Photo of the Week: Ishle Yi Park

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Featured poet Ishle Yi Park reads at the 2008 Festival.

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Lenelle Moïse

Mud Mothers

the children of haiti
are not mythological
we are starving
or eating salty cakes
made of clay

because in 1804 we felled
our former slave captors
the graceless losers sunk
vindictive yellow
teeth into our forests

what was green is now
dust & everyone knows
trees unleash oxygen
(another humble word
for life)

they took off
with our torn branches
beheaded our future
stuck our breath up on pikes
for all the world to see

we are a living dead example
of what happens to warriors who―
in lieu of fighting for white men’s countries―
dare to fight
for their own lives

during carnival
we could care less
about our bloated empty bellies
where there are voices
we are dancing

where there is vodou
we are horses
where there are drums
we are possessed
with joy & stubborn jamboree

but when the makeshift
trumpet player
runs out of rhythmic breath
the only sound left is guts
grumbling

& we sigh
to remember
that food
& freedom
are not free

is haiti really free
if our babies die starving?
if we cannot write our names
read our rights keep
our leaders in their seats?

can we be free
really? if our mothers are mud? if dead
columbus keeps cursing us
& nothing changes
when we curse back

we are a proud resilient people
though we return to dust daily
salt gray clay with hot black tears
savor snot cakes
over suicide

we are hungry
creative people
sip bits of laughter
when we are thirsty
dance despite

this asthma
called debt
congesting
legendarily liberated
lungs

- Lenelle Moïse

Used by permission.

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Lenelle Moïse hailed “a masterful performer” by GetUnderground.com, is an award-winning "culturally hyphenated pomosexual" poet, playwright and performance artist. She creates jazz-infused, hip-hop bred, politicized texts about Haitian-American identity and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, spirituality and resistance. In addition to featured performances in venues as diverse as the Louisiana Superdome, the United Nations General Assembly Hall and a number of theatres, bookstores, cafes and activist conferences, Lenelle regularly performs her acclaimed autobiographical one-woman show WOMB-WORDS, THIRSTING at colleges across the United States.

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Moïse will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

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

An Appeal from Alfred Corn & Marilyn Hacker

Dear friends of Sam Hamill and Gray Foster, Copper Canyon Press, and Poets Against the War:

You may have heard that Sam and Gray have had some financial reverses lately. Both have also have had recent hospital stays and still need treatment not covered by insurance. Because of impaired hearing, Sam can no longer teach classes. He survives on his pension but has no room for emergency expenses.

We think that their friends will want to help Sam and Gray get through a difficult patch, and that's why we are raising funds in their behalf. No contribution is too small, and the names (though not the amount of donation) will be given in a few weeks to Sam and Gray, along with the total of contributions. Because of the emergency, donations must be received before the end of November. This kind of fund doesn't qualify for tax-exempt status, so we suggest that those for whom this is a concern first determine the amount they would like to donate and then deduct from it the figure they estimate they would save if the contribution were deductible.

Alfred has set up an account for the fund and checks or money orders (in U.S. dollars) should be made out in his name (you can write in on the memo line “for Sam Hamill”) and sent to:

Mr. Alfred Corn
P.O. Box 214
Hopkinton, RI 02833
U.S.A.

This effort is probably best described not as charity but as compensation for unpaid labor involved in the founding and management of Copper Canyon Press and the website Poets Against the War, both extraordinary achievements for which we would like to show gratitude.

Thank you for your interest and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Alfred Corn
Marilyn Hacker

**

And if you're in the Boston area, head on out for a poetry extravaganza tomorrow night in support:

Poetry Reading and Reception

Honoring Sam Hamill

featuring

Kathleen Aguero
Jennifer Barber
Mary Bonino
Bill Corbett
Diana Der-Hovanessian
Jessica Harman
Richard Hoffman
Andrew Hughes
George Kovach
Ruth Lepson
Frannie Lindsay
Fred Marchant
Gary Margolis
Ifeanyi Menkiti
Tomás O’Leary
Mark Pawlak
Katie Peterson
Lloyd Schwartz
Afaa Michael Weaver
Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
Franz Wright
Tom Yuill

Friday, November 20, 7:00 PM
Pierre Menard Gallery
10 Arrow Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge

Vote for Split This Rock

It would only go a little bit of the way toward making up for all the pain Chase and the other huge banks have wrecked in people's lives, but imagine Chase supporting truth-telling poetry. Imagine Chase supporting poetry that calls out the corporate thugs (like Chase) who stole the common wealth. Imagine Chase supporting poetry that celebrates the beauty and dignity of everyday extraordinary lives.

You can make it happen by voting for Split This Rock to receive Chase charitable support! Just click the button above.

Open Letter to President Barack Obama: Moments for Poetic Language in Military Decisions

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington D. C. 20500

Dear President Obama:

Respectfully, I suggest inclusion of poetic language by reading a poem or excerpt in White House discussions regarding military decisions, particularly now about Afghanistan .

The poetic language takes people past the generic abstractness of numbers—40,000 troops contemplated for Afghanistan , for example—to awareness about every single one of these troops. The tragic beauty of the poetic language provides a compelling visual of a battle scene and what happens to the individual serviceperson.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow moves us when he writes about a young Civil War soldier, “Killed at the Ford,” in the first stanza:


Killed at the Ford

He is dead, the beautiful youth,

The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,

He, the life and light of us all,

Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,

Whom all eyes followed with one consent,

The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,

Hushed all murmurs of discontent.


In “Anthem for Doomed Youth” the poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action at age 25, November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice, asks…

What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle…

We have abundant resources for appropriate and moving language about war: Matthew Arnold’s “ Dover Beach ,” Carl Sandburg’s “Wars” and Herman Melville’s considerable poetry about the Civil War. In “ Gettysburg ,” Melville tells us “The evening sun/ Died on the face of each lifeless one.”

There is the informing those who survive like the parents being called to the porch in Walt Whitman’s “Come Up from the Fields Father,” which could be a national memorial poem:


Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

...

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come Father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away


Open the envelope quickly,

O this is not our son’s writing…

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

…While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead…

I am inspired to make this appeal, Mr. President, by your having revived the tradition of a poet writing and reading a poem at the Inauguration.

Thank you for your consideration of this suggestion.

Sincerely,


Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr

Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr. is the First Poet Laureate of Nassau County, New York 2007-09.

Poem-of-the-Week: Allison Hedge Coke

America, I Sing Back

for Phil Young, my father, Robert Hedge Coke, Whitman, and Hughes

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.
Sing back the moment you cherished breath.
Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.

Oh, before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep,
held her cradleboard, wept her into day.
My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery,
held her severed cord beautifully beaded.

My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps,

nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong.
My song comforted her as she battled my reason

broke my long held footing sure, as any child might do.

Lo, as she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself,
as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall.

My blood veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries
circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine.

Oh, but here I am, here I am, here, I remain high on each and every peak,
carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing—

and sing again I will, as I have always done.

Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing

the stoic face, polite repose, polite, while dancing deep inside, polite
Mother of her world. Sister of myself.

When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle.
Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light,

day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision—

Then, she will make herself over. My song will make it so

When she grows far past her self-considered purpose,
I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh, I will—I do.

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.

-Allison Hedge Coke

Used by permission.

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Allison Hedge Coke holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, and directs the Reynolds Reading Series & Honoring the Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Tribute Retreat. She has authored five books including the American Book Award winning volume Dog Road Woman and the Wordcraft Writer of the Year for Poetry volume Off-Season City Pipe, both from Coffee House Press. Hedge Coke came of age cropping tobacco and working fields, waters, and factories.
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Hedge Coke will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism - four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

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

Interview with Fady Joudah

The Writer's Center and Split This Rock Present: Thursday Night Live

In connection with Thursday's Poetry Discussion of The Earth In the Attic, I interviewed Fady Joudah about his work. The following is an excerpt from the Writer's Center interview. The full interview can be found here.

KH: Your work as a doctor shows up in the content of your work. Other than providing material, how do medicine, or science in general, and poetry intersect for you? What comes of those intersections?

FJ: The language of medicine, with its Greek and Latin obsessions, is fascinating. It was also quite metaphorical in its nascent days, in the 18th century for example; even if it likes to denounce that flowery lexicon and pretend a kind of certain specificity, it was originally bound to metaphor and translation in order to achieve a sense or illusion of inevitability, of objectivity, of truth. In that manner it resembles many aspects of poetry. Of course medicine is far more utilitarian than poetry is. Still medicine is a window into the dialogue between power and knowledge, and the politics of knowledge, from which poetry is not exempt. I think Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic or Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor are each a case-in-point.

Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her foreword as, “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession ... have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” He is the winner of the 2008 Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish collected in The Butterfly’s Burden, published in a bilingual edition by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and by Copper Canyon Press in the US. The US edition was short-listed for PEN America’s poetry in translation award in 2009. His most recent translation is of If I Were Another: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). He was a field member of Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005.

Katherine Howell is a poet, the Communication and Development Assistant for Split This Rock, and a Lecturer in Writing at the George Washington University. She lives, writes, and teaches in Washington, D.C. You can read her reviews of Split This Rock featured poets here.

Yvette Neisser Moreno will lead the discussion on Thursday, November 19. She is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her translation (from Spanish) of Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications earlier this year. In addition to working as a professional writer/editor, Moreno teaches poetry and translation at The Writer’s Center and has taught poetry in public schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.