Split This Rock Interview with Franny Choi, Judge for the 2019 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest

by Neveen Shawish

The Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest serves to raise the visibility and prestige of poetry of provocation and witness.  

PRIZES: First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on Split This Rock's website and in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. All prize winners will receive free festival registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2020 and the 1st place recipient will be invited to read the winning poem on the main stage at the festival.

READING FEE: $20. Benefits Split This Rock, helping to sustain its work to bring poetry to the center of public life.

The contest is open for submissions until November 1, 2018. To submit, please visit the contest page on the website.

About the Contest Judge

Photo by Tarfia Faizullah.

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and the forthcoming Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Helen Zell Writers Program. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow, an Editor of News and Politics at Hyphen Magazine, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Franny was a Featured Poet at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014. Learn more at Franny Choi's website.

Franny will serve as a final judge for the contest, selecting the winning poems from up to 20 top poems chosen by first readers. As she desires, she may also select poems as honorable mentions.

* * *

Neveen Shawish: Your cultural identity is prevalent in your work in such a vulnerable and beautiful way. The cultural divide between your family and where you live now really resonates with me, particularly in your poems “Split Mouth” and “Choi Jeong Min." How has your upbringing impacted your work? What have you found out about your own cultural identity through the world of poetry?

Franny Choi: You know, I get some version of this question almost every time I’m interviewed, and I never know how to answer it. If you’re asking how being the queer, femme child of Korean immigrants has impacted my experience of language, the best answers I have for you are my poems—that’s exactly the question I’m trying to answer in nearly everything I write. So: yes, exactly! How does it affect a voice to begin in uprooting? What can I learn about what it means to come from a forcefully divided, postcolonial country through the world of words? What does it mean to write like a person whose body has been objectified, fetishized, scapegoated, made fantasy, made tool, etc.? Yes, those are exactly the questions I’m trying to answer, too.

Shawish: From Floating, Brilliant, Gone to Death by Sex Machine, or even from before your publications, how do you think your poetry has evolved over time and how do you believe that you, as a poet, have evolved?

Choi: I think the content of my work hasn’t changed that much over time; the questions that drove me to the page five or ten years ago are still the most important ones in my writing today. But when I look back at Floating, Brilliant, Gone, what I feel most strongly is a kind of shock at its openness, at how forthcoming those poems are about both their content and their mechanisms. I love the vulnerability of that book (in the same way I love the 23 year old who wrote it), but I’m also glad at the ways I’ve grown in my ability to modulate between clarity and difficulty. I know more often now, that my moments of intense vulnerability are intentional, that they’re openings I can stand fully behind. And I know that my moments of difficulty aren’t just there to sound smart, but are intended to vibrate—to create a particular kind of tension that I want the reader to grapple with, or stand in the midst of. I think gaining more fluency in openness/difficulty has been not just an important point of growth on a craft level, but also part of forming a healthier personal relationship to my poems.

Shawish: In what ways do you hope poetry will contribute to ongoing resistance efforts? Do you carry a sense of responsibility for particular causes that you write about?  

Choi: I think poetry that is meant to witness, educate, and incite is so vitally important. Poetry as a strategic vehicle for disseminating knowledge about injustices; poetry that serves as documentary and memorial; poetry that sparks the kind of anger that’s necessary for real change—these are particular and crucial modes of writing, but I think it’s not exactly the work I’m tasking my poems with at the moment. 

At the moment, I think the impulse that’s driving my writing is the impulse to understand and imagine deeply. That is, to go microscopic on the terrain of human tenderness in the context of this world wrecked by the violences of empire; and to imagine new ways of feeling, new ways of living. 

As far as responsibility in that work, I always want to ask myself: Am I making something that’s already here? Is this redundant to the ways we already know how to think about the world, whether by reinscribing its violences or recycling the horror stories already available to our imaginations? Or: does it make some attempt to break through to something else? I think being armed with this question, along with an ethics of care and a good crew of people to tell you when you’re screwing up, will get a person pretty far.

Shawish: As Split This Rock’s 2019 Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest judge, is there anything that you will be looking for in poetry submissions? What moves you most when reading a poem?

Choi: There’s certainly no particular style or form of poetry that I’m looking for. I feel moved by reading poets who seem to truly be writing like themselves. I feel moved by new ways of making language, by political and conceptual bravery, by rigorous vulnerability, by humor, by meter, by a well-crafted lie. Judging contests is weird; please just know that I’ll consider every poem I read a real-life, breathing gift. 

* * *

Photo by Elizabeth Khatib.

Neveen Shawish is a 20-year-old Palestinian American, based in the Washington DC area. She is a full-time student at George Mason University where she studies Communication with a concentration in Journalism. Neveen spent the summer as Split This Rock’s Communication and Social Media Intern (and loved every second of it!). She is passionate about progressive social change, volunteering, American Sign Language, and of course, poetry.

The Split This Rock Interview with Terisa Siagatonu

By Franny Choi

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 19-21, 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.

On-site registration is available every day during the festival at the festival hub: National Housing Center, 1201 15th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005. A sliding scale of fees is available for full registration, beginning at $200. Student registration (with ID) is $75. One day passes are $85. Two-day passes are $170.

Full festival schedule available on the website. The Festival Mobile App is Live! Download the free app  for iOS and Android today for easy access to the schedule, session descriptions, presenter bios, and more! Just search your app store for Split This Rock.

Events Open to the Public

Nightly Free Poetry Readings: National Housing Center Auditorium

Social Change Book Fair: Saturday, April 21, 10 am-3:30 pm, National Housing Center (Free)

Poetry Public Action: Louder Than a Gun – Poem for Our Lives, Friday, April 20, 9-10 am, Lafayette Park (Free)

Open Mics: Thursday, April 19 & Friday, April 20, 10 pm-12 am, Busboys and Poets, 5th & K, Cullen Room, 1025 5th St NW, Washington, DC 20001 ($5 at the door)

Closing Party: Saturday, April 21, 10 pm-1 am, National Housing Center Auditorium ($10 online and at the door)

Open mics and the closing party are free to festival registrants.

* * *

Terisa Siagatonu is an award winning poet, arts educator, organizer, and mental health advocate from the Bay Area. With over a decade of experience in writing, performing, competing, coaching, and teaching poetry, Terisa has shared her work in places ranging from the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, to the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France, to the White House. A recipient of President Obama’s Champion of Change Award (2012), Terisa's writing has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Upworthy and elsewhere. A national poetry slam finalist, Terisa is also a poetry slam coach on both the youth and collegiate level, having coached five poetry slam teams to place Top 20 in the nation. Alongside being a full-time artist, Terisa is also a Senior Poet Mentor with Youth Speaks, Inc., leading poetry lessons with Bay Area high school students and professional development with teaching artists. She is one of the co-creators of The Root Slam, a poetry venue based in Oakland, CA, and was a member of the 2017 Root Slam Poetry Slam Team, helping her team to place 5th in the Nation at the 2017 National Poetry Slam competition. Terisa holds a Masters in Marriage/Family Therapy from the University of Southern California, aiming to merge art and therapy throughout her healing work both on and off-stage.

* * *

Franny Choi (FC): Can you talk about one of your proudest poetry-related moments over the past year or so?

Terisa Siagatonu (TS): Last year, I had the opportunity to visit American Samoa and spend an entire week leading writing workshops for 5 of the high schools on the island, including the one my father attended when he was a teenager. The last time I visited American Samoa was 12 years ago, and I remember being 17 years old and complaining about how hot it was, and how much I wanted to go back home to California. On this trip, though, I wanted to stay on the island forever. I still do, even though I'm not there anymore. During that week, I was so grateful to be given another chance to cherish the land, my culture, and my people, with their unconditional love and overflowing hospitality for me and my colleagues. While in each of those classrooms on each campus, something inside of me was changing as I witnessed my own people step into their voices and tell their stories for the first time in their lives. That was the case for all of the students I worked with that week. Every teacher I met said: "that was the first time I ever heard them open up like that." I struggle a lot with owning all of my Samoan identity because of the disconnect I feel at times from being born in the United States, but I felt so at peace and at home during that week on island. It was the first time where I felt the most confident in my ability to lead a group in a writing workshop because this group of people are the ones who are most important in my life: they're my community. I come from them, and I depend on them the way our culture depends on them to keep our legacy alive. I've never felt so proud to be both Samoan and a writer. It meant everything to me to be able to share something as important as writing with my people, because both are the reasons why I'm still here and why I know who I am.

(FC): In your poem “Meauli,” you say, “There is no translation for anti-blackness in a lot of our languages, but it doesn’t mean we haven’t been nurturing it in our language.” What do you want to nurture in your language?

(TS): I want my language to nurture things like patience, forgiveness, genuine empathy, and growth. These are things that were incredibly hard for me to come by when I was growing up. Things I didn't have permission for when I was younger. I want a kind language, one that angles towards hope and doesn't falter when a better way of saying something is close but unreachable in the moment, for whatever reason. I want my language to hold people accountable for how they hurt others, while also knowing how to learn from the mistakes it makes when it causes pain. I guess I want my language to nurture what I've always wanted nurtured in me. I think it's easy to be reactive with language, and go off the rails with whatever emotion we feel is biggest in our body at the moment, without really teasing out what we actually mean to communicate. I want my language to nurture the hard. Not the easy. I want it to re-imagine what is possible when language has only the capacity to heal, and not be a weapon all of the time.

(FC): What do you think is your role in the fight?

(TS): I'm somewhere either in the middle of the pack, trying to make sure everyone is well nourished and has what they need to journey on, or I'm in the very back, walking alongside the slowest, engaging with them in dialogue and actively listening to their every word as we move, and not worrying about being the last ones left. I'm a people person. A "South" in all of those 4 Directions Working Styles group activities (they're the ones who care about the well-being of the people involved and whose strengths lie in being compassionate and group-oriented, even to a fault). I can't imagine a better world than this one that doesn't free us all. I see myself committed, even now, to dedicating my life to understanding what it takes for us to get closer to that freedom. Even if we never reach it in my lifetime, but we reach it nonetheless.

(FC): Can you envision an APIA space that is truly inclusive of Pacific Islander folks? Is such a space even possible (or necessary)?

(TS): I think my Pacific Islander community and I, to a large degree, are moving into a place in our understanding of our identity where we are no longer waiting for permission or asking to be accepted into something that wasn't necessarily made with us in mind (i.e. the "APIA" community). For me, it comes down to: do I want to spend my energy and time teaching non-PI members of the APIA community about the PI community, or do I want to spend my energy and time with my PI community, learning how to be understood and seen on our own terms? For all that we are? There was a time in which we Pacific Islanders believed it was absolutely necessary to be a part of the APIA umbrella because we deemed our smallness (in numbers, in resources, in collective power, etc.) as being a deterrent or an obstacle in our way towards self-actualization and acceptance, but in reality, there is power in all that we are as a people. There's power in us realizing that not only do we come from small islands in the Pacific: we are the Pacific. A whole damn body of water, and the largest body of water this world has. "Inclusivity" is fine, and at times, necessary. But I see a world for me and my Pacific Islander people where we don't have to keep coming from the margins of anything, yearning to be in the center. I see a world in which we are what everything else orbits around. Where we're seen, nurtured, accounted for, and never left behind ever again. 

(FC): What’s the last thing you read or saw that gave you hope?

(TS): Before he died this past January, my grandpa kept a daily journal every year, and wrote in it every single day since 1994. He has 13 red journals, mostly written in Samoan, but some written in English. I read a passage he wrote last year when he thought he was having a heart attack or stroke. You could see where his hand started to shake in writing that passage, as he was describing, on paper, the pain he was experiencing in his chest. I read how he called out for my Uncle for help. The last part of that passage was him accepting this fate and preparing himself to enter God's Kingdom. Although I grew up in a very religious household, my faith in God and in religion was nothing like my grandpa's. He was the most devout Christian I knew, and reading that passage of his brought me to a really scared and sad place, but it also reminded me of how unwavering my grandpa's faith is in his God. And how he was anything but scared that day. I read that and was reminded that I come from the same courageous lineage as this man. That I can also have a faith in something that is as unwavering as my grandpa's faith. That when it's my time to leave here, I hope to have my writings in a place where my future generations of my family can find them as well, and know exactly what to make of them when they read through it all. 

* * *

Additional Links

Terisa’s poems appear in the portfolio of Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 featured poets in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine.

“Layers,” the poem Terisa performed at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris.

“Pacific Islander Poets Use Art, Stories to Urge Climate Action at UN Conference,”  (NBC News)

Terisa’s poem “Atlas” in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine

Huffington Post feature on Terisa and Carrie Rudzinski’s poem “Women”

Terisa poem “The Day After American Samoa Is Under Water” (The Quarry)

* * *

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and the forthcoming Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received awards and fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Helen Zell Writers Program. She is a Kundiman fellow, Senior News Editor at Hyphen   Magazine, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark NoiseCollective. She was a member of the curatorial committee for the 2018 Split This Rock Festival. Photo by Eileen Meny.

Split This Rock at AWP in Tampa - March 7–10, 2018

Split This Rock will be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) taking place March 7-10 in Tampa! 

If you're attending, we hope you'll join us to celebrate Split This Rock's 10th anniversary as we rededicate ourselves to poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. Check out all the details below! (See the AWP website for more on the conference.)

Visit Split This Rock at 

AWP Table #T603

Visit Split This Rock at Table #T603 in the AWP Conference Bookfair, where you can meet and hang out with Split This Rockers, write a haiku post card to elected officials demanding gun control, buy a T-shirt, mug, or notecards with beautiful artwork with Split This Rock co-chair Dan Vera, pictured above and excerpts from poems in The Quarry, and enter a drawing for a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, and Javier Zamora. We look forward to seeing you! 

**

Split This Rock 10th Anniversary Reading at AWP!

Thursday, March 8 at 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM

Tampa Convention Center, First Floor, Room 20 & 21

In their last year of leadership, Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning and long-time Board Chair Dan Vera will read with two poets whose work and spirit are central to Split This Rock, Franny Choi and Cornelius Eady. Also performing with Cornelius will be musicians from the Cornelius Eady trio.

Sarah Browning is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness. Author of Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, and co-editor of three special issues of Poetry magazine, she co-hosts Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone. She has received awards and fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Kundiman. She is a Project VOICE teaching artist and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight poetry collections including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize, and Brutal Imagination. He holds the Miller Chair at the University of Missouri and is co-founder of Cave Canem.

Dan Vera is co-editor of Imaniman: Poets Respond to Gloria Anzaldúa and author of two books of poetry, most recently Speaking Wiri Wiri. Winner of the 2017 Oscar Wilde Award and Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, his poetry appears in various publications and university writing curricula. He now co-chairs the board of Split This Rock.

Learn more on Facebook. 

Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology Book Launch & 10th Anniversary Celebration

Friday, March 9 at 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM

The Attic Cafe

500 E Kennedy Blvd, Suite 400, Tampa, Florida 33602

Come celebrate the launch of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology and Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! Hosted by Melissa Tuckey, Editor, and Co-Founder of Split This Rock. This ground-breaking book of poems brings social justice to the forefront of eco-poetry and offers a rich terrain of culturally diverse perspectives. 

Readers include Jennifer Atkinson, Sarah Browning, Camille Dungy, Kathy Engel, Jennifer Foerster, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Allison Hedge Coke, Tiffany Higgins, Brenda Hillman, Philip Metres, Lenard Moore, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Emmy Pérez, Danez Smith, Pam Ushuck, Dan Vera, and Javier Zamora. 

This off-site event is free! Full cafe menu will be available for purchase, including beer and wine. Within walking distance of the convention center and conference hotel. Wheelchair accessible.

Learn more on Facebook. 

Poem of the Week: Franny Choi

   

Chinky 

 

I. LETTER FROM THE WORLD TO MY EYES

How'd you get so slice?

Razor pinch all flat-like? All puff

& sting? What's your allergy?

Hi bucktooth cartoon. Hi war

paddy. Hi refugee. Spit. Take it.

Tight lids. Dagger flick. Stick

shift. Tease. Lemon juice.

Wide screen. We all scream.

What are you mad? Seething in

the corner? Cat squeezing

fish spine from back? What are you

blind-eye? What are you cock-

roach? What are you gleaming

all teeth no iris at the sun's grin?

II. LETTER FROM MY EYES TO THE WORLD

Act like you've

never seen a pinhole

camera. I drink every

every. Condense light

into its smallest body.

-Franny Choi   

Use by permission.

Originally published in Radius.  

Franny Choi's poetry explores the collisions of identity, the volatility of language, and the haunting relationship between the artist's body and her body of work. She has been a finalist at the National Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. A Pushcart Prize Nominee, her literary work has appeared in Fringe, Apogee, Tandem, Angry Asian Man, and others. Her play Mask Dances, which told the story of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, was staged for the 2011 Writing is Live Festival. She co-coordinates ProvSlam Youth, a program for young writers in Providence, RI. Her first collection of poetry, Floating, Brilliant, Gone, is forthcoming from Write Bloody Publishing in March 2014. 

 

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.