New Labor Journalism

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Poem of the Week: Rashida James-Saadiya

Rain Dance

we scatter
dodge words that rip into flesh
hide from clenched fist

ache in unison
wait and run

full speed into Mother's arms
her body somehow a magic shield
flying us over everything ugly

as she weeps a muted death

the story always ends the same

we hold on

gathered like broken straps

clinging to memories of light

he twirls in circles

eyes arrow sharp

sometimes he screams at God

or simply smiles at our tears

-Rashida James-Saadiya


Used by permission.

Rashida James-Saadiya is an educator, writer and Artistic Director of Crossing Limits, an inter-faith art-centered non-profit supporting social change, progressive literature and creative thinking. In addition she is a founding member and co-editor of Voyages, a quarterly online journal dedicated to Africana Arts and Culture and the idea that knowledge should be shared.

James-Saadiya attended Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2008.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Naomi Shihab Nye to read at the Folger

Naomi Shihab Nye reads at the 2008 Festival.

2008 Split This Rock Featured Poet Naomi Shihab Nye will be reading at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre on Monday April 11 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15.

From the Folger Library Bio: Naomi Shihab Nye’s work provides a spotlight on the everyday and reawakens the beauty in the ordinary. Her books of poetry include A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; You & Yours, a best-selling poetry book of 2006; and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, a finalist for the National Book Award. Other works include What Have You Lost? Honeybee, her collection of poems for young adults, which won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In January 2010 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

At the 2008 Festival March

For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.

For more examples of Naomi's poetry, and how it affects the world, please check out this Weekend Meditation on The Kitchn (the comments are especially worth reading): "Red Brocade"

Also check out "Famous", Naomi's poem chosen for the National Poetry Recitation Contest, Poetry Out Loud.

Can Poetry Heal the Planet? Stephen Levine’s Surreal Dharma Jazz

So, let us welcome Stephen Levine’s return to poetry. Breaking the Drought can also refer to a return to one of humanity’s most ancient of spiritual practices: sacred speech. As such, it’s a link back to a continuity temporarily severed by the Technological Revolution. It is a link we need in order to live in a fragmented world, dislocated by loss of spiritual unity. Meanwhile, with such grounding our collective drought continues, literally and figuratively.

Read the article by Gary Gach in Religion Dispatches here.

Poem of the Week: Rich Villar

Always Here

lacking a proper entrance

into a poem

about Arizona Senate Bill 1070

prompts me instead

to tell you

about the flamboyanes blooming

in Doña Yeya's mouth

every time she speaks

about her children,

or the pasteles that do not

wrap themselves

until blood is offered to the masa,

or the boys she sent to Germany,

who came back headless

and quoting Bible verses

or the girls

with thirteen years of bruises

at the hands of those same boys

who were told asi es la vida

without the slightest sense of irony

who shouldered Nuyorican babies

dutifully to Bayamón

dreaming about a nation

under which they cannot

legally claim citizenship

or parrandas of gold stomping

flat the Jersey snow

forgetting that coquito never meant

cold weather

or the act of forgetting

beneath every aguinaldo,

because civil cafesito

and politics cannot coexist

and we do not question

our birth certificates

unless we are agents of Homeland Security

because we were born American citizens

and as such are eligible to die

at a higher rate

in exchange for houses in Orlando

that we do not own.

There are Puerto Ricans

in Arizona and New York and Nebraska and,

I promise you,

good gente, it makes no difference

if your grandmother conjures

Michoacan or Mayaguez

in her flowered breath, it makes

no difference

if you bless the four winds

or pray to San Juan Bautista,

to those who only see papers

and brown flesh, who cannot

locate your cities on the maps

of conquerors or conquered,

you are a threat,

and if this is the case,

gente, I say,

be a threat. Unquieted,

bloom where you are not permitted

to bloom. Disjointed,

walk anywhere you please, stumble

if you must, but be present.

And when they ask you

where you keep your company,

tell them here, here,

always here.

-Rich Villar

Used by permission.

Rich Villar is the executive director of the Acentos Foundation, a Bronx-based organization fostering audiences for Latino/a poetry in the United States. His poetry and prose have appeared in MiPoesias: The American Cuban Issue, Ocho, Rattapallax, Latino Poetry Review, and the chapbook series Achiote Seeds. He is the fiction editor for The Acentos Review and lives and writes in New Jersey with his wife, poet Tara Betts.

Villar was on the panel Radical Diversity: The Presentation of Poetry as an Agent for Radical Change and was part of the Aqui Estamos: A Sampling of Poetry From the Inaugural Acentos Poetry Festival reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Your Activism Pays Off!

Great news everyone! Today the Washington Post published an article on the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. As many of you know, Split This Rock, in cooperation with local poets, has been leading a letter writing campaign urging the Post to publish more poetry reviews - and it now looks like the effort is making an impact. Details of the campaign are here.

While this is great step, we can't stop now. Be sure to read the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030806408.html

and leave feedback thanking the editors for publishing commentary on this vital art form. While you're at it, keep the pressure on by writing a letter letting the Post know that you want to see more poetry.

Note: to comment on the story, click here and login or register

Thanks so much for your work on this, and lets keep the momentum going!

Poem of the Week: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Prison


Prison is the sinner’s bouquet, house of shredded & torn
................Dear John letters, upended grave of names, moon
................Black kiss of a pistol’s flat side, time blueborn
& threaded into a curse, Lazarus of hustlers, the picayune
Spinning into beatdowns; breath of a thief stilled
................By fluorescent lights, a system of 40 blocks,
................Empty vials, a hand full of purple cranesbills,
Memories of crates suspended from stairs, tied in knots
Around street lamps, the house of unending push-ups,
................Wheelbarrels & walking 20s, the daughters
................Chasing their father’s shadows, sons that upset
The wind with their secrets, the paraphrase of fractured,
................Scarred wings flying through smoke, each wild hour
................Of lockdown, hunger time & the blackened flower.


-Reginald Dwayne Betts

From Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010)

Used by permission.

A Cave Canem Fellow, R. Dwayne Betts is 2010 Soros Justice Fellow and winner of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Debut for his memoir, A Question of Freedom. He has won a Holden Fellowship, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Fellowship. His first collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award given by Alice James Books in 2010. His poetry and essays have been published in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, the Washington Post, the ABA Journal and other national literary magazines, periodicals and newspapers.

Betts attended Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2008.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210