Poem of the Week: Jaime Lee Jarvis

Aral

"Forty years ago, Muynak was a busy fishing port ... Today the waters have receded so much that there is not a drop as far as the eye can see. ... Cancers, lung disease and infant mortality are 30 times higher than they used to be ... The children of Muynak have made a playground out of the wrecks of ships ..." -BBC News, March 16, 2000

Was it the rush of words in that language
we understood only when we cocked our heads,
speaking on the slant, slurring our way
through the grammar of another way of life?

Was it the whirr of metal shards the ragged
children hucked at our heads
the way they delivered their greeting

hellofuckyou

obscenity blunted by effervescence but
still bearing that cutting edge?

Was it the slow groan of the abandoned barges
that sheltered them, crumbling through
geologic time, salted and sharp-jointed
like the people living among them --their desiccated hope?

Or the whoosh of power as we hurled
words back at them in their own language,
mouths stretching and puckering to make
the sounds they sang? Our speech waxed formal
and the children

armed to their rotten teeth with the remnants
of a fishing industry--brandishing scythes torn
from the rotten hulls--laughed at the village accents
we'd worked so hard to own.

Maybe it was knowing
they were doomed

to die from the inside out,
that their empty sea was brimming with
what had already killed them.

Maybe it was the shimmer in the distance,
the heat shining like water, mocking us
with what we had come to see, mocking us
with what we would never learn to see.

-Jaime Lee Jarvis

Used by permission.

Jaime Lee Jarvis is a professional editor, trained technical writer, and environmental activist. She visited the ship graveyard in the town of Muynak in 1999, when she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan. A decade later, news about the ongoing ecological disaster and human tragedy surrounding the shrinking Aral Sea has largely disappeared from public view.
Jarvis was volunteer coordinator for the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008, and now serves on Split This Rock's board.

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Poem of the Week: JoAnne Growney

Mitigation of Toxins


A stand of poplars is a self-assembling
solar-powered pump-and-treat
ground-water protection system.
Brake ferns filter arsenic from soil;
Indian mustard drinks up lead.
Sunflowers shrink strontium levels.

........An uncommon man, an occasional woman,
........buffer the malice of others, keep
........the rest of us from tilting the world.

Phytostablization,
phytoextraction,
rhizofiltration,

.........civilization.

-JoAnne Growney

"Mitigation of Toxins" first appeared in Innisfree and may now be found in Growney's collection, Red Has No Reason, (Plain View Press, 2010).

Used by permission.

JoAnne Growney grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. After a first career in mathematics, she returned to poetry. Her most recent collection is Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010). Growney promotes math-poetry connections and climate concerns in her blog at http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com. She teaches an ongoing poetry workshop at a neighborhood wellness and recovery drop-in center.

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

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Afflict the Comfortable: Martin Espada at the Poetry Foundation

Kevin Canfield interviews Martín Espada at The Poetry Foundation. An excerpt follows. For the full text, click here:

In a sense, this anecdote encapsulates Espada’s poetry career. Over the course of almost 20 collections of poetry, essays and translations, Espada—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2006 collection The Republic of Poetry—has proved to be the voice of the underdog, a resourceful writer motivated by both personal and political concerns.

“In many of my poems that go beyond the law, I see myself as an advocate, speaking on behalf of those who don’t have an opportunity to be heard,” he says, from his home in Amherst. “Whereas this is a somewhat controversial position to take in the poetry world, in the world I come from as an attorney it was a very natural thing to do.”

Split This Rock Poem of the Week: Mark Doty's "Charlie Howard's Descent"

Dear Friends,

Split This Rock mourns the gay and lesbian young people who committed suicide in the past weeks: Justin Aaberg, Asher Brown, Raymond Chase, Tyler Clementi, Aiyisha Hassan, Billy Lucas, and Seth Walsh. Their deaths demonstrate again the power of words. Words can destroy.

But they can also restore, give hope, remind us of our common humanity. We are privileged to be able to share with you this week Mark Doty's poem "Charlie Howard's Descent," which he read so movingly at the inaugural Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008. Charlie Howard's murder took place in 1984. Sadly, we still need this poem now more than ever. Please send it to everyone you know as a call for an end to hate, an end to bullying, a call for a full and rich life for every precious young person.

In peace and poetry,

Split This Rock

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit our blog archive.

Please repost this poem widely but we ask that you include the publication credit and festival information listed after the poem. Thanks!

Charlie Howard’s Descent

Between the bridge and the river
he falls through
a huge portion of night;
it is not as if falling

is something new. Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known. What others wanted

opened like an abyss: the laughing
stock-clerks at the grocery, women
at the luncheonette amused by his gestures.
What could he do, live

with one hand tied
behind his back? So he began to fall
into the star-faced section
of night between the trestle

and the water because he could not meet
a little town's demands,
and his earrings shone and his wrists
were as limp as they were.

I imagine he took the insults in
and made of them a place to live;
we learn to use the names
because they are there,

familiar furniture: faggot
was the bed he slept in, hard
and white, but simple somehow,
queer something sharp

but finally useful, a tool,
all the jokes a chair,
stiff-backed to keep the spine straight,
a table, a lamp. And because

he's fallen for twenty-three years,
despite whatever awkwardness
his flailing arms and legs assume
he is beautiful

and like any good diver
has only an edge of fear
he transforms into grace.
Or else he is not afraid,

and in this way climbs back
up the ladder of his fall,
out of the river into the arms
of the three teenage boys

who hurled him from the edge -
really boys now, afraid,
their fathers' cars shivering behind them,
headlights on - and tells them

it's all right, that he knows
they didn't believe him
when he said he couldn't swim,
and blesses his killers

in the way that only the dead
can afford to forgive.

- Mark Doty

Used by permission.

Mark Doty's FIRE TO FIRE: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry. He teaches at Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

Doty was featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2008, when he read "Charlie Howard's Descent." You can watch video of that reading here.

Poem of the Week: Sonja de Vries

Illegal Borders

a scar starting below his

cheekbone ran down the length

of his face like a road map,

disappeared under his

chin and into his uniform

and my mouth - treacherous

flesh - wanted to kiss the top

of his scar, follow it down,

unbutton his starched shirt to see

where it would lead, but my mind -

that loyal sergeant -

kept me walking, passport open,

my lips moving in prayer.

-Sonja de Vries

Used by permission.

Sonja de Vries is a Kentucky-born writer, filmmaker, and queer social justice activist. She believes that art is integral to creating a deep and lasting transformation of society. She was raised by a powerful radical, activist mother and grandmother. The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmet, Gabriela Mistral and others formed her consciousness and continue to inspire her. De Vries's first book Planting A Garden In Baghdad will be released by Finishing Line Press in January 2011.

de Vries was the third place winner of the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Contest and attended the 2010 festival.

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

Poem of the Week: Holly Bass

The Furious Dance

an occasional poem in celebration of Alice Walker and her book of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

October 2, 2010 (presented with tap dancer Melissa Frakman)

Photo Credit: McKenzie Johnson

What is a furious dance?

It is not polite.

Does not shuck and jive or shuffle along.

It is not beige.

It is bold. In your face. Ready for revolution.

A solidarity of the body. A rhetoric of rhythm.

A furious dance is the knowing

that despite the opposition's best efforts

to suppress, deny, destroy

we will shake off your oppression

and stamp it into dust

with our furiously dancing feet.

Are you furious

in your peacemaking, in your pleasure making,

your life giving and living? Do you dance the sun up

and give thanks each day?

We must be furious, like our sister Alice

Her words cut through

all the tepid tea parties, the sleight

of hand and misdirection of

pundits, politicos and profit mongers

She speaks truth, sings peace

in her garden of words

fingers coaxing nourishment

from the earth's fertile being

Alice

The eighth and last child of

Willie Lee Walker and

Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker

royalty of "the rural peasantry"

from red clay Georgia

this Daughter, Sister, Mother

Bearer of magic talismans:

a suitcase, a sewing machine,

a typewriter

Walker

She who make inroads

from dirt roads

Who cuts new paths

wherever her feet take her

Spelman to Sarah Lawrence

New York City to Mississippi

Gaza and Washington, DC

Poet, novelist, essayist, anthologist

editor, educator, activist

water-bearer

prophetess

sending us in search

of our mothers' gardens

only to discover that We

are the ones we have

been waiting for

We praise her for teaching

a generation of women the difference

between lavender and purple,

between feminist and womanist

for reclaiming our heroine

Zora Neale Hurston

and returning her arrow-sharp words

to their rightful position

Alice Walker has given us more

than four decades of catalytic language

beginning with a book of poems in 1967

Once

gathering into the global phenomenon

that is The Color Purple

and arriving some thirty books later here

to Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

Require is a word of urgency,

any-means-necessary

That is to say, this is not optional, people

this is a call to action,

to march, to shout, to protest, to love

to dance and dance furiously

our collective humanity.

-Holly Bass

Used by permission.

Holly Bass is a poet and performer. A Cave Canem fellow, her poems have appeared in Callaloo, nocturnes (re)view, Role Call, Beltway and The Ringing Ear, an anthology of Black Southern poetry.

Bass, Poet-in-Residence at the 5th & K Busboys and Poets, was a featured reader for the opening night of 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

In Case You Missed It: Poets and Artists Interviews Tiffany Higgins

In the Fall 2010 issue of Poets and Artists, a wonderful online magazine, poet and critic Michael Parker interviews 2010 Festival participant Tiffany Higgins. Her book is called and Aeneas stares into her helmet, and was published in 2009 from Carolina Wren Press.