a very charged atmosphere. Apparently, though, the opposition is divided: the Communists march one weekend and the Partito Democratico marches the next. (Sound familiar, peace movement?) Progressives have felt despairing of any possibility of change. Still they march. Here are the Communists passing in front of the Colosseum, Jerry Lee Lewis’ Great Balls of Fire blaring from the loudspeaker:





But now, for a change, the American people have given them hope. Here’s a poster the Democraticos got up within two days of the election: The World Changes.



Melissa asked us to think about the implications of the election for our poetry. I have to admit I find this a daunting challenge. I always write as the words and images rise up in me, not in a conscious way toward a political – or even poetic – agenda. If I try to do so, the words lie flat and lifeless on the page. I know our spirits have shifted. I hope some of the despair that some of us have been feeling is lifting.

But I also remember the great relief on the left when Bill Clinton was elected, bringing an end to 12 years of Reagan-Bush. Even though we knew at the time we had an imperfect president. We were tired, with good reason, and we let up. The temptation will be even greater now, with a President Obama. But change in our daily lives will not come rapidly. Children will still be dying at our hands in Iraq. Families will still be going without supper up the street in Washington, DC. Mothers will be working two jobs to pay their health care bills. Hope will dissolve into despair as dramatic change does not arrive quickly. Our jails will remain full. Our streets will be violent. The great disparity in wealth will continue to tear our country apart. Race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, variation in physical ability – these differences will sometimes still seem insurmountable, like walls in a fairy tale we thought we had torn down in the evening, only to wake to see them rebuilt in the morning.

And so I believe that our fundamental task as activists and, when the words arise, as poets, has not changed. Adrienne Rich exhorts us: “to insist in our art on the depth and complexity of our lives, to keep on creating the account of our lives, in poems and stories and scripts and essays and memoirs that are as rich and strange as we are ourselves. Never to bend toward or consent to be rewarded for trivializing ourselves, our people, or each other.” (From Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics, Interviews by David Montenegro.)

As Salman Rushdie has said, “A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.” I am very proud of our work of the past five years, especially of keeping voices of hope and visions of possibility alive in the darkest of times. I’m proud of the poets who’ve kept the world from going to sleep. Let us celebrate and savor this victory. And then let us also keep doing what we do well: starting arguments, pointing at frauds, taking sides, helping to shape this new world, in our poetry, in our communities, and in our daily lives.

Sarah Browning is Co-Director, with Melissa Tuckey, of Split This Rock and author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She’d be delighted to hear from you during her semi-sabbatical year in Italy (though she can’t promise an immediate response, as her internet access is spotty and there are just too many ancient ruins and medieval churches to be visited... she asks that you be patient with her.) She can be reached at: browning@splitthisrock.org.

ON THREE

Obama won the presidency. The night was revelatory, ecstatic, transformative, amazing, unbelievable said the people I talked to that night, which also happened to be the first night of my video camera ownership experience. Standing in front of the White House, as I tried to control the zooming, I recorded the gathering of a small group of friends from southern California who expressed relief that health care help was on the way. I managed to hold a steady frame on two serious young men from the Netherlands who predicted an improved image for the U.S. abroad. Less of the rough conqueror image, one said. An older woman from AFL-CIO, who canvassed for Eugene McCarthy in 1964, felt vindicated. Another woman, younger, was pleased by the turnout of voters, especially among young people. A man wearing a suit and a very wide grin exclaimed what felt like a personal accomplishment at having won by states – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Wisconsin, New Mexico – to name a few. On the screen in the lobby behind him, Jesse Jackson was seen crying.

As I review the 35 minutes of wobbly footage, the insights of people witnessing this time and place in history, I am struck by the background noise. For the most part, the background consists of loud, long shouting. There was high young shouting of 20-something women. There was my partner Bob, who, by the nature of our relationship, was heard frequently with his arms-raised baritone bellow. An abundance of AH and OO sounds overall. Nasal and guttural. There was also a delightful whistle I especially liked. A gym whistle wielded by an older man with the enthusiasm of a 13 year old boy. He whistled and waved. He whistled and jumped. He wanted to make some noise, he said. He was adorable.

Beneath this din of the long tone – high, low, and shrill – was a three-syllable beat. I don't think it was randomly chosen. It was heard in chants as well as in accompanying rhythm. One chant everybody outside that night could hear over and over was his name, the incantation of our leader in rally-style fervor. It was heard most certainly inside the walls of the White House (a friend who writes for the Washington Post tells me the White House is not sound proof. You cannot see into or out of the windows, but you can hear noise from the street.) The chant of our three-syllable President-elect's name echoed all the way to the ears of the deposed. Deposed is not quite right, but the feeling that we have overcome, that we have triumphed against tyranny and injustice; that we organized a critical segment of the state apparatus, which we then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder . . . this was nothing short of a coup d'état. But as I was saying, it was his name, O-BA-MA,O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA we heard on the rain-soaked streets, under the red, yes red, sky.

The second of the two chants was YES-WE-DID (formerly YES-WE-CAN.) A remarkably effective cheer, not unlike the songs played in the bleachers during high school and college basketball games. YES-WE-DID has the persistence of a marching tune but for it's 3-beat time. A waltz has a 3-beat, or 3 / 4 time. In the 19th century the waltz primarily indicated that the dance was a turning one, the dancers rotating rather than proceeding straight forward. The celebration on the night of November 4th 2008 was certainly about turning, about changing directions and stepping away from the previous path.

People in the crowd in front of the White House were mostly young, tirelessly cheering past midnight. But there were some standing in the back against the chain-link fence who have seen many elections. I approached an older African-American man and his two adult sons for comment. I'm ecstatic, said one son. The other asked his Dad if he wanted to say anything. He declined and looked up at the rain coming down. Tears of joy? Exactly, said the son.

Along with O-BA-MA and YES-WE-DID we heard the three-beat rhythm in claps, in drums and in police sirens. We saw police when they stopped their cars to close off a street to traffic as it filled with people; police who were smiling and hugging one another (a cadet was directing traffic in her Obama t-shirt) and blowing their blow horn-ish loud speaker brap, brap, braps. Cars and their horns contributed to the chanting. Some stuck to the three beats. Many had their own signature rhythm. All could be heard throughout the city. I know this because my friend Yael and I had to walk home from the White House. No busses. No taxis. Three miles of car horns, flag waving, long tone shouting and three beat shouting. When we got close to U St., the neighborhood we live in, a new crowd appeared. Another dancing-in-the-streets celebration. The same chants.

The same drums. This election. This historical night. We made history. Yes we did. Yes we did.

Eleanor Graves holds an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University. She was the recipient of the Mary Rinehart Prize for Poetry in 2005 and was awarded a Thesis Fellowship by George Mason University the same year. Her poems have appeared in Phoebe, Practice: New Writing + Art, and in Hayden’s Ferry Review. She has led poetry workshops for young people at the Freer and Sackler Galleries and for grown-ups at the Split this Rock Festival. Eleanor currently leads workshops for the non-profit writing group, Capitol Letters.

Eleanor hopes to get her video online of the
festivities in DC online as soon as she sorts out the technology
issues....

Dear Split This Rockers (hereafter to be designated as victors):

When the news came across the wires that Senator Barack Obama had been elected the 44 The president of the United States I was busy teaching a graduate workshop in nonfiction writing at the University Of Idaho where I had been invited as a kind of smarty pants out of town guest writer. If you know anything about the United States you likely know that Idaho is one of the reddest of the red zones and that only Utah has more Mormon residents. Add Pentecostal groups and John Birchers and various militias and you get the general picture. Rumor has it that my graduate class of ten (most of whom were from somewhere other than Idaho) actually doubled the number of big D or small d Democrats in the state.

I raced back to my hotel along with a troupe of students hoping to get to hear Obama’s victory speech. Oh victors! Have you ever experienced an overdose of shadenfreude? The snug and airless cocktail lounge was filled with sulking and sputtering Republicans, most of them men, all of them pink and large and wearing dark business suits.

Oh victors! How these Munchkins stirred their respective tumblers of Cutty Sark and how they sneered as we tried to turn up the barroom widescreen TV. One of our group challenged them thusly:”We’ve endured 8 years of your leadership you can endure at least 4 years of ours!”

The pink men snickered, went vocal, hissing like snakes. One of them sounded like he had a bolus of crow stuck in his windpipe. They refused to let us hear the speech by hooting and generally carrying on like the contestants on a game show. “I’ll take the gas grill and the Broyhill sofa and I’ll take advertising for fifty!” They babbled and whined in order that those of us who were hoping to hear the most historic acceptance speech in American history would be locked out.

And of course that’s just it. We weren’t locked out at all. We knew ourselves to be part of the most energizing and groundbreaking coalition of voters in U.S. history. We were finally winners after two suspicious national elections.

Oh victors, you can’t overdose on shadenfreude no matter what Aristotle might have said on the subject. Pain in others is one of the elements both of comedy and tragedy but last Tuesday night there in the bar of the Moscow, Idaho Best Western the suffering of the McCain supporters was a clear representation of what it felt like to be out of step with America.

Stephen Kuusisto

Iowa City

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of Only Bread, Only Light, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, and of the memoirs Planet of the Blind and Eavesdropping. He was a featured poet at Split This Rock in 2008. Visit his blog at www.planet-of-the-blind.com

YES WE DID!

After eight years of misery and darkness—change! The Bushes are moving out and none too soon. After a tremendous campaign—Obama won by a landslide. Though we may not agree with all of his policies, we do have great reason to celebrate! On November 3, we brought change, electing the first black president, expanding our notion of what is possible in this country, invigorating democracy. We voted and we cried. If nothing else, we know we are powerful, we know that when we work together we can make a difference.

Our journey doesn't end here. There is so much work to be done just to undo the damage of the last eight years, it will take all of us.

In Washington, DC, the streets on election night were jubilant. I've never experienced anything like it. It was like walking through a Whitman poem—everyone embracing one another in celebration of our expanding democracy. One by one they came, until every street was occupied by chanting joyful people. In front of the White House, pure glee. We were every color, every ethnicity, every age that night and none were strangers!

The next day was more sobering—propositions to deny the rights of same sex couples to marry were passed in several states, including proposition 8 in California. And then began the Obama appointments, which have already disappointed.

For now though—let there be joy. Let our poems break boundaries in their joy.

Something large has changed in our country, how will we put it into words? This is our time to reclaim language. To reclaim community. To reclaim hope. We have work to do. How shall we begin?

Posted by: Melissa, Tuckey, Co-Director, Split This Rock

Remembering Mahmoud Darwish

“’Me or him’

that’s how war starts. But

it ends in an awkward stance:

‘Me and him’”

--from A State of Seige, translated by Fady Joudah, 2002

On Saturday, this past week, the world lost one of its great poets when Mamoud Darwish passed away due to complications following heart surgery in Houston, Texas.

The loss has an extra sting for us here at Split This Rock in that the evening before he died we were joyfully discussing the possibilities for poets to invite to our 2010 Festival and all agreed the first person on our list would be Mahmoud Darwish, and we also agreed that it as central to our mission to include international voices on our stage.

Darwish embodied so much of what it is we admire—a necessary poet, as well as essayist, who put to words—resistance to occupation, the desire of Palestinian people to live as equals in their own country. All the while, Darwish wrote with an attention to craft and a poet’s sensibilities, writing prolifically in a wide range of styles, inventive throughout his life.

Here are some links to obituaries and editorials that have been shared with us:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/middleeast/11darwish.html

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&article_id=94993&categ_id=17

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/11/poetry.israelandthepalestinians

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLB25989

There's also a great video on youtube from AlJazeera. The video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7behEhDSsFU

Darwish is loved throughout the world, only recently coming to the attention of American readers with several excellent translations of his work in the past ten years or so, including most recently, “The Buttrerfly’s Burden,” which includes his recent three books, translated by Palestinian American poet and Yale Younger Prize winner, Fady Joudah.

I first encountered Darwish in an anthology called “This Same Sky” a collection of poems selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. The poem that knocked me out is called “The Prison Cell."
I read it whenever I begin to doubt that poetry can make a difference. Thank you Mahmoud Darwish for this gift and many more!

The Prison Cell

It is possible…

It is possible at least sometimes…

It is possible especially now

To ride a horse

Inside a prison cell

And run away…

It is possible for prison walls

To disappear,

For the cell to become a distant land

Without frontiers:

-What did you do with the walls?

-I gave them back to the rocks.

-And what did you do with the ceiling?

-I turned it into a saddle.

-And your chain?

-I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.

He put an end to my dialogue.

He said he didn’t care for poetry,

And bolted the door of my cell.

He came back to see me

In the morning,

He shouted at me:

-Where did all this water come from?

-I brought it from the Nile.

-And the trees?

-From the orchards of Damascus.

-And the music?

-From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got mad;

He put an end to my dialogue.

He said he didn’t like my poetry,

And bolted the door of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:

-Where did this moon come from?

-From the nights of Baghdad.

-And the wine?

-From the vineyards of Algiers.

-And this freedom?

-From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad…

He begged me to give him back

His freedom.

Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Ben Bennani

Please share a favorite poem or quote from Darwish or a comment about how this poet has had an impact on your life or work. We invite you to post below.