Split This Rock Supports One Nation Working Together Rally

By: Carmen Calatayud

Photo credit: Jim Hayes
Split This Rock poets and friends gathered on Saturday morning, Oct. 2^nd, to march and show their support for the One Nation Working Together rally on the Washington Mall. One Nation Working Together inspired thousands of like-minded organizations and citizens to attend DC’s rally in a quest for jobs, justice and peace.

Together, a Split This Rock crew, draped with signs created the night before, made its way from 14^th and Constitution Streets, NW to the Lincoln Memorial for the 12 noon rally. Here are some of the lines of poetry we wore:

Many men died—although we know the fate
Of none, nor of anyone, and the war
Goes on,.................................................................Photo credit: Carmen Calatayud
and the moon in the breast of man is cold.
-- John Berryman

My son smells of peace when I lean over him. It isn't just the soap.
Everybody was once the child with the smell of peace.
-- Yehuda Amichai, Israeli Poet

Ravaged animals
creep, bleeding,
from the once-green world.
-- Ellen Wise

things sometimes work as they were meant,
like the torturer who finally can’t sleep

-Bruce Weigl

Photo credit: Carmen Calatayud
Split This Rock poets passed out poems with information about Split This Rock and its festival, met kind and hard-working advocates for justice along the way, and ended the afternoon of speeches with five poets reading poems on Free Speech TV.

The One Nation Working Together movement includes human and civil rights organizations, unions and trade associations, nonprofit organizations, youth and student groups, religious and other faith groups, educational, peace, environmental, and ethnic associations, and other groups and individuals who are committed to uniting our country for the good of all of its people.

Split This Rock was proud to bring a poetic voice to the call for justice on the Mall.

Photo credit: Carmen Calatayud

Photo credit: Jim Hayes

Photo credit: Carmen Calatayud

Poem of the Week: Jeff Gundy

A Day at the Pond Without Geese A good day for late wildflowers--daisies and burrs leaned out into the path for a better view, brilliant blue somethings with tiny blooms on tall stalks. A good day for a young dog's yapping, the splish of a muskrat, thin gold of poplar leaves screening the low sun. At the end of a lush summer, not much has changed. The latest suicide bomber was nearly done with law school. The enemy shot her brother. Afterwards her head was found on the floor of the restaurant in Haifa, black hair still flowing. Like most men in such times, I want to give advice. The pond is pretty in its small way, trees still green, a bank of cattails, water echoing blurry greens and sky, for once no geese to harry and complicate things. Two quiet wrens, that dog yelping stupidly, and a crow way off to the east. Like most men, I think I'm smarter than most men. I dream of women even when I'm awake. If I sit long enough, the trees or the water will surely tell me something. A woman passes, explaining to her cell phone as she walks. As far as I can see, everything is calm as Eden. Her black hair, flowing like the night. - Jeff Gundy From Spoken among the Trees (Akron, 2007). Used by permission. Jeff Gundy's eight books of poetry and prose include Spoken among the Trees (Akron, 2007), Deerflies (WordTech Editions, 2004), and Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye (SUNY, 2003). He teaches at Bluffton University, and was a 2008 Fulbright lecturer in American Studies at the University of Salzburg. Gundy appeared on the panel "The Peace Shelves: Essential Books and Poems for the 21st Century" 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

Fanny Howe Reading at Georgetown September 29

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice invites you to attend
A Poetry Reading by Fanny Howe, Lannan Chair in Poetry 2010-2012
Wednesday, September 29th at 8:00 p.m.
Georgetown University, McCarthy Hall, McShain Lounge
Followed by a book-signing and reception
in the new Lannan Center, 406-408 New North
in celebration of its opening

For more info: ct333@georgetown.edu

Campus map here: http://maps.georgetown.edu/

Mark Nowak: A Tale of Two Book Festivals

The following is an excerpt from a blog post by 2010 Featured Poet Mark Nowak. For the full post, click here.

These were precisely the types of events that I imagined for “Poetry,” and for myself as “Poet,” more than a decade ago. Back then, I wanted to push beyond what felt (to me) like overly constricted, delimited spaces and audiences for the reception of Poetry (I’ll stop with the quotes, but they are still there in the shadows behind the word). So I started curating events at UAW Local 879 at the Ford plant in St. Paul, organizing “poetry dialogues” between Ford workers in Minnesota and South Africa (and with AFSCME 3800 clerical workers, Somali nurses, and other unions and workers’ groups). And my collaboration with SEIU 32BJ in Fairfax and my dialogue on “The Cost of Coal” at the Radical Bookfair Pavilion are just two more examples of that trajectory of work. For me, “This is what Poetry looks like,” indeed.

Split This Rock Poem of the Week: Celebrating 50 Weeks with Kenneth Carroll

Dear Friends,

This week we celebrate 50 weeks of Split This Rock Poem of the Week! For the past 50 weeks, the poems have come to your Inbox, showcasing the voices of tomorrow, the poets who are telling the true story of our lives, the complexity, the fear, the despair, the determination, the vision of another world, just at the edge of the horizon.

And the 50 poems have flown around the world, thanks to all of you, to those who are hungry for these essential voices. Please keep forwarding them widely - including to all your friends and colleagues and family members who you think aren't inclined to read contemporary poetry - especially to them!

To mark this special week, we are happy to feature DC native Kenneth Carroll and his poem "A People's Historian" - a tribute to Howard Zinn. In it, he asks, "who speaks of our triumphs, of how we/altered the course of a raging river of oppression/how we turned our love for each other into a/garrison of righteous rebellion"? Howard Zinn, of course, but also the poets we have featured in Poem of the Week, all the poets "root(ing) around the muck of history" for truth, for the beauty and the difficulty that will help us find our way forward. We salute them all and invite you to forward this email widely, to share the good word. (Just be sure to include all the info about the poet and Split This Rock. Thanks!)

To read past poems of the week, visit the blog archive. In peace and poetry,Split This Rock

A People’s Historian

For Howard Zinn

who will come to tell us what we know
that the king’s clothes are soiled with
the history of our blood and sweat

who memorializes us when we have been vanquished
who recounts our moments of resistance, explicates
our struggles, sings of our sacrifices to those
unable to hear our song

who speaks of our triumphs, of how we
altered the course of a raging river of oppression
how we turned our love for each other into a
garrison of righteous rebellion

who shows us even in failure, when we
have been less than large, when our own
prejudices have been turned against us like
stolen weapons

who walks among us, willing to tell the truth
about the monster of lies, an eclipse that casts
a shadow dark enough to cover centuries

what manner of man, of woman, of truth teller
roots around the muck of history, the word covered
in the mud of denial, the mythology of the conquerors

let them be Zinn, let them sing to the people of history
let their song come slowly, on the periphery of canon
of history departments owned by corporate prevaricators

let their song be sung in small circles, furtive meetings
lonely readers, underground and under siege
their song, the seed crushed to earth, and growing
now a tree, with fruit, multiplying truth.

Used by permission.

Kenneth Carroll is a native Washingtonian. His poetry, short stories, essays, and plays have appeared in Black Literature Forum, In Search Of Color Everywhere, Bum Rush The Page, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. His book of poetry, So What: For The White Dude Who Said This Ain't Poetry, was published in 1997 by Bunny & The Crocodile Press. He is executive director of DC WritersCorps and past president of the African American Writers Guild. He received a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and received the Mayor's Arts Award for Service to the Arts. He was named one of WETA's Hometown Heroes in 2004. Carroll was a featured poet at the inaugural Split This Rock Poetry Festival in March, 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

http://www.splitthisrock.org/

info@splitthisrock.org

202-787-5210

Fall for the Book Writers on Sodexo Workers

Letter to the GMU community

The following excerpt comes from Mark Nowak's blog, Coal Mountain, and concerns the reaction of Fall for the Book writers to the allegations of unsafe work environments by Sodexo workers at George Mason University. For the full article, click here.

Nowak is the author of, “Coal Mountain Elementary” (2009) and a distinguished writer of “labor poetics.” As a former fast food employee and current writer and researcher of labor issues, Nowak also felt the decision to join with Sodexo was an easy one.
“Throughout my entire high school and undergraduate career, I worked between 30 and 40 hours per week at a Wendy’s in Buffalo, N.Y., so I have quite extensive knowledge about working conditions in the industry,” Nowak said when reached by email Saturday afternoon.
“What is happening to the Sodexo workers is so intimately a part of my personal history and my own research and writing that I can’t imagine doing anything but supporting these workers,” Nowak continued.
As part of his involvement in this year’s festival, Nowak is scheduled to give a talk on “Occupational Folklore” and he expects the Sodexo worker’s situation to be part of his discussion.

Poems for Peace by Philip Metres

In this Poetry Foundation article, Philip Metres, who was part of a panel called “Peace Shelves” at Split This Rock this year, talks about the challenges of compiling a peace canon of poetry (as opposed to merely anti-war). For the full article, click here.

How to imagine peace, how to make peace? In our conversations on the Peace Shelf, three general subcategories emerged, though these were full of overlap and contradiction: Sorrows, Resistance, and Alternative Visions. It’s simple enough: we need to witness and chronicle the horrors of war, we need to resist and find models of resistance, and we need to imagine and build another world. Even if modern poetry has been marked by a resistance to the glorification of war, vividly shown by the World War I soldier poets and many others, the important work of poetic dissent has been, too often, via negativa—resistance to the dominant narrative, rather than offering another way.