Lend a Hand at Split This Rock 2012!

We're in the final stretch for organizing the 2012 Split This Rock Festival and we need your help to make this work! Please consider volunteering during the Festival from March 22nd to March 25th. Some of the roles for volunteers include:

• Venue Czarina: Set up rooms according to the needs of the session, including posting the correct sign for current session. Check that all attendees have valid festival passes. Answer questions and help guide participants to appropriate rooms. Assist the session coordinator as needed. Ensure that all rules of the venue are observed. A cell phone is required for this position.
  
  
• Register/Check in: Responsible for cash handling/taking credit card info, checking student IDs, coordinating with organizers to hand over cash box when sales close. May help with signups for open mics.
  
  
• Info/Press/T-Shirt sales: Work alongside registration/check-in volunteers, to sell t-shirts and festival publications, hand out press packets/passes, and answer questions as needed. Responsible for cash handling/taking credit card info, coordinating with organizers to hand over cash box when sales close.

We are hosting three brief, fun volunteer training sessions to prepare you for your shifts! This is a great chance to meet our team and fellow poets & organizers. We ask all volunteers to please attend one of the following sessions:

• Thursday, March 8th from 6 - 7pm @ Split This Rock Office, 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600 - Washington, DC 20036
  
• Saturday, March 17th from 10:30 - 11:30 am @ Split This Rock Office
  
• Thursday, March 22nd from 9:30 - 10:30 am @ Thurgood Marshall Center, 1816 12th Street - Washington, DC 20009

If you are coming from out of town and can't make one of these sessions, please let us know. We're happy to accommodate you!

Volunteering has its benefits!

Volunteers who work two or more 2.5 hour shifts will receive a free pass to the festival and a free Split This Rock 2012 t-shirt. Plus you'll meet wonderful, fascinating people and be a part of a movement of poets working for a better world.

To volunteer or for more information, contact our Volunteer Coordinator Kaitie O'Hare at Kaitie.str@gmail.com.

Poem of the Week: Sherwin Bitsui

In a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,

wearing the gloves of this song tightly over closed ears;

the bursting sun presses licks of flame

into our throats swelling with ghost dogs

nibbling on hands that roped off our footprints

keeping what is outside ours tucked

beneath the warmth of their feet cooling to zero,

as they swarm luminous landmines like gnats,

as thunder shakes white sand from wet hair,

as police sirens trickle from water jars onto squash blossoms,

as starlight, opened inside a darkened room,

begins to tell its story from end to beginning . ..................again.

-Sherwin Bitsui

from Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)

Used by permission.

Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two poetry books, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a 2010 PEN Open Book Award and an American Book Award. He is originally from Baa'oogeedí (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation). He is Diné of the Todich'íi'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tł'ízíłání (Many Goats Clan).

Bitsui 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

Michon Boston of Eclectique | 916 Interviews Sarah Browning

E916: How did poetry become so popular in Washington, DC? What makes DC a poetry or a poetic city?

Essex Hemphill

SB: DC has a long and rich poetic tradition, to which we are all the lucky heirs. Walt Whitman spent the Civil War years in the city and the Harlem Renaissance poetry movement was launched here by Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, and others. DC was home to influential Black Arts Movement poets Larry Neal, Gaston Neal, and Amos Zu-Bolton, among many others. Essex Hemphill was the best known Black gay poet of that gorgeous generation tragically lost to AIDS, those who came of age in the 1980s.

It’s no coincidence that most of these poets are African American, of course. Our city’s Black writers and artists have always nurtured and supported one another, developing a strong cultural voice that has been critical to the survival of the District’s Black community.

Today is no different. Older poets mentor younger ones, communities of poetry form and dissolve and re-form. DC becomes a living center for oral poetry – the oldest of poetic forms – newly named “Spoken Word.” The District of course is also home to the federal government, an institution endlessly dissected and analyzed by the press and the popular imagination. Those of us who live here, in contrast, are often forgotten. We claim our place in the world, therefore, with poetry. Here is our story, our poems declare. Pay attention.

Read the full interview here.

Hot Off the Press: Beloit Poetry Journal's 2012 Split This Rock Chapbook

Beloit Poetry Journal

Vol. 62 No.3 - Spring 2012

Split This Rock Chapbook

For over sixty years of continuous publication, the Beloit Poetry Journal has worked to expand American poetic language and vision through its publication of international poetry and of work that challenges social, political, and aesthetic norms.

The Spring 2012 issue of the journal is a chapbook of new poems of provocation and witness by featured readers at the 2012 Split This Rock Festival: Homero Aridjis, Sherwin Bitsui, Kathy Engel, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Douglas Kearney, Khaled Mattawa, Rachel McKibbens, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, José Padua, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kim Roberts, and Venus Thrash. Robert Shetterly's probing portrait of Langston Hughes, from his portrait series Americans Who Tell the Truth, graces the cover. You can currently preview a handful of the poems on the BPJ website.

Order this special issue now from the BPJ website for only $5.00.

The issue will also be available for sale at the festival.

A subscription to the BPJ costs just $18/year (4 issues); student discounts are available for classroom adoption. Visit the BPJ website to order, browse the full-text archive, or join the conversation with poets from the 2012 Split This Rock Chapbook on the Poet's Forum.

Can She Get a Witness? Kyle Dargan Interviews Sarah Browning at Post No Ills

Members of Congress only need to look around the District in which they sometimes live to get a snapshot of that turmoil and struggle to which you refer. D.C. has the greatest income discrepancy of any city of its size in the country. We have the highest HIV infection rate, the shortest life expectancy, the highest adult illiteracy rate. So, we know of what we speak.

But we also have a rich history of struggle, of resistance, often through poetry and the arts. Split This Rock builds on this history, on the shoulders of so many who have written and organized and built community here, from Langston Hughes and Georgia Douglas Johnson to Essex Hemphill and Gaston Neal, to name just a few of our foremothers and fathers. We celebrate this tradition and teach it to one another and to the hundreds who come here for Split This Rock Poetry Festival and our other programs from all over the country.

Read the whole interview here.

Poem of the Week: Kathy Engel

I Will Not

(after June Jordan and Suheir Hammad)

write about the killing of Troy Davis or

the years he claimed innocence so many times

the words fell from his mouth like drops of honey.

Not about the last minutes when he said

may God have mercy on those who do this thing, or

the penultimate breath as he claimed

innocence. I will not talk about the

executioner or the cheering crowds,

the family he left behind, breakfast

unfinished at the table, the excavation of their

daily yearning, each bite of bread a reminder. I

will not speak about innocence or the sound

of his voice through incarceration, the look in his eye,

the shirt he wore the day he was hauled in or the one

he was instructed to wear on any given court day - was

it prison-ironed, plaid, blue? I will not write about

innocence. I want to look back and write about the day

the killing stopped, how we as animals rose

-Kathy Engel


from Liberty's Vigil: The Occupy Anthology
(Foot Hills Publishing, 2012)

Used by permission.

Kathy Engel is the author, most recently, of Ruth's Skirts (IKON) and co-editor, with Kamal Boullata, of We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (Interlink Books). She is an adjunct professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She co-founded MADRE, Riptide Communications, East End Women in Black, Hayground School and Kickass Artists. She teaches at NYU's Tisch School for the Performing Arts and works as a consultant for social change organizations.

Engel 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

Poem of the Week: Carlos Andrés Gómez

"Never Again" (Rwanda poem)

Carlos Andrés Gómez is an award-winning writer and performer from New York City. A former social worker and public school teacher, Gómez has performed at over 200 colleges and universities and toured across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. A star of Spike Lee's #1 movie "INSIDE MAN" and HBO's "RUSSEL SIMMONS PRESENTS DEF POETRY," he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was named Artist of the Year at the 2009 Promoting Outstanding Writers Awards.

Gómez 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