Haikus to President Obama Pt. 2

The Egyptians just demonstrated the influence a unified people can have on their government. In our continuing effort to do our part, here are some more selections from our Haikus to the President Campaign:

I think therefore, I
am; a timebomb ticks therefore,
I am a torturer.

- Jim Hayes

Save our butterfly
world and all its blue glory
so we can breath free

- Nancy White

When identity is post-hope
a field charred into coal
a whisper of a bromeliad

- J. Michael Martiez

Power to the people.

Poem of the Week: Yvette Neisser Moreno

SO THIS IS HOW THEY DECIDED TO TAKE HIM

So this is how they decided to take him—
at the end of his life,
his frame shrunken, his wild rambling days over,
his days of bar fights and women over—
they waited until now,
at eighty years old,
when he had no strength to fight—
snatched him off the street,
gagged him and bundled him into a car
with darkened windows.

He, a fifty-year citizen of Mexico,
Spanish rolling off his tongue,
lashing his takers with curses
in their own language.

In the end, they took him like that,
throwing him in the car
like a sack of meat
and finally, after calling his family
and extorting all the money they could—
not much—
after stripping him of every dollar
and every item of value on his body—
they did unto their elder the only thing
they knew how to do well—
they shot him.

--Yvette Neisser Moreno

Used by permission.

Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, Palestine-Israel Journal, The Potomac Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has translated two books of poetry from Spanish—most recently South Pole / Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri (co-translated with Patricia Fisher), which is forthcoming from Settlement House—and is currently seeking a publisher for her first book of original poetry, Grip. She works as a freelance writer/editor specializing in international affairs and social justice, and teaches writing at the University of Maryland University College, The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, Maryland), and Brookside Gardens (Wheaton, Maryland). She will be a featured poet in the Spring issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Moreno is currently leading Split This Rock’s initiative to get more coverage of poetry in the Washington Post Book World and other book reviews. (See our website for how to get involved and write a letter to the editor!) After volunteering at both the 2008 and 2010 festivals, she now serves on the planning committee for the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry 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 post, including this request. Thanks!

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

Haikus to President Obama

During AWP we asked writers who stopped by our booth (315!!) to write a haiku to President Obama. A continuing tradition at Split This Rock, the haikus are a creative and concise way to let the president know how we feel, and to remind him of his obligations to the American people. We had great participation this year, and felt that many of the haikus were simply too good for Obama to keep to himself. So, here are some of the highlights:


First the Russians then
Taliban - statues, people
ruined - now it's us

-Dr. Virginia Gilbert

The world is made of stories
not atom bombs. So we plead:
Find peaceful pathways!

- David Steinhardt

Tatoo on his arm
says "Miranda". Beneath it
the words, "We miss you"

-Daniel Schall

All your pragmatism
won't matter one bit
if we don't speak up

-Urayoan Noel

Photos from AWP: The Floricanto

Thanks to everyone who helped make the Floricanto an amazing success! Nearly 30 poets came together in an inspiring response to unjust immigration policies and racial profiling. Many people have been uploading photos of the event, and we'll try to showcase some of the highlights here.

The Floricanto In Washington: A Multicultural Reading in Response to Arizona SB 1070



In these photos: Francisco X. Alarcón, Rich Villar, Nephtali de León, Martín Espada & Sonia Sanchez

Photo Credit: Susan Deer Cloud & Daniel Sosa

You can find more photos on the Poets Responding to SB1070 Facebook page

February Sunday Kind of Love: Kim Roberts

Join us for a very special Sunday Kind of Love as we celebrate the publication of Kim Roberts's award-winning book of poems, Animal Magnetism. Kim has been central to Split This Rock since Day One, the smartest of advisors. Please join us as we toast her terrific accomplishment! As always, open mic follows.

Sunday Kind of Love

Featuring

Kim Roberts

Sunday February 20, 2011

4-6pm Langston Room - Busboys & Poets
2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC

Hosted by Sarah Browning and Katy Richey
Co-Sponsored by
Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock

Open mic at each event!
Admission free, donations encouraged

For more info: www.BusboysandPoets.com
browning@splitthisrock.org

www.SplitThisRock.org
202-387-POET

Kim Roberts's most recent book, Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), won the 2009 Pearl Prize. She is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and the anthology Full Moon On K. Street: Poems About Washington DC (Plan B Press, 2010). She is the author of two additional books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994), and the nonfiction chapbook Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word in DC (Beltway Editions, 2010).

Roberts has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Letters to the World (Red Hen Press), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel (No Tell Books), and The First Yes: Poems About Communicating (Dryad Press). She has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, France, Brazil, and New Zealand. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin.

Splitista Henry Braun - from Maine to DC to Egypt

THESE DAYS in Egypt....and D.C......and These days the sunlight almost seems total. A few men and women, trees, stand between heaven and earth. In the light of their shadows we others are reading still messages the dead have stopped sending these days of almost fatal sunlight. Henry Braun Verses of mine from the Vietnam war years, published in The Nation when Denise Levertov was poetry editor. I was part of the Split This Rock demo that once recited single antiwar lines in front of the White House. After a day of watching Cairo on the laptop, a day of knowing that the poets are assembling in D.C., not being able to leave our woodstove in the woods of Maine, I had to send you this old "these days" poem. I recite "These Days" on my website www.henrybraun.net

AWP begins today - Visit Blog This Rock all this week for haiku and other updates!

The mass gathering of creative writers known as AWP (8,000 writers in one hotel, all competing to see who has the coolest glasses) converges on DC beginning today. Some folks are trapped by weather and have had to delay their arrival or are waiting to see if they'll get here at all. We are praying to the weather and travel gods to deliver unto our city all stranded writers!

Split This Rock will have a major presence at the conference this year. You can check out our schedule here. The big change is that Split This Rock is a Literary Partner of the conference, bringing high-profile programming in exchange for organizational visibility. We are grateful to AWP and especially this year's conference chair, Francisco Aragon, for giving us this opportunity.

A sign of the times, that AWP is embracing explicitly political organizations and programs? I think so. A quick glance through this year's program shows more panels and readings with social issue content than I've ever seen before. There are Split This Rock's two panels, The Dreams the Dreamers Dreamed: A Tribute to Langston Hughes and Undivided: Poet as Public Citizen, but there's a ton of others. A small sampling, all of these before 1:30 pm on Thursday:

• Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children's Paintings Exhibit
• We(a)ve: Inter-Indigenous Sovereign Poetics
• Writing Human Rights: A Reading by Writers of the Iranian Diaspora.
• From the Home Front: Civilian Poets Writing on War
• If I Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution: A Reading by Six Writers of Political Engagement
• American Poets Respond to Major Global Trauma

I think that Split This Rock has played a role in helping to open up literary space for these kinds of discussions, so rare when I first started going to AWP in 2003. But the times have demanded, too, that writers engage deeply with the world: eight years of Bush and now the fall-out in every area of life - wars and occupations that stagger on with no end in sight, a gaping disparity in wealth (recently named the 8th Wonder of the World by The Onion), corporate America run amok, wreaking lives at every turn. Writers are responding - and none too soon. We'll need all our creativity to get us out of the mess we've created. We look to the Egyptians for inspiration.

Meanwhile, we head to the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel today to set up. We feel like poor relations at the banquet: Because Split This Rock is a Literary Partner this year, AWP kindly gave us a booth. But no one explained that a "booth" is really just a booth space and we'd have to rent the structure that goes inside the booth... So, visit us at #315 and see what creative decorating we come up with.

Other things to do at the booth this year:

• Write a haiku post card to President Obama. We'll post our favorites here on the blog each evening.
• Write a letter to the editors of the Washington Post Book World, urging more reviews of poetry. If you live out of town, pick up our campaign flyer to give you inspiration for writing to your hometown newspaper.
• Meet fabulous Split This Rock poet-activists.
• Sign up for the list serv, to receive Split This Rock's Poems of the Week and get updates on campaigns and the upcoming festival, set for March 22-25, 2012.
• See photos from past festivals.
• Eat chocolate!
• Make fun of our DYI booth decorating skills...

Hope to see you there!

- Sarah Browning