Volunteer Parties for Split This Rock

Split This Rock will have two volunteer parties leading up to the March 10-13th Festival: one on Thursday, February 25th and the other on Friday, March 5th. If you'd like to assist with what promises to be another life-changing event, please attend and sign up for a shift or two during the Festival. There will be refreshments, poetry, and, as always, good energy!

You can help with several things--staffing tables at each venue, helping with set-up and break-down at the end of the day; assisting attendees with disabilities; selling materials, refreshments, registration, etc.

In exchange for your generous service, you will be offered a free day pass per shift you work for the Festival.

Please RSVP if you can by e-mailing Program Associate Abdul Ali at ali at splitthisrock dot org or 202.787.5210. If you don't know if you can make it until last minute, feel free to show up anyway!

And if you can't make it to a party, but would like to volunteer, please e-mail Abdul at ali at splitthisrock dot org .

Last but not least, don't forget to register! Early-bird registration ends on Saturday February 20th. Register now to take advantage of the discount!

Video of the Howard Zinn Tribute at Busboys!

Click here to watch a video of the Zinn tribute at Busboys and Poets.

Poem-of-the-Week: Cornelius Eady

Manchild
............FOR BELL HOOKS

A warning one white friend hisses
To the one standing nearest to me
At an Upper West Side newsstand.
As if my ears
Could not cradle human speech.

This is the birth of a regret:
My surprise of the woman on my right
As I reach to buy a paper.
How her
Where? becomes an Oh.
How they grin,
I am a close call, how they grin,
Pickpocket my ease,
How they
Grin, then push off down the street.
Now I have the rest of Saturday.

Who will touch my hand,
Who will take my quarters,
These clots of syntax
Growing cold in the blush of my palm?

-Cornelius Eady

From Hardheaded Weather (Marian Wood/Putnam, 2008). Used by permission.

Cornelius Eady is co-founder (with Toi Derricote) of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets, and Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program 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. Eady’s latest book of poems, Hardheaded Weather (Marian Wood/Putnam, 2008), was nominated for a 2008 NAACP Image Award.
….
Eady 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!

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

Photo of the Week: Sonia Sanchez

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Featured Poet Sonia Sanchez reads at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Celebrating Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

- Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

E. Ethelbert Miller's 1 Question Interview with Jan Beatty

The Little e-Note is 2008 featured poet and Split This Rock Advisory Board Member E. Ethelbert Miller's blog. The following is his 1 Question Interview with Jan Beatty, 2010 Split This Rock featured poet, and author of Red Sugar. Reposted with permission.

THE QUESTION: What are the politics behind the sex in your poetry?

I’m writing poems about eating the world, about stripping off the easy—down to the metal inside us. I’m writing the inside of the body as the ultimate domestic space. I’m writing a football field, what football is: it’s the hitting, the loving the game, the brutality and the intimacy of my body against yours. I’m writing poems to other writers, poems to musicians who drive me: George Clinton walking through Houston, the restaurant he’s in, the black history there that’s now a gated community—I’m continuing this: after the narrowing, the map & the rope, I cross the lake into view. What comes after the lake of the body? I want Frankie Lymon, P-Funk, and Spanka-Vision. I’m writing the stripping of easy moves, the familiar, a moving into, inside of the new thing seen: what is it? It feels like landscape, not machine, but land, sky, view—organic, not man-made. The long view, seeing far. I’m writing life, the integration of movement, pressure, hydraulics—rather than either/or—manic or relaxed. I’m finding a place, a speed I can live with, but still, always, time away for big sky. I’m writing the big, radiant failures, the tower falling, the new world. The muscle car and the body inside. I’m writing the vast, lonely spaces of the American West that tattoo me, fill my empty spaces. I’m writing poems to send out, poems to publish, I’m stuck in the Charlotte airport. I’m writing the airport trash talk with the construction workers there. The sex is the politics in my poems. It’s the speaking it, bold & varied in its representations. It’s about putting the body in, putting the body of a woman on the page, but writing it complicated: in a range of voices, with different looks and levels of intensity. With cunts and deep voices and vulnerabilities. It’s political in that a woman is writing a woman on the page, and she’s sexual, alive, not always sweet—in fact, rarely sweet and nice. She’s brought out her tools and she’s butch and she’s building new worlds on the page.

The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing: Updated!

The following is an excerpt of a review of The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing by Caroline Malone at the Monserrat Review. You can read the complete review here.

In the anthology’s title poem, “The Call,” by Calder Lowe, the mundane sound of a train whistle transports the speaker back three centuries to the landscape of her ancestors” – glass blowers in the Black Forest, kin carrying Lafayette “off the battlefield”, the Von Eberhardt’s glowing furnaces – where fragments of history lead her back to the recent past. Her ancestors’ craft sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, glass being a difficult medium with which to work. The speaker imagines “Some of the goblets flower, some crack.” The church bells that end stanza one are then heard at the end of the poem where the immediate past is recalled in which a single mother abandons her children, her son left at “an orphanage / tucked behind the spire of a Presbyterian Church,” her creations left behind. The speaker carries her history as part of her identity, and one sound, the whistle of the train, collapses the divisions of time allowing the speaker to connect with the past.

The writers represented in The Call are summoned to memory and respond with a wide palette of voices to bear witness to the lives of extraordinary ordinary women: daughters, granddaughters, mothers, lovers, caretakers, sisters, adolescents who celebrate life.

CONTRIBUTORS include:

Cynthia Benson, Grace Cavalieri, K.E. Copeland, Carolyn Dille, Sharon Doyle, Jean Emerson,
Blanca Espinosa, Anne Gelhaus, Cynthia W. Gentry, Lara Gularte, Parthenia M. Hicks, Kathie Isaac-Luke, Calder Lowe, Margaret Luongo, Patricia McKeown, B.L.P. Simmons, Mary Lou Taylor, and Roberta Young

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