Poem of the Week: Anne Waldman

             

excerpt from Manatee/Humanity 

the aquarium deserted now,

this is the song at dusk I write in the notebook:

strange skin

not quite seal

not quite dolphin

inchoate

texture like

something you forget

something you didn't even see

the first time

old shoe

sentient being with others in watery caves

lights off

with motive & mind up a ladder

mouth moving

quixotic mind

quick flick

who are me

who haunt me

please haunt me

summoned by the dream

the kusha grass instructs

you might say a kind of ceremony

gather up these nightmares

this in a public space

where many minds meet

& pass around the objects of this dream

a blindfold, a crystal, a card with a bodhisattva upon it

gather them up & making an offering

all the bikkus going down on their knees for this

in this world marked out by the augur

interstices between living & dead

an initiation on the nature of time

& of continuity in a dark time

mean world: humanity

dream world: manatee

secret world: om mani padme manatee hum

om mani humanity padme hum

the center of reference becomes movement in this ritual

-Anne Waldman

Used by permission.

From Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Books, 2009)

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and poetics, and an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997). Waldman is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks's Church and she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in NYC, and has recently been involved in projects around the theme of Symbiosis, which studies the interaction between two or more different biological species.

Announcing Split This Rock's 2014 Contest Winners!

   

First Place

"At the Mall, There's a Machine That Tells You if You Are Racist"

Karen Skolfield

Karen Skolfield's book Frost in the Low Areas (2013) won the First Book Award for Poetry from Zone 3 Press. She is the poetry editor for Amherst Live, a quarterly production of poetry, politics, and more, and she's a contributing editor at the literary magazines Tupelo Quarterly and Stirring. Her poems have appeared in Best of the Net Anthology, Cave Wall, Memorious, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, West Branch, and others. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts.  

  

Second Place 

"School of the Americas" 

Rebecca Black

 

 

In 2011, Rebecca Black, was a Fulbright distinguished scholar at the Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  She is the author of Cottonlandia, winner of a Juniper Prize. A former Wallace Stegner and NEA fellow, her poems can be found in Poetry, New England Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, Agni, and many other magazines.  She has taught at several universities, most recently in the MFA Program at UNC-Greensboro. 

 

Third Place

"My Father's Hands"
Alison Roh Park 

 

Photo by: Yoon Kim

 

Alison Roh Park is a Kundiman fellow, Pushcart nominated poet, and recipient of of the PSA New York Chapbook Fellowship, Poets & Writers Magazine Amy Award and Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. She teaches ethnic studies at Hunter College and is founding member of The Good Times Collective of emerging poets writing in the tradition of Lucille Clifton. 

Poem of the Week: Tess Taylor

           

Eighteenth Century Remains

            Albemarle County

The ridge a half mile down from Monticello.

A pit cut deeper than the plow line.

Archaeologists plot the dig by scanning

plantation land mapped field

for carbon, ash, traces of human dwelling.

We stand amid blown cypresses.

Inheritors of absences, we peer

into the five-by-five foot ledge.

Unearthed painstakingly, these shards:

two pipe stems, seeds, three greening buttons.

Centuries-old hearthstones are still charred,

as if the fire is only lately gone.

"Did they collect these buttons to adorn?" But no one knows.

"Did they trade, use them for barter?"

Silence again.

Light, each delicate pipe stem,

something someone smoked at last

against a sill-log wall that passed as home,

a place where someone else collected

wedges of cast-off British willowware.

Between vines, a tenuous cocoon.

A grassy berm that was a road.

A swaying clue

faint as relief at finding something left

of lives held here that now vanish off

like blue smoke plumes I suddenly imagine--

which are not, will not, cannot be enough.

 

-Tess Taylor 

Used by permission.

From The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013)

Tess Taylor's chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America's inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. She reviews poetry for NPR's All Things Considered. In The Forage House, her first full length book, she examines sometimes painful family and national histories -- looking at what such stories contain, and what they leave out. The San Francisco Chronicle called The Forage House "stunning." The Oxford American says, "On their own, the poems are visceral, densely detailed, and frequently playful... Read together, in order, the details are illuminated by context and gain historical sweep." Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She now lives in El Cerrito, California. 

 

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

Poem of the Week: celeste doaks

         

Single Twin Band Crush

--inspired by Joe Millar's Losers and Winners

Aaron and Anita, the first real twins I ever personally knew,

drum majored our ragged band in high school called--

the Marching LaSalle Lions. Anita was the outgoing,

mouthy one, but I was star-struck by Aaron, the brooder.

I adored his strange pink olivey skin--always tan,

even in bitter Midwest winters--and his black spikey hair.

Of course those were the late 80's, and the whole world reeled

from Reaganomics, bad pop icons like Robert Palmer and his red-lipped

dames, and the Challenger crashed down on us like hail pelting

car hoods. Even my parents cautiously skated on the thin ice

of their marriage. No music could change America's forecast then.

But when Aaron coached me on flute, he calmed this confusing

world. He was the one who taught me the crescendos and intermezzos

of John Philip Sousa. As the world stammered on off-beat,

he was the one teaching me delicate rhythms

of quarter & eighths marching on regardless.

-celeste doaks 

  

Used by permission.

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the recipient of a 2012 Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her work has garnered a variety of accolades including the 2009 Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize and the 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship; she has also been awarded residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). Celeste received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2010 and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective(CAAWC). Her poems have been published in multiple on-line and print publications such as Asheville Poetry Review, Obsidian, Beltway Poetry Quarterly,and forthcoming in the new anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Doaks currently teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.

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!

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

January Sunday Kind of Love: celeste doaks & Tess Taylor

8th Anniversary
Sunday Kind of Love
Featuring

celeste doaks &
Tess Taylor 

    

   

Sunday January 19, 2014

5-7pm

Busboys and Poets

2021 14th St. NW
Washington, DC 20009

Hosted by

Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5 online or at the door

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets

& Split This Rock

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the recipient of a 2012 Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her work has garnered a variety of accolades including the 2009 Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize and the 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship; she has also been awarded residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post,Village Voice,Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). Celeste received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2010 and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective(CAAWC). Her poems have been published in multiple on-line and print publications such as Asheville Poetry Review, Obsidian, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and forthcoming in the new anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. Doaks currently teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.

Tess Taylor's chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America's inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. She reviews poetry for NPR's All Things Considered. In The Forage House, her first full length book, she examines sometimes painful family and national histories -- looking at what such stories contain, and what they leave out. The San Francisco Chronicle called The Forage House "stunning." The Oxford American says, "On their own, the poems are visceral, densely detailed, and frequently playful... Read together, in order, the details are illuminated by context and gain historical sweep." Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She now lives in El Cerrito, California.

Poem of the Week: Natalie Diaz

       

Why I Don't Mention Flowers When Conversations with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing

                              flowers home.

--Wislawa Szymborska

In the Kashmir mountains,

my brother shot many men,

blew skulls from brown skins,

dyed white desert sand crimson.

What is there to say to a man

who has traversed such a world,

whose hands and eyes have

betrayed him?

Were there flowers there? I asked.

This is what he told me:

In a village, many men

wrapped a woman in a sheet.

She didn't struggle.

Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.

They laid her in the road

and stoned her.

The first man was her father.

He threw two stones in a row.

Her brother had filled his pockets

with stones on the way there.

The crowd was a hive

of disturbed bees. The volley

of stones against her body

drowned out her moans.

Blood burst through the sheet

like a patch of violets,

a hundred roses in bloom.

-Natalie Diaz

  

Used by permission.

From When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)  

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She was awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, a 2012 Lannan Residency, as well as being awarded a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Mohave Valley, AZ, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.

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!

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

Deadline Extended for 3rd Annual Abortion Rights Poetry Contest

Deadline Extended 

to January 10!

Lighting the Way: The 3rd Annual Abortion Rights Poetry Contest
Sponsored by the Abortion Care Network & Split This Rock

EXTENDED Deadline: January 10, 2014 - Free to enter

The Abortion Care Network (ACN), a national organization of independent providers and prochoice supporters, and Split This Rock (a national group bringing poetry to the public realm) is pleased to announce our third annual poetry contest, to be held in conjunction with ACN's annual meeting in March 2014.

The experience of women who seek abortion and other reproductive services is as varied as the individuals involved. For some, there is safety, relief, and good medical care. For others, there is doubt, harassment, and stigma. For all, health care takes place in a politicized context in which even the most basic choices about our bodies, sexuality, and childbearing can be scrutinized. Reproductive rights are also linked to a whole host of other social issues, such as women's economic status and the accessibility of safe, affordable health care.

ACN and Split This Rock welcome the submission of poems on these themes. We will award the following prizes: First ($100), Second ($75) and Third Place ($50), and Honorable Mention. Judging will done by Split This Rock and ACN.

The first-place winner will be invited to read the winning poem at ACN's annual meeting. The prize-winning poems will be published in the ACN's quarterly newsletter, The Provider, in the conference program distributed to all meeting attendees, and on Split This Rock's website at www.SplitThisRock.org.  Poets from any part of the U.S. may submit poems, but we regret that no travel funds will be provided so that the winning poet may read at the meeting.

Read last year's winning poems here: http://www.abortioncarenetwork.org/news/2013-poetry-contest-winners

Submit Online!

Submission Guidelines:

*  Submit up to 3 poems (6 pages maximum) by midnight, January 6, 2014 via our Submittable site: https://splitthisrock.submittable.com
*  One entry per poet, please.
*  All styles and approaches accepted.
*  Free to enter.
*  Previously published in print is acceptable, but, please, not on the web.
*  Simultaneous submissions accepted. Please withdraw your poem/inform us immediately if the poem has been accepted for publication elsewhere.