Split This (Global) Rock: Love letter to Kenya

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, a Kenyan poet, author of Hurling Words at Consciousness and co-editor of Pambazuka News , heard about Split This Rock from the Africa Poets Yahoo Group. Mukoma is sharing with us a poem commissioned by the BBC World Service on the ongoing crisis in Kenya.

Kenya – A Love Letter
Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Inside looking out, snow is falling and I am thinking
how happy we once were, when promises and dreams
came easy and how when we, lovers covered only

by a warm Eldoret night, you waved a prophecy
at a shooting star and said, "when the time comes
we shall name our first child, Kenya" and how I

laughed and said "yes our child then shall be country
and human" and we held hands, rough and toughened
by shelling castor seeds. My dear, when did our

clasped hands become heavy chains and anchors holding
us to the mines and diamond and oil fields? Our hands
calloused by love and play, these same hands – when

did they learn to grip a machete or a gun to spit hate?
And this earth that drinks our blood like a hungry child
this earth that we have scorched to cinders - when we

are done eating it, how much of it will be left for Kenya?
My dear, our child is born, is dying. Tomorrow the child
will be dead.

Special Split This Rock issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly

Beltway Poetry Quarterly is beginning 2008 with a rousing issue featuring seventeen poets who are participating the Split This Rock poetry festival as organizers or readers. As co-editor Regie Cabico writes in his introduction, these poets sing "about gentrification, pop culture, immigration, war, heritage, disability, history and American iconography" to create a home "in the gut of a government that should hear, swallow, and ingest verses of provocation and witness."

The Split This Rock Issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly features poems by: Winona Addison * Naomi Ayala * Sarah Browning * Grace Cavalieri * Teri Ellen Cross * Heather Davis * Joel Dias-Porter * Yael Flusberg * Brian Gilmore * E. Ethelbert Miller * Princess of Controversy * Tanya Snyder * Susan Tichey * Melissa Tuckey * Dan Vera * Rosemary Winslow * Kathi Wolfe

The Split This Rock Issue (Volume 9, Number 1), is co-edited by Regie Cabico and Kim Roberts. The issue is available online now at http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

Attention Videographers and Filmmakers

Split This Rock Poetry Festival has put out a call for film and video submissions. Looking for a max of 15 minutes on "artistic, experimental, and challenging interpretations of poetry that explore critical social issues." Deadline is January 30, 2008. It will be juried by Francesco Levato, Executive Director of the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Do you have memories of great film or video exploration of poems or the role of poetry in witness and provocation? If so, leave a comment and links if available.

Howard Nemerov for some New Year's inspiration

A recent reading by Brookland Area Writers and Artists included this poem by former poet laureate Howard Nemerov, which I thought a great example of poetry using humor to skewer jingoism.

TO THE GOVERNOR & LEGISLATURE OF MASSACHUSETTS

When I took a job teaching in Massachusetts
I didn't know and no one told me that I'd have to sign
An oath of loyalty to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Now that I'm hooked, though, with a house
And a mortgage on the house, the road ahead
Is clear: I sign. But I want you gentlemen to know
That till today it never once occurred to me
To overthrow the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
By violence or subversion, or by preaching either.
But now I'm not so sure. It makes a fellow think,
Can such things be? Can such things be in the very crib
Of our liberties, and East of the Hudson, at that?
So if the day come that I should shove the Berkshire Hills
Over the border and annex them to Vermont,
Or snap Cape Cod off at the elbow and scatter
Hyannis to Provincetown beyond the twelve-mile limit,
Proclaiming apocalypsopetls to my pupils
And with state troopers dripping from my fingertips
Squeaking "You promised, you broke your promise!"
You gentlemen just sit there with my signature
And keep on lawyer-talking like nothing had happened,
Lest I root out that wagon tongue on Bunker Hill
And fungo your Golden Dome right into Fenway Park
Like any red-celled American boy ought to done
Long ago in the first place, just to keep in practice.

Garcia Lorca in Iran

This past Sunday's New York Times Magazine featured a wonderful essay by Zarah Ghahramani (as told to Robert Hillman) titled "Poetry of Protest."

In it, Ghahramani talks about how the work of Federico García Lorca inspired her as a young woman living under Iran's dictatorship. She became involved in the peaceful student protests and Garcia Lorca was an inspiring model for her during this time.

...I raised my voice in the street, along with thousands of other student protesters. I believed I was keeping faith with García Lorca, and also with the great poets Saadi and Hafez of long-ago Persia, who honored love and liberty.
-- Zarah Ghahramani

It's a moving testament to the power of poetry to inspire and to agitate. I was reminded of Dennis Nurkse at the Cut Loose the Body reading who spoke of García Lorca's martyrdom for freedom and his example of one who was tortured for his beliefs and his standing against tyranny. -- Dan Vera

You can read the entire essay here.

Cut Loose the Body: Action Ideas

This letter was given to attendees at the Cut Loose the Body reading at American University Museum. Rose Marie Berger, co-editor of the anthology, suggested posting it here to give people some ideas for taking action to stop torture:

Dear Friend,

We are very grateful that this copy of Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib Paintings has found its way into your hands.
“Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants,” writes author Umberto Eco, “but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.”
We want the poems in this collection to establish a different kind of bond between you and those who are held without trial and subjected to inhuman interrogation techniques. We invite you to consciously remove your tacit support from the inquisitor and boldly step forward as defender of human decency and the rule of law.
We ask you to do three things: Educate yourself. Talk with others. Act courageously.

Educate Yourself: Write down three questions you have about torture, then look for answers to your questions on these Web sites: The Center for Constitutional Rights (www.ccrjustice.org); Amnesty International (web.amnesty.org); Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (www.tassc.org).

Talk with others: Host an evening to read the poems in this book and discuss with others what you’ve learned in the process of developing your questions and seeking answers. (Poets Against War offers tips on how to host a poetry reading at www.poetsagainstthewar.org/createreading.asp.) Consider showing the one hour interview between poet Robert Hass and Fernando Botero about the Abu Ghraib paintings (available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGIa-9vCSto).

Act Courageously: Send a copy of these poems to your local, state, or federal representatives and ask them to explain to you what they are doing to prevent torture in America’s name, what steps they are taking to close the Guantánamo detention camp, and how they are holding the Executive Branch accountable for preventing torture in any form. Include one of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings with your letter. These can be downloaded from Revista Diner (www.revistadiners.com.co/noticia.php3?nt=24663) and the Marlborough Gallery (www.marlboroughgallery.com/artists/botero/artwork.html).
The true poetry begins where the words of the poems end. Your action in the world is pure poetry.

Rose M. Berger and Joseph Ross
Editors, Cut Loose the Body

Cut Loose the Body: Poetry as “Anti-Code”

Organizers of Saturday’s reading from Cut Loose the Body, an anthology of poems about torture and artist Fernando Botero’s works on Abu Ghraib, had set up a few dozen chairs at the American University Museum – an understandable expectation for an evening devoted to careful scrutiny of something we generally don’t want to think about – torture being committed by our government in our name. But the seats were all claimed well before the reading started, and rows were added until the supply of chairs was exhausted. And still people came, sitting on the floor and leaning against the walls, intent on bearing witness.

The chatter of old friends greeting one another in English and Spanish contrasted with the silence in the surrounding galleries as people took in the disturbing and startlingly extensive exhibit – scores of works in oil, pencil, and watercolor featuring Botero’s trademark “inflated” figures brutalized and bloody, tied to cell bars, menaced by fierce dogs, tortured alone and in groups. Something about the hefty Botero figures brought to mind even more vividly the gaunt prisoners in the actual photographs from Abu Ghraib, and the surreal reality that the orders for the degrading and inhumane treatment that was now depicted before our eyes were given just a few miles away in the White House.

The podium stood before a larger-than-life triptych of three prisoners, hooded and held in gloomy cells. Jack Rasmussen, director and curator of the American University museum, announced that, astonishingly, this was the only showing of the entire exhibit in any museum anywhere. How can that be? Shouldn’t every major museum in this country be bringing light to these dark truths?

The readers were introduced by Rose Marie Berger and Joseph Ross, who edited Cut Loose the Body, a collaboration by the AU Museum and DC Poets Against the War. Ross said the goal of the project was, in the end, to say something simple: “We object to torture.” Berger spoke of the “Republic of Poetry” described by Martín Espada, a contributor to the anthology, and urged people to move beyond seeing the art and hearing the words into taking action by supporting Amnesty International and the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition.

The first reader was Kyle Dargan, managing editor of Callaloo, whose poem “Habeas Corpus” includes the line that gave the anthology its title. Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, who teaches at NYU, was the final reader. E. Ethelbert Miller, a dean of the DC poetry scene, cited a line from Carolyn Forché, “There is nothing one man will not do to another.”

The evening featured several readers affiliated with American University, including associate professor Consuelo Hernandez, who also hails from Botero’s Colombia; MFA student Tala Rahmeh; and Myra Sklarew, professor emerita of literature and author of the forthcoming Holocaust and the Construction of Memory.

Dennis Nurkse, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and serves on the board of Amnesty International USA, recited lines from an anonymous prisoner in 14th Century Spain and from 20th Century poet Federico Garcia Lorca, assassinated for his anti-fascist politics and for being gay. The order for Lorca’s painful death, Nurkse said, was given in code: “Give him strong coffee.” Said Nurkse, in what could be a concise summation of the purpose of the evening, the work of DC Poets Against the War, and the goal of Split This Rock poetry festival, “Poetry is the anti-code.”

- Pete Montgomery

• Photos from the reading can be found on the Split This Rock
  Flickr page at http://flickr.com/photos/20390684@N02/sets/72157603117982631/
  
• You can read a post about this event by organizer Joseph Ross at http://livewrite.blogspot.com/
  
• The exhibit of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings continues at the American University Museum until December 30. For more information: http://www.american.edu/cas/katzen/museum/2007nov_botero.cfm