Announcing the 2012 Featured Poets!

Split This Rock is very excited to announce a spectacular line-up of featured poets for Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22-25, 2012.

The festival will once again feature some of the most visionary and powerful voices of our time.

Environmental activists, youth organizers, Pulitzer Prize winners, slam champions, poets of all ethnicities, DC-area poets, an opera librettist, translators, editors and publishers, emerging poets and mentors to emerging poets: Split This Rock 2012 has it all.

Join us in Washington, DC, for four days and more than 40 events - readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programs, open mics, and activism - as we pay tribute to the life and work of June Jordan, 1936-2002.

See below for the poets' beautiful faces and follow the link to read their bios. Save the date! March 22-25, 2012. Registration information soon.

Announcing the 2012 Featured Poets

Split This Rock Poetry Festival:

Poems of Provocation & Witness

March 22-25, 2012

Homero Aridjis

Sherwin Bitsui

Kathy Engel

Carlos Andrés Gómez

Douglas Kearney

Khaled Mattawa

Rachel McKibbens

Marilyn Nelson

Naomi Shihab Nye

Jose Padua

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Kim Roberts

Sonia Sanchez

Venus Thrash

Alice Walker

For full bios of the 2012 featured poets, please visit our website.

Poet As Public Citizen: Martín Espada

A few weeks ago, during AWP, Split This Rock hosted two extremely successful panels: The Dream the Dreamers Dreamed: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, and Undivided: Poet as Public Citizen. For those of you who missed the talks, Blog This Rock will be posting the transcripts. First up: Martín Espada.

Details about the events can be found here.

Undivided: The Poet as Public Citizen

(AWP, Washington, DC, February 5, 2011)

Martín Espada

Adrienne Rich, in her essay, “Poetry and Commitment,” writes:

I’ll flash back to 1821: Shelley’s claim, in “the Defence of Poetry” that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” Piously over-quoted, mostly out of context, it’s taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power--in a vague, unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay, “A Philosophic View of Reform,” Shelley had written that “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged” etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded…

And Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction between poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority…

Shelley saw powerful institutions, not original sin or “human nature,” as the source of human misery. For him, art bore an integral relationship to the “struggle between Revolution and Oppression…”

He did not say: “Poets are the unacknowledged interior decorators of the world.”

By this definition, many of our greatest poets have been unacknowledged legislators. This is what Whitman meant when he said: “I give the sign of democracy.”

Poets should have no trouble identifying with being “unacknowledged.” They grouse about being ignored, about paltry attendance at readings and royalty statements that would cause most novelists to jump off a bridge. Yet poets also contribute to their marginalization by producing hermetic verse and living insular lives, confined to the academy or to circles of other poets, by refusing to embrace their role as unacknowledged legislators.

The only antidote to irrelevancy is relevancy. The British poet Adrian Mitchell famously said: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” Mitchell lived his principles as a pacifist and unacknowledged legislator; in fact, he was declared the “Shadow Poet Laureate” of the UK. In February 2003, he read his anti-war anthem, “To Whom It May Concern,” to a quarter of million people in the streets of London, gathered to protest the pending war in Iraq.

Across the Atlantic, a former Marine and conscientious objector, Sam Hamill, was invited to participate in a Bush White House symposium called, “Poetry and the American Voice.” That symposium was cancelled when word leaked out of Hamill’s plan to collect a batch of anti-war poems and present them, like a bouquet of sorts, to First Lady Laura Bush. Hamill responded by founding an organization called Poets Against the War

Hamill also edited an anthology by that name. In the foreword, he writes:

Can (thousands of) poems inhibit this or any administration planning a war? It is only one step among many. But it is an important step, as each is. We join physicians against the war, teachers against the war, farmers against the war, and others. Poets Against the War helped bring about hundreds of poetry readings and discussions around the world while compiling a document of historic proportion…A government is a government of words, and when those words are used to mislead, to instill fear or to invite silence, it is the duty of every poet to speak fearlessly and clearly…Since most poets write in the same language politicians are given to abuse, in the language of everyday common speech, they must struggle to reveal clarity by way of musical and imagistic expression, and by transparency of emotion.

If phrases like weapons of mass destruction bleed language of its meaning, then poets must reconcile language with meaning and restore the blood to words. World War I poet Wilfred Owen uses the phrase an ecstasy of fumbling to describe the action of fitting on his gas mask before the deadly poison reaches him. Thus, as Gregory Orr observes, Owen takes back “the experience of war from the jabbering propagandists and patriots.”

Consider the state of our nation today, in a plummeting spiral. Could poets do any worse than the legislators? Would poets strip away our constitutional rights in the name of security more vigorously than the lawyers who sit in the House and Senate? Would poets, those perfectionists of the word, so quickly and eagerly resort to corruptions of language like “enhanced interrogation” to describe torture, by way of explaining that some tortures (and torturers) are better than others? Would poets be any less ethical than the politicians who grovel before lobbyists for the insurance and drug companies, triggering a health care crisis without end? Would poets with empty pockets vote repeatedly to pour billions of dollars into one catastrophic war of plunder after another? Should poets leave politics to the Republicans and the Democrats, or should all of us—poets included—grapple with the world?

Poetry humanizes in the face of dehumanization. Poetry frees a voice caught in the collective throat. Last night, three organizations of poets—Split This Rock, Acentos, and Poets Responding to SB 1070—collaborated on an event at the True Reformer Building called “Floricanto in Washington.: A Multi-Cultural Reading in Response to SB 1070.” I took part in this event with more than twenty-five unacknowledged legislators. I’ll read the poem I read last night. The racist backlash against immigrants in this country today triggered in me the memory of an incident from my own life thirty years ago. That’s the basis of the poem. A “corrido” is a Mexican narrative song, and the poem itself is called…

Isabel’s Corrido

Para Isabel

Francisca said: Marry my sister so she can stay in the country.
I had nothing else to do. I was twenty-three and always cold, skidding
in cigarette-coupon boots from lamppost to lamppost through January
in Wisconsin. Francisca and Isabel washed bed sheets at the hotel,
sweating in the humidity of the laundry room, conspiring in Spanish.

I met her the next day. Isabel was nineteen, from a village where the elders
spoke the language of the Aztecs. She would smile whenever the ice pellets
of English clattered around her head. When the justice of the peace said
You may kiss the bride, our lips brushed for the first and only time.
The borrowed ring was too small, jammed into my knuckle.
There were snapshots of the wedding and champagne in plastic cups.

Francisca said: The snapshots will be proof for Immigration.
We heard rumors of the interview: they would ask me the color
of her underwear. They would ask her who rode on top.
We invented answers and rehearsed our lines. We flipped through
Immigration forms at the kitchen table the way other couples
shuffled cards for gin rummy. After every hand, I’d deal again.

Isabel would say: Quiero ver las fotos. She wanted to see the pictures
of a wedding that happened but did not happen, her face inexplicably
happy, me hoisting a green bottle, dizzy after half a cup of champagne.

Francisca said: She can sing corridos, songs of love and revolution
from the land of Zapata. All night Isabel sang corridos in a barroom
where no one understood a word. I was the bouncer and her husband,
so I hushed the squabbling drunks, who blinked like tortoises in the sun.

Her boyfriend and his beer cans never understood why she married me.
Once he kicked the front door down, and the blast shook the house
as if a hand grenade detonated in the hallway. When the cops arrived,
I was the translator, watching the sergeant watching her, the inscrutable
squaw from every Western he had ever seen, bare feet and long black hair.

We lived behind a broken door. We lived in a city hidden from the city.
When her headaches began, no one called a doctor. When she disappeared
for days, no one called the police. When we rehearsed the questions
for Immigration, Isabel would squint and smile. Quiero ver las fotos,
she would say. The interview was canceled, like a play on opening night
shut down when the actors are too drunk to take the stage. After she left,
I found her crayon drawing of a bluebird tacked to the bedroom wall.

I left too, and did not think of Isabel again until the night Francisca called to say:
Your wife is dead. Something was growing in her brain. I imagined my wife
who was not my wife, who never slept beside me, sleeping in the ground,
wondered if my name was carved into the cross above her head, no epitaph
and no corrido, another ghost in a riot of ghosts evaporating from the skin
of dead Mexicans who staggered for days without water through the desert.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once
on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.
I kept a snapshot of the wedding; yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I’d do it again.

(Thank you.)

Thanksgiving Week Reading Material: Political Awareness, Social Consciousness and Memory in Susan Tichy's Poetry

This week, as we face an overabundance of stories about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we here at Blog This Rock have a round-up of interesting and engaging pieces about Poetry for you to read! Today, an interview with 2008 Featured Poet Susan Tichy from Cerise Press. Forward widely, and enjoy!

The following is an excerpt. Please click here to read the full interview.

Both Bone Pagoda and Gallowglass contain overlapping themes of war with cross references from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Why (and how) is this overlap in the two books important and meaningful to you? How do you relate this overlapping to your personal memory of similar events?

This is hard to answer without a sense of diminishment — by which I mean the two books, especially Gallowglass, would be my reply — but I’ll do my best.

I had just begun Bone Pagoda when the 9-11 attacks took place, so, though its subject is Vietnam, it was, from the start, overshadowed by the current wars. There’s a long history of writing about current events in the guise of historical subject matter, from “Flowers of the Forest” — an 18th century Scottish Jacobite lament, ostensibly about a 16th century war — to Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant — a film dissecting the ethics of guerilla tactics employed by the British during the Boer War, released in the aftermath of American (and Australian) involvement in Vietnam. I wasn’t exactly doing that — my book really is about Vietnam and I had been preparing to write it for some time before September 2001 — but I could hardly avoid the parallel. Later, there was a period when I was finishing Bone Pagoda but had also begun Gallowglass, so of course there were questions of boundary and inclusion. I think the difference between the two books is one of foreground versus background: Bone Pagoda is a book about Vietnam, written in the presence of our current wars. Gallowglass is not quite the opposite, because its other unifying subject is my husband’s death, but it is a book about the present, into which the past is inextricably woven.

Split This Rock Poem of the Week: Mark Doty's "Charlie Howard's Descent"

Dear Friends,

Split This Rock mourns the gay and lesbian young people who committed suicide in the past weeks: Justin Aaberg, Asher Brown, Raymond Chase, Tyler Clementi, Aiyisha Hassan, Billy Lucas, and Seth Walsh. Their deaths demonstrate again the power of words. Words can destroy.

But they can also restore, give hope, remind us of our common humanity. We are privileged to be able to share with you this week Mark Doty's poem "Charlie Howard's Descent," which he read so movingly at the inaugural Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2008. Charlie Howard's murder took place in 1984. Sadly, we still need this poem now more than ever. Please send it to everyone you know as a call for an end to hate, an end to bullying, a call for a full and rich life for every precious young person.

In peace and poetry,

Split This Rock

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

Please repost this poem widely but we ask that you include the publication credit and festival information listed after the poem. Thanks!

Charlie Howard’s Descent

Between the bridge and the river
he falls through
a huge portion of night;
it is not as if falling

is something new. Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known. What others wanted

opened like an abyss: the laughing
stock-clerks at the grocery, women
at the luncheonette amused by his gestures.
What could he do, live

with one hand tied
behind his back? So he began to fall
into the star-faced section
of night between the trestle

and the water because he could not meet
a little town's demands,
and his earrings shone and his wrists
were as limp as they were.

I imagine he took the insults in
and made of them a place to live;
we learn to use the names
because they are there,

familiar furniture: faggot
was the bed he slept in, hard
and white, but simple somehow,
queer something sharp

but finally useful, a tool,
all the jokes a chair,
stiff-backed to keep the spine straight,
a table, a lamp. And because

he's fallen for twenty-three years,
despite whatever awkwardness
his flailing arms and legs assume
he is beautiful

and like any good diver
has only an edge of fear
he transforms into grace.
Or else he is not afraid,

and in this way climbs back
up the ladder of his fall,
out of the river into the arms
of the three teenage boys

who hurled him from the edge -
really boys now, afraid,
their fathers' cars shivering behind them,
headlights on - and tells them

it's all right, that he knows
they didn't believe him
when he said he couldn't swim,
and blesses his killers

in the way that only the dead
can afford to forgive.

- Mark Doty

Used by permission.

Mark Doty's FIRE TO FIRE: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry. He teaches at Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

Doty was featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2008, when he read "Charlie Howard's Descent." You can watch video of that reading here.

Fall for the Book Writers on Sodexo Workers

Letter to the GMU community

The following excerpt comes from Mark Nowak's blog, Coal Mountain, and concerns the reaction of Fall for the Book writers to the allegations of unsafe work environments by Sodexo workers at George Mason University. For the full article, click here.

Nowak is the author of, “Coal Mountain Elementary” (2009) and a distinguished writer of “labor poetics.” As a former fast food employee and current writer and researcher of labor issues, Nowak also felt the decision to join with Sodexo was an easy one.
“Throughout my entire high school and undergraduate career, I worked between 30 and 40 hours per week at a Wendy’s in Buffalo, N.Y., so I have quite extensive knowledge about working conditions in the industry,” Nowak said when reached by email Saturday afternoon.
“What is happening to the Sodexo workers is so intimately a part of my personal history and my own research and writing that I can’t imagine doing anything but supporting these workers,” Nowak continued.
As part of his involvement in this year’s festival, Nowak is scheduled to give a talk on “Occupational Folklore” and he expects the Sodexo worker’s situation to be part of his discussion.

Bid on a Split This Rock 2010 Autographed Poster!

Click here and bid today to take home an intimate piece of the historic 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival!

We have a 24” x 36” poster designed by the fabulously talented Nancy Bratton (www.nancybrattondesign.com), that feature original signatures from most of Split This Rock 2010’s featured poets:

Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Jan Beatty, Fady Joudah, Lenelle Moise, Quincy Troupe, Lillian Allen, Chris Abani, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Cornelius Eady, Martha Collins, Richard McCann, Alison Hedge Coke, Mark Nowak, Nancy Morejón, Francisco Aragon, Natalie Illum, Sinan Antoon, Holly Bass, Beny Blaq, and Derrick Weston Brown, among others.


Spoken word artist Theresa Davis, who appeared on the panel Word Warriors: Women Spoken Word Artists at the 2008 festival, is featured on the poster – along with the late South African great Dennis Brutus. The poster also features a quote from a letter Adrienne Rich wrote to Split This Rock: “May this gathering inspire and affirm the spirit of many…Thank you for your belief in the freeing power of language and action.”

Your bid will help us bring poetry and poets into the public sphere in a variety of exciting ways:

* Biennial festivals – 2012 is just over the horizon. And guess what? We already have commitments from Marilyn Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, and Alice Walker for Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2012! You won’t want to miss it – March 22-24, 2012.

* Poets’ voices in the media – Through our partnership with the Institute for Policy Studies, Split This Rock arranges for poets to write op eds and appear on radio programs discussing critical social issues. In just one example, Mark Nowak’s op ed, “Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners,” appeared in small-town newspapers throughout the country.

* Infusing poetry into political action – Split This Rock poets read at demonstrations, hand out poems, carry poetry signs. Recently, we distributed poems to a fired-up crowd at an immigration justice rally in DC and urged supporters to do so at the many rallies that took place throughout the country. And Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week reaches thousands who might not otherwise be reading poetry of provocation and witness.

* National and community collaborations – Here in DC, Split This Rock will present a reading of the poem “Howl” by poet Anne Waldman at Busboys and Poets in July, to celebrate the exhibit “Beat Memories” at the National Gallery. And next year, we’ll be a literary partner at the conference of the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, AWP, to be held here in DC on Langston Hughes’s birthday in February. We’ll have programs in the conference celebrating Hughes and the poet as public citizen, as well as off-site events, plunging us all into the vibrant life of the city.


This year is critically important for Split This Rock. We’ve received a major grant from the Open Society Institute to build the foundation of the organization so we can keep growing nationally and locally. We can’t do it without you. Won’t you join us?

Revamped XCP webspace!

XCP's webspace has been revamped and the journal will be posting (with some regularity) complete writings and excerpts from the journal's nearly 15 year history of continuous publishing. Thanks, everyone, for continuing to submit work, subscribe, and read the amazing writing that continually fills the pages between the covers of XCP.

http://xcpcrossculturalpoetics.wordpress.com/

Split This Rock in Fire and Ink

Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, edited by Francis Payne Adler, Debra Busman and Diana García, is a valuable and vibrant anthology. I will publish a short review of it and other works received at AWP soon, but for now, let me call your attention to the following blurb about Split This Rock in the preface to the anthology:

In 2003, poetsagainstthewar.org drew thousands of poems within days. In 2008, with no end in sight to the war in Iraq, activist poets gathered at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington D.C. They came from across the country, a national network of writers for change, with readings by such poets as Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Carolyn Forché, among others - many of them contributers to this anthology.

As to the question of the taboo against social action writing or "political writing: some writers inhabit a privileged realm that leaves them free to reflect on the perfect hurricane or a new hummingbird's nest. Other writers' realities reflect on the aftermath of the hurricane. It is the need to privilege those alternate or non-mainstream realities now that compels us to name social action writing as a literary movement.

First Morning Poem by Allison A. Hedge Coke

DC STR #1 Adams House Suite

In a room facing chimneys
over the place Nancy Morejón rests
between sleeps lining free lines
she whispers to hearing DC:
Obsidiana, Un Gato Pequeño A Mi Puerta,
Vilma en Junio.

Morning is birdsong
in an old Spanish town.

Though the chief
in his acquired misery
echoes Kenya until he breathes
life into malady, or at least compels
us to believe so, she sleeps with
Africa, Canton, and other points slavery
turn Cuban in her bone breath
bringing love, embrace, freedom from
whatever holds the rest of us in weight.

The lifting is simple, yet
without it how sad we all be.

Embargo=fear
Yet here she is!

Sugaring our boughs before we break.

Lots of Awesome Festival Activities on Thursday

Check out Thursday's Schedule and all details here.





Panels and Workshops include:

• The Peace Shelves: Essential Books and Poems for the 21st Century
• The Public Role of Poetry: How to Build a Poetry Reading
• Writing from the Margins: Life, Survival, and Healing for Women of Color
• The Care and Feeding of the Rural/Small Town Poet-Activist
• Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: A Conversation with Cuban Poet Nancy Morejón
• The War is Not Over: Writing About Iraq and the Case of the Mutanabbi Street Coalition
• Cross-Discipline Collaboration: How Writers and Artists are Working Together to Push Boundaries and Engage the Public
• Giving Voice to the Silence/d
• Let Us Work Together: A Practical Guide & Discussion on Creating Community-Based Writing Projects
• Gay and Lesbian Poetry in the 40th Year Since Stonewall: History, Craft, Equality
  

From 2:00 to 3:30, there will be film and performances, including:

• Split This Rock 2010 Film Program
• Reclamation, Celebration, Renewal, and Resistance: Black Poets Writing on the Natural World
• 7 & 7: 7 Poets Celebrate Kundiman's 7th Year
• Beltway Poetry Quarterly Tenth Anniversary Reading
  

From 4:30 to 6 join us for POETRY IN THE STREETS

From 8 to 10, there will be a reading at Bell Multicultural High School featuring poets Francisco Aragón, Lillian Allen, Mark Nowak, and Nancy Morejón.

From 10 to midnight, decide between an Open Mic or a reprise of the film program!

Thursday's Featured Poets:

Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press) and editor of the award-winning The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press). Among his limited edition chapbooks are, Tertulia, (BOOKlyn). He is also the editor of Canto Cosas, a book series out of Bilingual Press that publishes Latino poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in various anthologies and in print and web journals. He directs Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshop in San Antonio and serves on the boards of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and the Guild Complex—a community-based literary organization in Chicago. He resides in Arlington, VA and works out of the ILS' offices in Washington, DC. franciscoaragon.net

Lillian Allen is an award-winning Canadian poet, fiction writer, playwright, and cultural strategist. As one of its lead originators, she has specialized in the writing and performing of dub poetry, a highly politicized form of poetry, which is sometimes set to music. Her recordings, "Revolutionary Tea Party" and "Conditions Critical," won Juno awards in 1986 and 1988 respectively. Her publications include Theorize This (2004), Psychic Unrest (Insomniac Press, 2000), Women Do This Every Day (Women’s Press, 1993), Nothing But A Hero (Well-versed, 1992). Her many recordings include Freedom & Dance, 1999, and Conditions Critical, 1988. Allen has also worked in film, both as a featured artist (“Revolution from de Beat,” 1995; Unnatural Causes, 1989; “Rhythm and Hardtimes,” 1987) and as co-producer and co-director of “Blak.. Wi Blakk…” (1994), a film on Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka. She was the instigator, co-producer, and host of WORDBEAT, CBC’s show on poetry and the spoken word. A past member of the Racial Equity Advisory of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Experts Advisory on the International Cultural Diversity Agenda, past executive member of the Sectoral Commission on Culture and Information of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Allen was named a Foremother of Canadian Poetry by the League of Canadian Poets in 1992.

Mark Nowak is the author of Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009) and Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004). For the past several years he has been designing and facilitating “poetry dialogues” with Ford autoworkers in the United States and South Africa (through the UAW and NUMSA), striking clerical workers (through AFSCME 3800), Muslim/Somali nurses and healthcare workers (through Rufaidah), and others. Nowak’s writings on new labor poetics have recently appeared in Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke, 2007), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007), The Progressive, and elsewhere. A native of Buffalo, New York, he now directs the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. http://coalmountain.wordpress.com

Nancy Morejón, one of the foremost Cuban writers and intellectuals, has published more than twelve collections of poetry, three monographs, a dramatic work, and four critical studies of Cuban history and literature. Her lyrical verse, shaped by an Afro-Cuban sensibility and a feminist consciousness, evokes the intimacy of family, the ephemerality of love, and the significance of Cuban history. Her poems have appeared in several bilingual editions in the United States, including Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing (The Black Scholar Press) and Looking Within-Mirar adentro (Wayne State University Press). She has translated numerous acclaimed French authors including Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Éluard, and Aimé Césaire, and her books of criticism of the work of Nicolas Guillén are considered classics.

Up Close and Poetical: Mark Nowak

Welcome to the third in a series of profiles of featured poets here at Blog This Rock. The series, titled "Up Close and Poetical," aims to introduce you to our featured poets and their body of work. Other profiles can be found here. This profile was written by GMU student and Split This Rock intern Mike Reid.

Coal Mining is dangerous business; for as long as there has been mining there have been accidents. According to the US Department of Labor Mine Safety and Health Administration, there were 17 mine related fatalities in 2009 – and that is just in the US. Chinese officials reported 2,631 deaths in mining related incidents in 2009, down 18% from previous years. These are the types of numbers poet and social activist Mark Nowak wants to make people aware of. Nowak is the author of three works: Revenants focuses on the Polish-American subculture around his home town of Buffalo, New York; Shut Up Shut Down talks about the hard life of America’s steel workers and miners face in the “rust belt.” His newest work Coal Mountain Elementary mixes real life testimony from miners and rescuers from an accident in Sago, West Virginia with the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren and newspaper articles and pictures of Chinese mining accidents.

Mark Nowak was born in Buffalo, New York and was strongly influenced by the “working class” culture he was surrounded by. When asked about his education, he says “I was educated in the neighborhood. People who lived next door to me were steelworkers, bricklayers, bakery truck drivers. My dad was the vice president of his union for many years. I went to four grammar schools, two high schools, a community college... I learned almost nothing about literature, about art, about politics, about life, at any of them.” He was educated at Eerie Community College, where he got his first introduction to poetry.

Labor difficulties have been a major focus for Nowak, and he has been in support of and part of the dialogue for multiple different labor groups’ conflicts. Through the United Auto Workers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, he designed a transitional worker-to-worker poetry dialogue for Ford plants in the US and South Africa focusing on analyzing, communicating and expressing their thoughts and feelings on the job and effects of situations such as plant closings, downsizing and the tensions that can exist between workers and management. He also founded the Union of Radical Workers and Writers and through them has helped unionize a Border’s bookstore as well as produce essays and volumes about and even by the employees of big box chain and independent bookstores across the United States and Canada.

Mark Nowak currently serves as the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He is also associated with Speak Out Now: The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture and has his own blog with writings and press releases about recent mining accidents at http://coalmountain.wordpress.com/. He is a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival; Nowak will take part in a featured reading at 8:00 p.m. Thursday, March 11 at Bell Multicultural High School, and will help lead a panel entitled Documentary Poetics in the Langston Room at Busboys and Poets (14th and V) Friday, March 12 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Mike Reid is a sophomore at George Mason University.

Attractive Opposites: A review of Sarah Browning's Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and Arthur Sze's The Ginkgo Light

The following review was written by guest reviewer and 2010 Split This Rock panelist, Bob Blair. Bob has also reviewed Andrea Gibson's Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns for us. Read that review here.

American poetry has always been a big tent – one inclusive of the likes of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot and W.C. Williams, Amiri Baraka and Robert Hayden. Even within the limits of contemporary mainstream verse, writers continue to present an extraordinary range of visions and styles. A side-by-side reading of, for example, Sarah Browning's Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and Arthur Sze's The Ginkgo Light, offers insight into the radically different sensibilities and aesthetic approaches that inhabit that tent today.

Browning is a DC-based, emerging poet with an East Coast, urban orientation. Whiskey in the Garden of Eden is her first book. Sze is a Santa Fe-based, established, academic poet and translator with a West/Southwest and Asian/Amer-Indian orientation. The Ginkgo Light is his 9th book.

The 44 poems in Whiskey are written in unadorned, colloquial language delivered in conversational tones. The “I” speaking in most Whiskey poems is not only distinctly female, but often uniquely Sarah Browning. The poems are intimately personal and set in distinct locales. Frequently that's Washington DC or her childhood Chicago. Browning's poems are inhabited by her son Ben, sister Katie, husband Tom, father and mother, and even her bad boy eighth-grade heart-throb. The spirits of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Harriet Tubman are still out and about in Browning's DC.

Sze's poetry is altogether different. The 23 poems in Ginkgo are literary collages of images and details that frequently find their inspiration in Amer-Indian, Chinese and Japanese culture. They offer a complex and arresting vision built from samplings across a variety of geographies and histories. The “I” speaking in Ginkgo's poems resists classification by gender, nationality, or personal history. A nondescript consciousness addresses the reader describing sights and offering observations in an almost meditative tone.

Some of these differences can be seen by comparing two poems – the first by Sze, the second by Browning – concerning the speakers' relationships with their partners.

"In the Rose Light"

no red-tailed hawk, no crows,
no geese, no raccoon tracks
by the door; when a magpie
flaps across the road,
disappears beyond the window
frame, I ponder frames –
glasses, door jamb, bee hive,
a moment of stillness – trace
an intimate geography:
son in Albany donating a cell
phone so that someone he
will never meet may call
911; clusters of wild irises
in the field; daughter glimpsed
through the doorway, arms
raised, in a ballerina pose,
then, in five minutes, asleep;
though the pink and orange
bougainvilleas are not yet
budding, I incandesce to
our firelight, to ten years
we have entwined each other.

The initial setting of the poem is evoked by the animals' absence; then a passing bird shifts the speaker's thoughts to various types of frames; but consciousness immediately shifts again – to an absent son, local wild flowers, and the sight of a young daughter before bedtime. Finally, the image of the bougainvilleas sets up the closing reflection on of the couple's ten years of “entwining."

This flow of images and associations follows the speaker's mind as it leaps from the natural world, to family, to the flowers that symbolize love and companionship. That movement is more evocative and exploratory than explanatory. The speaker could be male or female, of any ethnicity or nationality, from any social class. The lack of personal identity, by its very ambiguity, invites reader identification.

"Barely"
for TNH

You are away
and I barely remember you,
barely recall our love-makings
going blind in the kitchen
as you press me against the wall.

I try to feel your cock, really feel it –
can the mind alert the body
with memory, with love? – press against me.
It's been two weeks, today. It will be
six more Mondays like this
sitting in the growing sunshine
spring waking me
to myself.

I'll have to do it without you, this year:
celebrate the bulbs pushing through
the reticulated mass of fall leaves
and twigs, my weightiness.

There –
I swear I felt it.

Browning's poem plunges straight into the relationship: absence, longing, physical desire. The “entwining” in “Barely” is straight-on sex, not talismanic flowers. The situation unfolds simply and directly. The emotional focus remains fixed on the speaker's longing for the absent lover. And the final lines implicitly answer the embedded question: yes, the mind, with memory & love, can alert the body.

Many of Browning's poems are initiated by particular events, both personal and public: A family outing in Rock Creek Park (intruded on by passing helicopters), a demonstration at the second Bush inauguration, a post-party car ride home with her dad, an afternoon spent playing in the rain with her sister, and efforts assisting her son with an African-American history assignment. They are short, tightly-ordered lyrics that usually include a spare description of the key event(s), her emotional response, and reflections on the event(s) and response.

Between Whiskey and Ginkgo, the dichotomies are plentiful. Where Browning's poems tend toward emotional/psychological vignettes stressing human compassion, Sze takes a more intellectual/trans-cultural (almost cosmic) slant. Ginkgo's poems are built-up like musical compositions – with sharp, spare images instead of notes or chords – and depend on indirect associational connections. His carefully crafted clusters of images tie together in ways that seem to bind aspects of the natural world to a bewildering array of human activities and artifacts. And certain images developed in one poem (trees, flowers, glazed pottery, even mountain ranges) reappear in later poems to echo and expand the original – subtly and suggestively linking the individual poems.

Even in the more directly political poems, Whiskey and Ginkgo remain worlds apart. Here's Browning:

"In a City of Barricades, I Dream of Baghdad"
Second Inauguration

A man walks into a wedding
and detonates – lace and sweet cakes.
Who imagined love was immune?
One body alone has chosen this future.
We choose to object, cardboard coffins
in our streets. But we've nothing
to draw the cameras, or even the cops.
We make love and weep. We cannot stop.

This poem, like many of the others in Whiskey, shows the essential “lifefulness” of Browning's poems. Life enacting itself through desire and the activities that desire drives. Life's goal is more life – less unnecessary pain and death. The deaths from a suicide bombing are associated with the cardboard coffins at the anti-war demonstration, and opposed by the lovemaking, mourning and commitment expressed in the final line.

Ginkgo's title poem includes its own bomb, but Sze's treatment of it goes in an entirely different direction.

Section 5 from "The Ginkgo Light"

August 6, 1945: a temple in Hiroshima 1130 meters
from the hypocenter disintegrates, while its ginkgo

buds after the blast. When the temple is rebuilt,
they make exit, entrance steps to the left and right

around it. Sometimes one fingers annihilation
before breaking into bliss. A mother with Alzheimer's

knows her son but not where she lives or when
he visits. During the Cultural Revolution,

Xu-mo scrubbed one million dishes on a tanker
and counted them in a trance. A dew point

is where a musher jogs alongside her sled dogs,
sparing them her weight on the ice to the finish.

Unlike the temple, the ginkgo tree survives the blast. And when the temple is rebuilt, the leaf-bearing tree is preserved in place as a natural symbol of hope and recovery. Relatively straight-forward at first, including the annihilation/bliss epigram, the poem then jumps, without transition, to the Alzheimer mother, Xu-mo's labors during Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the finish of a sled-dog race. These odd juxtapositions suggest a kind of aesthetic/ethical jigsaw puzzle – inviting scrutiny and deliberation. Or, perhaps, each poem is a like an extended Zen koan accessible to intuition but not to rational analysis.

In addition to the differences between Whiskey and Ginkgo, the books contain internal variety as well. Whiskey, for example, includes a two-page humorous poem in Q&A survey format, called “Assess Your Own Eating Habits,” that playfully mocks food/body image/weight loss anxieties. It begins:

1. Do you feel a desire to be thin?
Yesterday, chocolate eggs and schoolboy cookies and cheese
and cheese and carrot cake chips toast and butter butter and
toast. OK, today, fruit fruit fruit yogurt juice juice.

And this fun little piece:

"Mobil"

I don't often use car metaphors
in poems
being a girl.
But when I got stuck in fifth gear
on Route 2, racing to Boston,
it was irresistible.
I need my linkages lubricated,
the shy garage man told me
and he's right.

That said, Whiskey and Ginkgo are, if not quite opposites, so divergent in orientation, technique and attitude to reception that – taken together – they well illustrate contemporary American poetry's impressive diversity. And taken together they should be! What the critic and poet Dana Gioia advised for public poetry readings – that poets should read the works of others in addition to their own – applies to the solitary reader, too. Embrace variety! Read outside your comfort zone!

Whiskey in the Garden of Eden
The Word Works
2007, $15.00

The Ginkgo Light
Copper Canyon Press
2009, $15.00
A review copy of The Ginkgo Light was provided by Copper Canyon.


Sarah Browning, besides being a poet, is co-director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival and DC Poets Against the War, and co-editor of the anthology DC Poets Against The War (Argonne House Press, 2004). She has worked as a community organizer in Boston public housing and a political organizer for a variety of progressive and women's causes. She was founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists Institute and Assistant Director of The Fund for Women Artists. For more info on Browning click here.

Arthur Sze, an award winning poet and translator of Chinese verse, is a featured poet at the Split This Rock 2010 Poetry Festival. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he served as the city's first poet laureate from 2006 – 2008. His nine books of poetry and poetry translations are published by Copper Canyon Press. For more information on Sze click here.

Bob Blair is a former English Lit major (way former!) who, after five years with the Peace Corps in Thailand teaching and training teachers, was transformed via academic chrysalis into an economist. But, in recent years, he has returned to his caterpillar heritage by facilitating weekly poetry workshops at Miriam's Kitchen. (www.miriamskitchen.org)

Dancing to the New Music: Upcoming Article in The Nation

The following is an excerpt of an upcoming article by E. Ethelbert Miller in The Nation. The full preview of the article, which will appear in the March 15 edition, is available here.

The first Split This Rock Poetry Festival was held in 2008. I was a participant, along with poets like Martín Espada and Naomi Shihab Nye. I consider us to be believers in the expression of speaking truth to power. On the last day of the festival a number of writers walked down to the White House to protest the war in Iraq. I'm certain that poets visiting Washington in March will have something to say about the foreign policy of the Obama administration and the war in Afghanistan. Our poems--and yes, our chants--always seem to be on call. Once again, our New Year's resolutions contained prayers for peace. The year 2010 represents not just the start of a new year but also the beginning of a new decade. Might it be a prelude to the "terrible teens" of this century? If so, what might poets and writers be doing? What do the times demand?

Up Close and Poetical: Bruce Weigl

Welcome to the second in a series of profiles of featured poets here at Blog This Rock. The series, titled "Up Close and Poetical," aims to introduce you to our featured poets and their body of work. Other profiles can be found here. This profile was written by GMU student and Split This Rock intern Michael McGrath.

I’m often reminded of the difficulty many of us experience when trying to find the words to express what we’ve been through. This can be especially true when such experiences forced us to act in ways that were so overwhelmingly transformational; the person staring back from the mirror can look like a stranger. Someone who has found a way to make this type of experience accessible to others is poet Bruce Weigl.

The work of the Split This Rock Festival featured poet, Bruce Weigl, gives voice to the darker side of existence that often emotionally isolates us from society and even the humanity within us. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, Weigl was exposed to the demons of humanity through firsthand experience with horrors of war. In today’s modern America, the ghost which followed Weigl home from Vietnam are etched into the faces of modern warfighters returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For these individuals, Weigl’s work and subsequent career demonstrates hope for the future that even though their lives have changed, they have not lost that which makes them human. For those whom have never lived through such atrocities, Weigl’s work creates a vivid moment of accessibility that guides an audience to share in the emotional experience within his words.

Those new to poetry will find Weigl’s work quite different from the poetry they once dread from high school English classes. Rather than using abstract constructions, Weigl’s words flow off the page in a familiar manner that resembles the way thoughts flow freely through our minds as we experience the events of our own lives. Speaking about poetry, Weigl has said, “The poem itself, means that no matter however horrible the subject, we can somehow go beyond it as people, as human beings.” This connection with the average individual speaks to the importance of his work and the promise of poetry to empower every man, woman, and child.

While introducing Song of Napalm at the College of Southern Maryland’s 1991 Literary Collection Series, Weigl spoke of his struggles to reconcile the horrors he experienced as a Vietnam Veteran through the his craft as a poet. He said, “You learn that as a poet you want to make the words beautiful, yet your subject is so dark and terrible. I think the salvation comes in the belief… that somehow in the act of writing the poem, is an affirmation of life.” This notion of redemption is not unique to warfighters, and serves as a beacon for anyone struggling with the unique demons of their own pasts.

Bruce Wiegl will be a featured poet at the upcoming Split This Rock Festival in Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010. Weigl is currently a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the Lorain County Community College and has been an active member of the poetry community for quite some time. He has won multiple awards for his work which include such honors as the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Poet’s Prize from the National Academy of Poets, as well as two Pushcart Prizes. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a poem he wrote in 1998, "Song of Napalm," which drew from his experiences as a warfighter during the Vietnam War.



Michael McGrath has recently come to appreciate poetry after he was dragged kicking and screaming to a live reading. His postings on this blog will be from the perspective of someone completely new to poetry, so he asks that he be forgiven if his views seem under-informed. Michael is a native to the DC Metropolitan area and has been involved in the LGBT community for more years than ought to be said publicly. He is senior at George Mason University majoring in communication with a minor in conflict analysis and resolution. And, if everything goes as planned, he will graduate in May 2010.

The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing: Updated!

The following is an excerpt of a review of The Call: An Anthology of Women's Writing by Caroline Malone at the Monserrat Review. You can read the complete review here.

In the anthology’s title poem, “The Call,” by Calder Lowe, the mundane sound of a train whistle transports the speaker back three centuries to the landscape of her ancestors” – glass blowers in the Black Forest, kin carrying Lafayette “off the battlefield”, the Von Eberhardt’s glowing furnaces – where fragments of history lead her back to the recent past. Her ancestors’ craft sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, glass being a difficult medium with which to work. The speaker imagines “Some of the goblets flower, some crack.” The church bells that end stanza one are then heard at the end of the poem where the immediate past is recalled in which a single mother abandons her children, her son left at “an orphanage / tucked behind the spire of a Presbyterian Church,” her creations left behind. The speaker carries her history as part of her identity, and one sound, the whistle of the train, collapses the divisions of time allowing the speaker to connect with the past.

The writers represented in The Call are summoned to memory and respond with a wide palette of voices to bear witness to the lives of extraordinary ordinary women: daughters, granddaughters, mothers, lovers, caretakers, sisters, adolescents who celebrate life.

CONTRIBUTORS include:

Cynthia Benson, Grace Cavalieri, K.E. Copeland, Carolyn Dille, Sharon Doyle, Jean Emerson,
Blanca Espinosa, Anne Gelhaus, Cynthia W. Gentry, Lara Gularte, Parthenia M. Hicks, Kathie Isaac-Luke, Calder Lowe, Margaret Luongo, Patricia McKeown, B.L.P. Simmons, Mary Lou Taylor, and Roberta Young

Available today, exclusively from
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