Sunday Kind of Love: Pintura : Palabra Reading

Sunday Kind of Love

presents

PINTURA : PALABRA

a project in ekphrasis

Post-Workshop Reading  

  

Carlos Almaraz, Night Magic (Blue Jester), 1988, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Gloria Werner © 1988, Carlos Almaraz Estate

 

Sunday February 16, 2014

5-7pm

Busboys & Poets

2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC 20009

Hosted by

Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5 online or at the door

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets,

Split This Rock, and Letras Latinas

"Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art"--on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until March 2--is the inspiration for this reading, which gathers mostly DC area poets who took part in a workshop on site at the museum. The workshop was led by award-winning poets Valerie Martínez and Brenda Cárdenas, who have both served as Poet Laureates of Santa Fe, NM and Milwaukee, WI, respectively. Joining Martínez and Cárdenas at this special reading are the workshop participants:  

Elizabeth Acevedo 

Carlos Parada Ayala
Carmen Calatayud 

John Chávez 

Samuel Miranda 

Juan J. Morales 

Yvette Neisser Moreno 

Maritza Rivera 

Emma Trelles 

Dan Vera

 

PINTURA : PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis aims to foster ekphrastic writing inspired by Latino art while the exhibit travels around the United States. It is a program of Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Brenda Cárdenas has authored Boomerang and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. She also co-edited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mind the Gap: A Portfolio of Poem-Print Translations, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in Chicago's Urban Wilderness, The Golden Shovel Anthology: Honoring the Continuing Legacy and Influence of Gwendolyn Brooks, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, Pilgrimage, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She has given readings widely, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Tempe Center for the Arts, Brooklyn College, The Milwaukee Repertory Theater, the Chazen Museum of Art, and the Bryant Park Reading Room. An Associate Professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-2012.

Valerie Martínez's books include Absence, Luminescent, World to World, A Flock of Scarlet Doves, Each and Her, And They Called It Horizon, and This is How It Began. Each and Her won the 2012 Arizona Book Award. Valerie's work has been widely published, including in The Best American Poetry, Fifteen Poets of Todays' Latino Renaissance, the Washington Post, and the Poetry Foundation's Poetry Everywhere series. Valerie has more than twenty years of experience as a teacher, primarily at the college level.  For over fifteen years, she has also worked with children, youth, adults and elders in a wide range of community engagement programs. Valerie is a Director and Core Artist with Littleglobe, a non-profit based in New Mexico consisting of artists, facilitators, activists, and cultural workers devoted to building individual and community capacity through art. Learn more about Valerie at  www.valeriemartinez.net and www.littleglobe.org.

Split This Rock Responds to Criticism of Inaccessibility

Stephen Kuusisto has reason to be frustrated with Split This Rock’s website not being accessible to people with disabilities. He pointed out two problems: PDFs of the schedule of the upcoming Split This Rock Poetry Festival are not ADA compliant and emails we send out frequently lack the descriptive tags that should be attached to embedded images.

We didn’t know that PDFs are not accessible, but ignorance is no excuse. When Stephen wrote to me, I immediately wrote back to apologize and tell him we’d rectify the situation. Not labeling images, I’m afraid, is the result of all of us – a tiny staff at Split This Rock – feeling stretched to the limit and cutting corners. I was wrong not to train new colleagues and not to give all of us continual reminders, so that we wouldn’t make these errors.

We are still learning. We sometimes miss things. But when those errors and omissions are pointed out, we are grateful: it offers us the opportunity to improve how we practice what we preach.  

  

I would like to take a minute to share the ways we have tried to make Split This Rock a place that is welcoming to people with disabilities. We were lucky to have the poet and writer Kathi Wolfe on our first festival coordinating committee back in 2008. Kathi is legally blind. A writer and poet, she urged us to include a disability rights and cultural perspective.

We designed our website to be ADA compliant, venues for Split This Rock events are wheelchair accessible, and we make large-print materials available at our festivals. Once we were able to provide ASL interpretation for a festival featured reading and we will strive to do so again this year. I know this is by no means a perfect record, but we are trying.

We have also welcomed and accepted proposals for panels and themed group readings at Split This Rock Poetry Festival on disability poetics, giving festival participants an opportunity to learn from poets and activists about the disability rights movement and about disability culture. We’ve presented poets with disabilities as festival features, including Stephen at our first in 2008 and Sheila Black at the upcoming festival in March.

Accessibility is one of our core values: “Accessibility – Split This Rock values individuals of all abilities and strives to make its programs and materials accessible to all.” We include people with disabilities in the language we use to describe the stunning diversity of American poetry to which we are dedicated.

On this occasion, though, we screwed up. Given the lack of access that people with disabilities face every day, I don’t blame Stephen for being angry that an organization that claims to be dedicated to inclusion excluded him. He is right that we should have built into our schedule – into the daily culture of the organization – periodic check-ups of the website for ADA compliance.

This episode challenges us to rededicate ourselves to accessibility. We are in the midst of a website redesign, for example, which we had hoped to have launched by now. The site will be ADA compliant and we’ll all be able to update it, a huge improvement for the staff, as, at the moment, only one very part-time member of the staff can make changes – very slowly – to the current site. Unfortunately the launch has been delayed, but we are eagerly awaiting the new site and its greater functionality.

I am sorry that Stephen will not be joining us for this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival. We will miss his wisdom and his powerful voice. I hope he will consider being part of future festivals. And we welcome his further engagement – and that of other people with disabilities and advocates for disability rights – as we continue to learn and to build the kind of organization we wish Split This Rock to be, one that is welcoming and accessible to all.

Sarah Browning

Executive Director

Split This Rock

Martín Espada Workshop & Reading in NYC Feb 8

MEDICINE SHOW THEATRE - WORD/PLAY READING SERIES

Saturday, February 8:
POETS TAKE THE STAGE: Martín Espada and Lauren Schmidt

2-5 pm: POETRY LIKE BREAD: A POETRY WORKSHOP
with Martín Espada

This is a generative workshop, rather than a workshop for the critique of poems. Participants will generate new work based on the distribution and discussion of poems by Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Grace Paley, Roque Dalton, Marilyn Nelson and Claribel Alegría. Workshop participants will write on the spot, then share their work, reading aloud to the group (for thunderous applause only). Together we will speak for the rights the others are down upon, prophesy like Cassandra (but be listened to this time), catch sight of the promised land, and prove Dalton’s proposition that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

Fee: $25, payable by cash or check (made out to Medicine Show) at the door
Reservations: cbrandt@medicineshowtheatre.org or 212 262-4216.

7-9 pm: THE MEANING OF THE SHOVEL: A READING

Martín Espada will be reading from his newly-released collection, The Meaning of the Shovel (Smokestack Books, UK). This collection brings together, for the first time, all of Martín Espada’s poems about work. Espada has worked as a bouncer in a bar, a primate caretaker, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, a gas station attendant and a tenant lawyer. As a poet, he acts as an advocate for the Latino community, particularly the immigrant working class, from farm workers sprayed with pesticides in the field to the kitchen staff who died in a restaurant atop the World Trade Center on 9/11. This is a book that explores the emotional and often invisible landscape of labor: the church janitor who quits in the middle of the night, the cab driver who wants to write a love poem to win back his estranged wife. The title poem, based on the poet’s experience digging latrines in Nicaragua, embraces the vision of revolutionary change.

Schmidt will be reading from her collections, Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (Main Street Rag) and Psalms from the Dining Room (Wipf and Stock). Jim Daniels says of Psalms, based on the poet’s experience working in a soup kitchen: “Lauren Schmidt lays down riffs like a fierce blues guitarist, one who knows the power of each carefully chosen note. These poems explode with tough
compassion. They sting a little bit—they make us flinch in recognition. Schmidt's sharply etched details tell the powerful stories of her characters' struggles to be seen, to be acknowledged as human. These poems remind us of how close we all are to each other, despite efforts at denial and distance, despite how violence can erode the human spirit. Her characters fight for dignity in the face of everything rigged to keep them down.”

Admission: $7

Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble
549 W. 52nd St
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10019
www.medicineshowtheatre.org

Poem of the Week: Danez Smith

               

juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet  

one is hard & the other tried to be

          one is fast & the other was faster

                    one is loud & one is a song

                    with one note & endless rest

           

                     one's whole life is a flash

        both spend their life

        trying to find a warmth to call home

both spark quite the debate,

some folks want to protect them/some think we should just get rid

                                      of the damn things all together.

 

-Danez Smith 

Used by permission.

Danez Smith is a Cave Canem Fellow, Pushcart Nominee, Survivor & Black Queer from St. Paul, MN. Danez was featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith & was a finalist for the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize. Danez is the author of hands on ya knees, a chapbook published by Penmanship Books. His full-length collection, ‘[insert] Boy, will be published in 2014 by Yes Yes Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Devil’s Lake, The Cortland Review, Anti-, & elsewhere. Danez started writing because of slams & necessity, & placed 6^th in the world at the 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam & is the 2013 Rustbelt Midwest Regional Slam Champion. Danez twerks with the best, has no time for the rest. He writes & lives in Oakland, CA.

 

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.

In Memory of Pete Seeger, 1919-2014

Split This Rock mourns the loss of Pete Seeger, folk singer, organizer, voice for all of us in the struggle for justice. We celebrate his extraordinary life and courage.

Below, we are proud to republish a poem in Pete's honor by 2012 featured poet Kathy Engel. Please feel free to pass it on.

A radio documentary of Pete's life is here.

From an interview on Democracy Now! -

AMY GOODMAN: And for someone who isn’t so hopeful, who is listening to this right now, trying to find their way, what would you say?

PETE SEEGER: Realize that little things lead to bigger things. That’s what Seeds is all about. And this wonderful parable in the New Testament: the sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousand fold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

— Interview, Democracy Now, May 4, 2009

Dad, Pete and Obama                                                           

When Pete sang at the Lincoln Memorial I called to ash.

I had played Pete as your last breath slipped out, 

the rest of you already gone.

Pete ushered you; your hero sang for the man

whose name you spoke the week you died:

Obama, you said, sipping water,

I believe something is happening, don’t you?

Pete with his grandson who lived in Nicaragua,

the country we loved in its burning birth, Pete

who wouldn’t testify, Pete Civil Rights, Pete Peace,

Pete 1199, Pete this land, our land—

Pete Clearwater, Pete and Toshi, Pete and

Brother Kirkpatrick, Pete and June reading poems

at the UN Rally circa 1983, Pete the unwavering

for all who were taken, all who picketed and as Pete said

for the young people who taught us not to be afraid

those Montgomery sit-in days, Pete in his power,

in the place of power, suspenders and banjo, train

chug of workers belting out a new old gusty day, ghosts

of resistance swaying past the monument, feeding

the hungry crowd, this day when Pete sang

at the Lincoln Memorial I called to you

who took a bus alone to D.C. at 80 to protest:

I called to your ash, Dad, who took me there first.

                                                                                    Kathy Engel 2009

Originally published in Adanna. Used by permission.

Split This Rock Goes to Seattle!

Join Split This Rock at AWP in Seattle

  

February 27-March 1, 2014

Table BB38

2 Conference Presentations

  

Splitistas Katy Richey & Jonathan B. Tucker sporting their 2012 festival T shirts at AWP 2013

We hope to see many friends at the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), February 27-March 1, in Seattle.

Split This Rock will be at Table BB38 in the bookfair with haiku post cards to president Obama and a drawing for a free festival registration.

We'll also be presenting two official conference programs: A 2014 festival preview reading with Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and Wang Ping on Saturday at noon and an interactive workshop on Thursday at 1:30 pm on "Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word," with Elizabeth Acevedo, Josh Healey, Pages Matam,  and Jonathan Tucker. 

Read on for more details. Poetry is everywhere!

Visit us at Table BB38

Splitistas -- like the two friendly and brilliant ones pictured above -- will be on hand to meet you and tell you more about our efforts to bring poetry to the center of public life - where it belongs! Stop by to write a Haiku Post Card to President Obama and to enter a drawing for a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014.

Two Split This Rock Conference Presentations

Intense/Beautiful/Devoted: 

Poems of Provocation & Witness

Saturday, March 1, noon-1:15 pm

Room 301, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3

Sarah Browning, Natalie Diaz, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Wang Ping

Leonard Bernstein wrote, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." Poets today are looking without flinching at our world of drones, evictions, gun shows, and violence to the earth, as they tell the many stories of our lives. Happily, too, they are imagining alternatives and provoking change. A reading of intense and striking music, in the spirit of Split This Rock, with Patricia Smith providing opening remarks.

Engaging Youth with Slam Poetry and Spoken Word

Thursday, February 27, 1:30-2:45 pm

Room 604, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

Pages Matam, Jonathan Tucker, Josh Healey, Elizabeth Acevedo

As performance poetry and slam competition grows in popularity, many organizations are using the energetic and entertaining format of slam to engage, inspire, and motivate young students. In this interactive workshop, leading youth workers will discuss the benefits and challenges of slam poetry programs and facilitate dialogue among participants about best practices and how to reach and motivate more students using poetry. 

The full conference program and schedule are here.

Poem of the Week: Anne Waldman

             

excerpt from Manatee/Humanity 

the aquarium deserted now,

this is the song at dusk I write in the notebook:

strange skin

not quite seal

not quite dolphin

inchoate

texture like

something you forget

something you didn't even see

the first time

old shoe

sentient being with others in watery caves

lights off

with motive & mind up a ladder

mouth moving

quixotic mind

quick flick

who are me

who haunt me

please haunt me

summoned by the dream

the kusha grass instructs

you might say a kind of ceremony

gather up these nightmares

this in a public space

where many minds meet

& pass around the objects of this dream

a blindfold, a crystal, a card with a bodhisattva upon it

gather them up & making an offering

all the bikkus going down on their knees for this

in this world marked out by the augur

interstices between living & dead

an initiation on the nature of time

& of continuity in a dark time

mean world: humanity

dream world: manatee

secret world: om mani padme manatee hum

om mani humanity padme hum

the center of reference becomes movement in this ritual

-Anne Waldman

Used by permission.

From Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Books, 2009)

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and poetics, and an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997). Waldman is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks's Church and she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in NYC, and has recently been involved in projects around the theme of Symbiosis, which studies the interaction between two or more different biological species.