Split This Rock on Poets & Writers Website

Poets & Writers is featuring a quote about the Festival from our report on their funding support on their website until June 15. Just click here: http://www.pw.org/funding and scroll down to the box on the left labeled, "What They're Saying."

Photo of the Week: Melissa Tuckey and Sarah Browning

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Melissa Tuckey and Sarah Browning at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival opening ceremonies.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Poem of the Week: Philip Metres

For the Fifty (Who Formed PEACE With Their Bodies)

In the green beginning,
.……in the morning mist,
………………they emerge from their chrysalis

of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
.………slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
………………necks & tanks, Tommy’s & Salvation

Army, platforms & clogs,
.………abandoning bras and lingerie, labels
……………….& names, courtesies & shames,

the emperor’s rhetoric of defense,
.………laying it down, their child-
……………….stretched or still-taut flesh

giddy in sudden proximity,
.………onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
……………….as if come-hithering

or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
.………the shape of a word yet to come, almost
……………….embarrassing to name: a word

thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
.………of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
……………….they touch to make

the word they want to become:
.………it’s difficult to get the news
……………….from our bodies, yet people die each day

for lack of what is found there:
.………here: the fifty hold, & still
……………….to become a testament, a will,

embody something outside
.………themselves & themselves: the body,
……………….the dreaming disarmed body.


-Philip Metres

Used by permission.

Philip Metres is the author of numerous books, including To See the Earth (poetry, 2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (anthology of peace poems, 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (criticism, 2007). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili.

Metres appeared on the panels "The Peace Shelves: Essential Books and Poems for the 21st Century" and "Documentary Poetics" during 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

Calling All DC-Area Volunteers!

Dear Friends,

Split This Rock is gearing up for our national mailing and we need your help!

Please join us on the evenings of Wednesday June 9th or Thursday 10th (or both!) at 5:30pm for our first mailing party since the 2010 festival.

This is a great chance to meet the staff, other volunteers, and talk poetry and politics - all while helping spread the good word!

What: Split This Rock mailing party
When: Wednesday June 9 and Thursday June 10 5:30-7:30 pm
Where:Institute for Policy Studies 1112 16th St. NW6th Floor Washington, DC 20036
(Red Line: Farragut North, Blue Line: Farragut West)

Please RSVP to info@splitthisrock.org

Snacks and drinks will be provided. (Free beer and wine!) We'd love to see you.

In peace and poetry,
Split This Rock

Revamped XCP webspace!

XCP's webspace has been revamped and the journal will be posting (with some regularity) complete writings and excerpts from the journal's nearly 15 year history of continuous publishing. Thanks, everyone, for continuing to submit work, subscribe, and read the amazing writing that continually fills the pages between the covers of XCP.

http://xcpcrossculturalpoetics.wordpress.com/

Poem of the Week: Remica Bingham

photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths


Final Exam Administration


I enter to find all the students in uniform
occupying a small room.

I hand out pencils and registration forms.
Some begin without orders.

I remind them to remain anonymous
no names, just ID numbers should appear

on the waiting pages, white and clean
as unwritten letters or discharges.

Just a number.....the private
in BCGs and fatigues mumbles

from the back.....that’s all
we are. A number

and a gun......His comrades laugh,
erasing what might have been.

Do your best.....I say,
and they settle, salute.


-Remica L. Bingham

Used by permission.

Remica L. Bingham is currently the Competency Coordinator at Norfolk State University in Norfolk, VA. She earned an MFA from Bennington College and is a Cave Canem fellow. Among other journals, her work has been published in New Letters, Callaloo, and Gulf Coast. Her first book, Conversion, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and was published by Lotus Press. A book of her selected poems, The Seams of Memory, will be translated into Arabic and published in 2010 in conjunction with the Kalima Project.

Bingham appeared on the panel Reclamation, Celebration, Renewal, and Resistance: Black Poets Writing on the Natural World during 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

Split This Rock in Fire and Ink

Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, edited by Francis Payne Adler, Debra Busman and Diana García, is a valuable and vibrant anthology. I will publish a short review of it and other works received at AWP soon, but for now, let me call your attention to the following blurb about Split This Rock in the preface to the anthology:

In 2003, poetsagainstthewar.org drew thousands of poems within days. In 2008, with no end in sight to the war in Iraq, activist poets gathered at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington D.C. They came from across the country, a national network of writers for change, with readings by such poets as Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Carolyn Forché, among others - many of them contributers to this anthology.

As to the question of the taboo against social action writing or "political writing: some writers inhabit a privileged realm that leaves them free to reflect on the perfect hurricane or a new hummingbird's nest. Other writers' realities reflect on the aftermath of the hurricane. It is the need to privilege those alternate or non-mainstream realities now that compels us to name social action writing as a literary movement.