Voices Forward: Adrienne Rich’s Statement to the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Ten years ago, in 2008, poets convened for the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Every poet invited to feature at the first gathering agreed and most participated at no cost to the festival—so strong was their commitment to this gathering dedicated to poetry that engages the real textures and troubles of our lives. Only

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

one poet declined, and that with deep regret due to intensifying illness.

In lieu of her nourishing presence, Adrienne Rich sent the following statement to the founders. They read it to those gathered at that first festival. It is our honor and pleasure to share it with our community now, ten years on, to inspire us all for the next ten years and the years beyond.

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STATEMENT FOR “SPLIT THIS ROCK” FESTIVAL
WASHINGTON D.C., MARCH 20-23, 2008

By Adrienne Rich

Over the weekend preceding “Split This Rock,” I have been watching video clips of the “Winter Soldier” panels conducted by Iraq Veterans Against the War. I have been listening to the hard-earned, factual, understated yet intensely charged words of testimony from these men and women.

War and injustice are not “themes” for some poets to pick up or put down by choice. Let’s be clear about this from the outset: Even when we taste the sweetness of life, love, greet a new child, pay decent homage to lost comrades and elders, our work, our access to time and space, our pulse and breath are subject to the structures of inequality, exclusion, cruelty and violence. We read and write poetry to sense through expressive language what the discourse of power has numbed or silenced; to search out truth in our own souls and with other souls.

We don’t write poetry to speak truth to power, as if it will change the minds of the powerful.

Illegitimate power does not want truth. It depends on manufactured ignorance, manipulation, secrecy and force. We in the United States who have written dissident poetry for much of our lives have done so because, like it or not, politics have saturated the air we breathe, the pores of our skin, the waters we drink, where and how and with whom—and whether—we sleep at night. Recognizing this we crave, and try to create, language equal to our time and needs, our location in a greater humanity. We begin to question easy, cynical formulations and accept the responsibility of our artistic task.

Dissident art realizes itself, finds its voice in collective activity. There is no contradiction here, only challenge. May “Split This Rock,” like “Winter Soldier,” become one conversation, one event among the many that, for the long future, must confront our national, our human, emergency.

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This is the essential work to which the founders, board, staff, and community of Split This Rock are committed, to poetry on the side of life. We thank every poet and reader who joins us, shares this work forward, and supports us. As we affirmed one to another at the closing of the 2018 festival, WE ARE WITH YOU. To invest in the long future of dissident poetry, consider a gift to Split This Rock. Visit the website for details. #10YearsofPoWeR

"Here I Am" - New Poem for José Gouveia by Martín Espada - Please Help

Joe Gouveia leads panel on the rant,
Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2008. 
Photo by Jill Brazel.

Joe Gouveia -- community builder, poet, great guy -- is battling cancer. Again. He has done so much for poets, as a newspaper columnist, the host of a radio show, an anthologist (Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology), an organizer of readings and workshops, and more.

Split This Rock invites our community to give back and contribute what you can to the Joe Gouveia Recovery Fund, here: http://www.gofundme.com/584zps

Poet and essayist Martín Espada, a good friend of Joe's, has written the following poem in tribute. We urge you to read it, repost it, and spread the word, as we pay tribute to Joe, help him cover expenses while he's hospitalized, and thank him for his own powerful voice, his big heart, and his generous spirit.

Here I Am

            For José “JoeGo” Gouveia

He swaggered into the room, a poet at a gathering of poets, 

and the drinkers stopped crowding the cash bar, the talkers stopped

their tongues, the music stopped hammering the walls, the way

a saloon falls silent when a gunslinger knocks open the swinging doors:

JoeGo grinning in gray stubble and wraparound shades, leather Harley

vest, shirt yellow as a prospector’s hallucination, sleeve buttoned

to hide the bandage on his arm where the IV pumped chemo through

his body a few hours ago. The nurse swabbed the puncture and told him

he could go, and JoeGo would go, gunning his red van from the Cape

to Boston, striding past the cops who guarded the hallways of the grand

convention center, as if to say here I am: the butcher’s son, the Portagee,

the roofer, the carpenter, the cab driver, the biker-poet. This was JoeGo,

who would shout his ode to Evel Knievel in biker bars till the brawlers

rolled in beer and broken glass, who married Josy from Brazil

on the beach after the oncologist told him he had two months to live

two years ago. That’s not enough for me, he said, and will say again

when the cancer comes back to coil around his belly and squeeze hard

like a python set free and starving in the swamp. He calls me on his cell

from the hospital, and I can hear him scream when they press the cold

X-ray plates to his belly, but he will not drop the phone. He wants

the surgery today, right now, surrounded by doctors with hands

blood-speckled like the hands of his father the butcher, sawing

through the meat for the family feast. The patient’s chart should read:

This is JoeGo: after every crucifixion, he snaps the cross across his back

for firewood. He will roll the stone from the mouth of his tomb and bowl

a strike. On the night he silenced the drinkers chewing ice in my ear,

a voice in my ear said: What the hell is that man doing here?

And I said: That man there? That man will live forever.

- Martín Espada