Split This Rock 2018 Festival Press Coverage Round-Up!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been just a few weeks since Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018. We are so moved by the outpouring of love, unity, and meaningful conversation that occurred at the festival and has continued in the weeks after. Split This Rock is grateful to stay in conversation with you all as we work toward liberation together.

Have you written about Split This Rock Poetry Festival? Let us know by emailing info@splitthisrock.org.

Below is what attendees, presenters, and media are saying about this year’s Festival. All photos by Kristin Adair.

Special features from Festival sponsor Poetry Magazine

The editors at the Poetry Magazine Podcast discussed a few of the Featured Poets’ poems, Paul Tran’s poem “Scientific Method, Elizabeth Acevedo's “Iron”, Solmaz Sharif's “The End of Exile”, Ilya Kaminsky's “Search Patrols”, and Camille T. Dungy's "Frequently Asked Questions: 10".

Festival Preview Coverage

The Festival led the Washington City Paper’s Critic’s Pick for the weekend, with Alexa Mills encouraging DC residents to check out the Festival: “If you’re looking for some clarity in the chaos, turn to the poets.” Features a great photo of D.C. poet and 2018 Festival feature Elizabeth Acevedo!

In anticipation of the festival, Kathi Wolfe from The Washington Blade underscored the event’s importance to communities speaking truth to power. The article declares, “Poetry isn’t an elite, ethereal art form. It’s as essential as food, water or having enough air to breathe." Then goes on to quote Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning, "Poets have always challenged the powerful and told the suppressed stories of those with little power, which is why our words are on the lips of revolutionaries and why tyrants don’t much like us.” The Poetry Foundation later picked up The Blade’s story on The Harriet Blog, congratulating Split This Rock on our 10th anniversary!

Over on Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary, Executive Director Sarah Browning and 2018 DC Youth Slam Team Member who performed a poem on the festival main stage Mary Kamara joined hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon to discuss Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 as well as the power of poetry to bring hope in times of despair.

Leading up to the festival, Split This Rock’s Sarah Browning joined local radio station WPFW for interviews with David Rabin (April 10) and David Whetstone (April 18) to talk about Split This Rock’s mission and the 2018 Poetry Festival.

Festival Reflections

From Deborah A Miranda reflections in a blog post: "Split This Rock! is not just a place, nor just a literary festival. It is a crucible, an awakening, a cracking open of the heart that has been hardened by oppression, grief, fear, exhaustion. Poetry is the hammer. My heart was the rock." Deborah charges Split This Rock to do better, as well, to build community with Indigenous poets and communities, as we "rebuild the foundations of this nation." Read the full post, Split This Rock! 2018: Three Days in a Poet's (almost) Utopia on Deborah’s blog Bad NDNS.

Dan Wilcox offered reflective recaps of the Thursday workshops, Friday workshops, Thursday Featured Readings, and Friday’s Public Action: “It’s like returning home. Split This Rock Poetry Festival happens every other year & I look forward to it, but this year it fell exactly during Albany’s WordFest, including the Third Thursday Poetry Night that I host, but I had to be here. It was the 10th year of this festival of “provocation & witness,” & I’ve been to all of them.” Read all of the recaps on his blog.

From Karren LaLonde Alenier’s blog The Dresser: “The Split This Rock panels this season make the Dresser groan with pleasure because it is hard to decide which ones to attend. For example, this afternoon April 19 at the 1:30 session, she has to decide between ‘Arabic/English Poetry Game Workshop,’ ‘Seniors for Social Justice,’ or ‘WordPlay: Poetry a self-advocacy for Youth with Autism.’ This is not to mention the panel on the Warrior Writers and two book oriented sessions--one on the letters of Audre Lorde and the other Eco-Justice poetry.” Read Report #1, Report #2, Report #3, Report #4, and Report #5 on Karren’s blog.

Over on the Ms. Magazine blog, Emily Sernaker provides an in-depth discussion of Thursday afternoon's No More Masks! 45 Years of Women in Poetry panel, featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Ellen Bass, Sarah Browning, and Solmaz Sharif as speakers. The panel centered around the No More Masks! anthology, co-edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. In addition to a history of the anthology, Sernaker documents one of the topics that came out of the panel: tokenism. Quoting Acevedo: “I think folks are realizing there are writers that have been previously marginalized and disenfranchised who are writing the best work in the country right now. But I also get reached out to like, ‘because you’re a writer of color who’s writing some of the most exciting work in the country right now, can we just have a poem?'”


Book Riot’s Christina M. Rau highlighted several must-read voices that she felt inspired by after attending the fest: “In the tumultuous socio-political landscape of the United States today, poetry filled the air in DC. Voices rang out, speaking to a vast array of issues...Be on the lookout for Jonathan Mendoza. This young poet is the First Place Winner of the 2018 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest. He read a poem entitled ‘Osmosis’ that brought the entire room to silence and then cheers. The poem weaves its way through water and land, singling out instances of injustice regarding immigration and violence.”

Public Action Coverage

At Think Progress, Alejandro Alvarez reported on the festival’s Public Action, in which attendees each brought 12 words each to contribute to a group poem, called a cento, on the topic of gun violence, to join the voices of students for the National School Walkout DC. The article shared: “The White House sidewalk is no stranger to protest. But where you might normally find signs, flags, and hearty chanting, Friday’s activist lineup featured something a bit different: poetry… By gathering socially active poets directly before the National School Walkout, [Sarah] Browning said she hoped to “add voices of witness and imagination” to the conversation for gun control. With roots in the anti-Iraq War movement, she described Split This Rock as a creative force injecting a human perspective into a national push against war, greed, and violence.”

Abby Zimet of Common Dreams also covered the Public Action: “...About two dozen members of Split the Rock climbed a makeshift stage to each add a line to a piece titled “Louder than a Gun.” Their ensuing "tapestry of voices" included the lines, “My country ’tis a quivering child’s breath, held in a closet....Our hearts are less fragile than the nothingness that pulls the trigger...What is it worth? Building graveyards on the backs of our children?” and, from longtime activist Joanne Rocky, “They will beat their guns into poems, and sing out love.”

Read the full poem and see more photos of the public action at Split This Rock's website.

From Festival 2018 Presenters and Readers

On the Kenyon Review Podcast, Featured Poet Javier Zamora spoke with Kenyon English faculty member Andrew Grace about immigration, advocating for undocumented poets, and what Salvadoran poets Americans should be reading. At PRI’s The World, Carol Hills discussed issues of race in America with Featured Poet Kwame Dawes.

Here’s a special treat: Presenters from Brick City Collective filmed and posted their session titled, "Witness and Experience: Luso/ Latinx Poets Voicing Brick City Life." The panel features 7 poets & writers who make up the Brick City Collective, a multimedia arts group whose roots are in Newark, NJ. Take this amazing chance to catch the session if you missed it or want to share it with friends!

Donnie Welch, presenter from the "Wordplay: Poetry & Self-Advocacy for Youth with Autism" workshop, wrote an enthusiastic blog post detailing his experience as a presenter, volunteer, and participant at the festival.

Finally, stay tuned in the next weeks as we prepare video highlights from the featured readings to post on Split This Rock’s YouTube channel. Meanwhile, you can watch videos of past festivals and dream of 2020!

Split This Rock Interview with Elizabeth Acevedo

 By Lauren May

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2018.

The festival is three days at the intersection of the imagination and social change: readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, activism, a book fair, and a party. Celebrating Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! The poets to be featured are among the most significant and artistically vibrant writing and performing today: Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora.

Online registration is available until midnight (EST) on March 28. Onsite registration will be offered during the festival. Group rates, scholarships, and sponsorship opportunities are available. Readings by featured poets are free and open to the public. More information at: www.SplitThisRock.org.

We are especially pleased be able to present this interview between Acevedo and May, as Acevedo coached May and the rest of the DC Youth Slam Team 2013-2015, including the 2014 team which took first place at Brave New Voices International Teen Poetry Festival.

* * *

Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in New York City and her poetry is infused with Dominican bolero and her beloved city’s tough grit. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo is a National Slam Champion and has performed for over 14 years at such nationally and internationally renowned venues as The Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, South Africa’s State Theatre, The Bozar in Brussels, and the National Library of Kosovo. She is also well known for poetry videos, which have gone viral and been picked up by PBS, Latina Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in POETRY, Puerto Del Sol, Callaloo, The Notre Dame Review, and others. Acevedo is a Cave Canem Fellow, CantoMundo Fellow, and former participant of the Callaloo Writer's Workshop. She is the author of Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (YesYes Books, 2016) and her debut novel, The Poet X (HarperCollins) was published March 6, 2018 . She served as coach of Split This Rock's DC Youth Slam Team from 2013 to 2015. Learn more at her website. Photo by Stephanie Ifendu.

* * *

Lauren May (LM): Assuming you got asked the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" when you were younger, what was your response? Did you ever imagine that you would have the career that you have now?

Elizabeth Acevedo (EA): I always knew I wanted a career involving language: singer, politician, poet, but I didn’t have a road map on making any of those things possible. I’m glad that I allowed myself to be flexible in regards to how I used language and that I gave myself permission to write in many different genres, which ultimately led me to where I am today. And, I’m still open to complicating the lines of what kind of writer and speaker I need to be.

(LM): Was there ever a time when you didn't feel like a writer?

(EA): So much of being a writer seems like walking a tightrope of just enough ego to put your work into the world, and just enough humility to always remember you have yet to write your best or most precise work. That said, for me it’s hard to keep a balance between humility and insecurity. I continuously question whether or not the quality of my work is up to par, if I’m pushing the envelope enough, if the work is asking critical questions;  continuously moving through those doubts seems to be what keeps someone still writing vs. what stops them in their tracks.

(LM): Your poem titled “bittersweet love poem” is one of my favorites. I watch it on You Tube often, because the way you speak of love feels so honest. Love is a feeling that I believe only poetry/art seems to make any sense of. What did the process of writing that poem feel like?

(EA): That poem was written over the course of several years. Lines would come to me and I would write them down but never strung them together. I think at the time I wrote that poem I’d been writing a lot about the death of black people, and the ramifications of colonialism, and the need to pay an ode to joy and love felt pivotal. So, I went back to all these scattered lines and figured out a way to pull them into one piece.

(LM): What's the most beautiful place you've visited while touring, and why?

(EA): Beautiful is a difficult word to apply to some of the places I’ve traveled to since the definition of what is beautiful changes from geography to the people to the art scene, but I was able to participate in the International Poetry Festival of Nicaragua and I was very moved by the physical beauty of the country and how warm and lovely the people of the country were. It was an intensely vibrant and alive place and poetry was a part of the cultural structure of the country. They have poetry everywhere and truly revere their classical poets. There’s so much love for the written word in Nicaragua that it made me nostalgic for what I think is possible in the US.

(LM): What does the process of writing a book look like, for you?

(EA): Writing any kind of book has its unique challenges, but with a novel-in-verse it was difficult for me to learn that not every single piece had to be a self-contained poem; some of the pieces work as hinges or transitions to connect the more self-fulfilled poems. But because I was coming from a background in poetry, not fiction, I wanted all 368 pages to be publishable poems ... and that can be a lot of pressure.  Some of the poems need to be expository, need to be a small breath, or else the language itself will weigh down the narrtive arc. So, I had to learn to trust my process and also show up every day to keep an on-going relationship with my character! She told me where the story needed to go and what needed to be done to create a satisfying ending.

(LM): When I was your student, when you coached the DC Youth Slam Team, you gave my peers and me the advice to read just as much, if not more, than we write. Why is that important, in your opinion? What are you reading lately?

(EA): I tell students to read as much if not more than they write because the practice of reading as a writer is a study, it’s a craft. The goal of creating isn’t just to be masturbatory with your writing, but to continue pushing your artwork, continue exploring what your work can do, and to consider how you are contributing to the conversation in the literary landscape. We don’t make in silos, and I think it’s not only humility, but the point of artistry to engage with the work of your predecessors and peers.

I just finished reading Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and I am currently rereading Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down.

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Additional Links

Elizabeth Acevedo on her debut novel The Poet X (Bustle)

Interview with Elizabeth Acevedo (Teen Vogue)

Synopsis of The Poet X (Publisher’s Weekly)

How to Be a Poet, by Ellen Haile, on the work and career (Unruly)

Behind the Mic with Elizabeth Acevedo, by Tosin Oyekoya (Blavity)

Two of Acevedo’s poems “In Translation” &  “The Therapist Says to Talk Through Your Door in Case You’re Listening” (The Quarry)

* * *

Lauren (Lo) May is a 21-year-old writer, artist, host, human rights advocate and french fry enthusiast born in DC, raised in Maryland. An alumna of the award-winning DC Youth Slam Team, Lauren is part of Split This Rock’s Ushindi Performance Group. She has featured as a guest speaker at MCASA’s 10th Annual Women of Color Network Conference, the National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence, and The White House United State of Women Summit.

11 Poems for Care

We're fighting for health care and we know you are too! Poetry, in fact, is relevant everywhere, including policy debates. As the administration and majority party seek to reverse the progress made, and to remove the protections given Americans by “Obamacare,” Split This Rock offers 11 poems on matters related to health and health care.

When we searched our collection for poems that witness on health or illness, to respond to the current fiasco of dismantling the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we found most of the poems on this theme are by women. Fitting, since the current Senate bill never once mentions women. The poems range in subject from families living with a son’s mental illness, to the way chronic pain can govern a life, to how our veterans need the care our government might soon eliminate - unless we fight!

We hope you will find inspiration for your advocacy work as you resist the draconian and mean-spirited reforms currently under consideration. You might not only read these poems, but use them:

●      to help keep yourself grounded

●     to open meetings

●     to share among discussion groups, inspire others

●     to email to representatives to inspire them to keep working for the health and safety of the people

●     or to email to those who need a reminder of just how much our health is a matter of luck, or class, or gender, or war.

We offer excerpts of these poems, below, for your hearts and your courage. Click on the title to read the full poem.

For more poems related to matters of health, its economics, and the effects of care, please visit  The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.  

As I Pay Forty Dollars

By Susan Eisenberg

for my asthma inhaler that

last year cost fifteen

I pause     for the mom

whose young son will forget

his inhaler / on the bus /

at his friend’s house /

in the park / at the game /

maybe in his school locker /

somewhere-I-dunno;

Test for Cognitive Function

By Hermine Pinson

Mother

Slipper

July

“I will ask you to recall these words

at the end of our session”

Depression Insists We Stay In

By Katy Richey

You do look fat in those pants,

probably gained twenty pounds
in the last thirty minutes. There’s no parking
within ten blocks of the party.
All the people you hate are already there.
They’re miserable too, but tonight
you won’t be able to tell. They’ll have
green string tied around their middle fingers
and you’re supposed to know why.

A Car, A Man, A Maraca

By Charlie Bondhus

At the mirror I heft

elbows, belly, cock,

say hematocrit—44.3; hemoglobin—15.2;

neutrophils—62; monocytes—5.

And Still They Come (for Dr. Sue)

By Gordon Cash

… You make war
On us, ignore or call collateral
The pain and blood of woman-damage left
In all your battles' wakes.  And still they come.
The patients come, each seeking her own peace.

Rosary for my Brace

By Sheila Black

The brace was metal, and it fastened around the ankles.

Outside in the street there was the beggar with elephantiasis; there was

the leper, the neighbor with eyes milky blind,

and in the book the child with the hand reaching out for the water.

Everyone spoke in code, everyone lied. There were the

invisible hospitals. There were the poor who could be scattered

like lice.

Dick Cheney’s New Heart Speaks

By Melissa Tuckey

A roadside bomb is planted in every chest

I was a pea sized fist in the dirt of a man

who had half your brains

but he was good

The Therapist Says to Talk Through the Door In Case You're Listening

By Elizabeth Acevedo

 … Rob, I am splintered, drawn blood.

We both know how to slip medicine into milk, how to gift

each other with our backs. The hundred kinds of get out

someone can backhand against a name, take them all, palmed,

opened, don't be afraid that I'll ever try to walk through this door,

because the surface against my cheek is the only comfort you've shown

me in years.

Oceanside, CA

By Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Balancing on crutches in the shallows

near her mother, a girl missing her right lower leg

swings her body and falls, laughing.

    

Ode to the Chronically Ill Body

By Camisha Jones

This body       is lightning

     Strikes the same place      more than twice

This body       is a fist                         pounding its own hand

This body       crumples like paper

           I crumple     like paper           because of this body

This body       just wants        and wants         and wants

from Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography

By Jennifer Bartlett

based on a series of neat errors

          falling and catching

to thrust forward

sometimes the body misses

then collapses

sometimes

it shatters

with this particular knowledge

a movement spastic

                       and unwieldy

is its own lyric