Friday, January 13, 2012
Poem of the Week: Naomi Shihab Nye
The Burn
Such a swift lump rises in the throat when
a uniformed woman spits Throw it away!
and you tremble to comply wondering why
rules of one airport don't match another's,
used to carrying two Ziploc bags not just one
but your pause causes a uniformed man to approach
barking, Is there something you don't understand?
and you stare at him thinking
So many things, refugees marching
from one parched field to another,
rolled packs on their heads,
burn of ancestors smoldering outside stolen homes,
or you could be six again, yelled at on the playground
by a teacher who knew all the bad things you could do.
You're pressing little shampoos and face creams
firmly into a single plastic bag, he could slap you.
Sorry, so sorry, not wanting
to give up seven extra bottles of Bliss brand
lemon & sage soapy soap fresh-foaming shower gel
that you tipped the W houseboy into leaving
so you could pretend you live a Happy Hour life
back home, you hope she takes it out of the trash
when you turn away, obviously she needs a relaxing shower
and a stiff gin and he needs something like a long trip
into a country full of foreign soldiers and we all need
to swallow hard again so the lumps dissolve
and pressure eases and our worlds mingle kindly
and he no longer feels the gun in his back.
-Naomi Shihab Nye
from Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011)
Used by permission.
from Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011)
Used by permission.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011), You & Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), Fuel (1998), and Red Suitcase (1994). Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall prize, and the International Poetry Forum. Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has written books for children and edited several anthologies of prose.
Shihab Nye will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!
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
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Announcing the 2012 Contest Winners!
Split This Rock is thrilled to announce the winners of our fifth annual poetry contest, judged by 2012 featured poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Click on the winner's names below to read their winning poems on our website.Judge's Statement
This judge was dazzled by the subtlety and utter power of the poem "White." Worlds within and behind visible public worlds. Everything we don't see and hear—private, precious pulse of identities.
Reading all the finalists' poems felt like entering a potent kingdom of Mattering—topics/subjects of essential collective care, poems embodying deep witness, speaking up in hard places, not shuddering or seeking popular favor—poems of responsibility and elegantly shaped conviction. It was a gift to read them. They are all winners.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye will be featured at the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. She is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2010 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.
First Place - White by Leona SevickLeona Sevick serves as Associate Provost and faculty member in the department of English at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Maryland and has written extensively on the work of the writer Willa Cather. Her most recent poems appear in Memoir Journal and are forthcoming in Bateau. She writes poems and stories about growing up in an ethnically mixed family in rural America.
Second Place - Làt-Kat by Elizabeth HooverElizabeth Hoover is a poet, critic, and journalist. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, and The Massachusetts, among others. In 2011, she was a resident at the Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts and a nominee for Sundress Publications Best of the Net. She has contributed poetry reviews and author interviews to such publications as The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The Dallas Morning News. She recently completed a biography of Suzanne Collins and is currently working on a biography of Robert Hayden. You can see more of her work at www.ehooverink.com.
Third Place - A constellation of mint by Kevin McLellanKevin McLellan is the author of the chapbook Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: Barrow Street, Colorado Review, failbetter, Horse Less Review, Kenyon Review Online, Versal, Western Humanities Review, Witness and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA with Frankie (a canary), and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at the University of Rhode Island in Providence.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Liberty's Vigil release
FootHills Publishing Releases First International Occupy Movement Anthology Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology:
99 Poets among the 99%
Ninety-nine poets, including 2012 festival featured poet Kathy Engel and a handful of Split This Rock friends: Francisco X. Alarcón, Scott Hightower, M.J Iuppa, and Michael Rothenberg, speak out on behalf of the 99%, encouraging their fellow citizens to join in the effort to end corporate excess and income inequality, and win back the middle-class from corporate titans and their political puppets. Co-editors Karla Linn Merrifield and Dwain Wilder have assembled the first anthology of its type in the world to inspire readers to take action on behalf of the 99%.
We encourage you to check out the Liberty's Vigil blog: http://99poets.blogspot.com for the latest on the project, including readings.
Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99% (128 pages) is available for $20.00 at selected bookstores nationwide – ISBN 978-0-931053-81-8 -- and from FootHills Publishing at www.foothillspublishing.com. FootHills Publishing, celebrating its 26th anniversary this year, is headquartered in Wheeler Hill, N.Y. Michael Czarnecki, publisher, is available at (607) 566-3881.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Poem of the Week: Jose Padua
Take a Giant Step
All the out of business auto body shops
on this slow highway, all the abandoned
buildings with peeling paint, the vacant
lots overgrown with junk trees and weeds
bounded by chain link fences, all the things
we could never fix and threw away, all
the insane metaphors for living, the fake
equation of ideas, the pretty words that
soar today in a shallow heart as wisdom
before giving way to tomorrow's clever
observation, commandment, or list
of the neglected and overrated, and all
the shut ups and neverminds we breed
with our lips because we have never been
upon the verge of either idiocy or genius.
This is not where you belong, alone in this
tiny town without mending, this is not
the long endless line that waits for an exit
out of city sleep, this is not the thick wall
you can't hear through. So go, like everything
that has decayed before us, everything that has
shattered so beautifully, go into that street
like a man crashing a parade with smelly clothes
and dirty skin, go into that building that's on fire
because the sky is full of smoke and you are water.
-Jose Padua
Jose Padua was born in Washington, DC, in 1957. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon.com, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and many other journals and anthologies. His manuscript, Here Comes the Monster, was runner-up for the Many Mountains Moving Poetry Prize. After living in big cities like Washington and New York all his life, he now lives in the small town of Front Royal, Virginia, where he and his wife, the poet Heather Davis, write the blog Shenandoah Breakdown.
Padua will be reading at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012. Join us!
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
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Beltway Poetry Quarterly's FLORICANTO Issue
Read the issue in full:
Volume 13:1, Winter 2012
FLORICANTO ISSUE
INTRODUCTION
Francisco Aragón, Guest Editor
A young man raises his hand.
“How does it feel writing about our country?”
The invited guest tells the story of how he came to poetry.
The country in question: El Salvador. The scene of this exchange: a high school in Washington, DC.
Frazier O’Leary, who has taught and coached for thirty years, has gathered twenty or so of his Cardozo students, most of them natives of this small Central American nation, or the sons and daughters of Salvadoran immigrants. A few weeks earlier they had each been given The Art of Exile by William Archila—also born in El Salvador, who migrated to California in 1980 at the age of twelve. After Archila’s presentation, O’Leary’s students line up to have their books signed, chatter and visit with their new friend.
That spring afternoon, in 2010, poetry became a palpable bridge.
Among those who witnessed what took place in that classroom was Dan Vera, who’d graciously agreed to document the moment with his digital camera—whose poem, “If You Want To Purify America’s Textbooks of Ethnic Studies,” is one of the twenty-six poems you’ll read in this winter issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an issue that aims to embody a similar bridge.
Read the rest of the introduction here.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Poetry by and for the 99%!
Recently we sent out a list of 25 of our favorite poetry books of 2011 (see below). 18 were by people of color; 15 by women. All engage the world in visionary and creative ways.
Compare Split This Rock's list to some by The Other Guys. We were thinking of linking to some of those Guys's lists. But rather than point fingers, we'd prefer to promote the poets we love, the poets who are telling the true story of what it is to be alive today in the United States, in all its variety and beauty and madness and disaster.
If you value this work of amplifying the voices of poets of conscience, please consider a year-end gift to Split This Rock.
Here are four easy ways to give:
Compare Split This Rock's list to some by The Other Guys. We were thinking of linking to some of those Guys's lists. But rather than point fingers, we'd prefer to promote the poets we love, the poets who are telling the true story of what it is to be alive today in the United States, in all its variety and beauty and madness and disaster.
If you value this work of amplifying the voices of poets of conscience, please consider a year-end gift to Split This Rock.
Here are four easy ways to give:
- Give online - Click here to give securely using your credit card.
- Give by mail - Send a check or money order made out to Split This Rock to 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036.
- Register for Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Add a donation when you register for the festival at SplitThisRock.org, helping others who might not otherwise be able to attend.
- Sponsor Split This Rock Poetry Festival - We'll thank and promote your organization or business in the festival program book and on the website. Contact us for details!
Your tax-deductible gift to Split This Rock supports essential voices and movements for change.
In the words of June Jordan, whose life and work we will honor at the festival in March, We are the ones we have been waiting for. Please join with us today.
With gratitude and hopes for peace in 2012,
Split This Rock Team
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