Poem-of-the-Week: Wang Ping

Solstice in Lhasa


What more can you say
Nomad daughter of glaciers?
City has bleached the sun from your face
18 years old with a freckled nose
Hides of yak, barley, sandy wind
Knees stiff from scrubbing toilets
What dreams keep you alive
On the marble floor of Gangkar Hotel?

Drunken tourists and their nightingales
Money is the moon on Lhasa's holy streets
In Beijing a storm drops 36 tons
Of dust upon the city of concrete
Nomad daughter from the Black River
What more can you say?
The wetland is becoming a desert
Home for rats, carcass of yaks

The salted tea you brought to my room
Yellow butter afloat from a distant factory
"It's fake but tastes okay.
The real is gone, like snowcaps."

Wind, breath, naked river beds
At dusk, a boy on motorcycle
Comes home with his last herd
Nomad daughter from the Sacred Lake
What dreams keep you going
In the glass cage of illusion?

Before the clouds
Cabs, trucks, mobs of fortune seekers
Behind the clouds
Patola Palace absent of its Buddha

Your ancestors are on the road
Nomad daughter from the Blue Treasure Plateau
Wooden gloves and padded knees
Long prostrations into the thin air
Their cry of never-perish ghosts
Calling you to keep the lamp burning, burning

And you shout to me across the street
"Sister, please find me a rich husband in America."

-Wang Ping

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Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1985. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House Press. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. She had two solo photography and multi-media exhibitions--"Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges" at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and "All Roads to Lhasa" at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College. www.wangping.com
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Wang Ping will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism-four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

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!

Poem of the Week - Francisco Aragón

Torso


Despite the absent head (whose eyes

were the green of apples)
the supple flesh hums
with the afterglow

of those eyes
which is why the curve
of chest shimmers which is why

the twist of loin turns
that look into a smile, snaring
your eyes, leading

them slowly to regions
below the waist...That block
of stone more than a figure

disfigured and short; cascade
of shoulder glints
like a sinewy beast

of prey, whose edges blink
like stars-that torso:
gazing on its own. Step closer:

go blind


after Rilke

from Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press, forthcoming March, 2010)
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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 resides in Arlington, VA and works out of the ILS' offices in Washington, DC. www.franciscoaragon.net
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Aragón will be featured at Split This Rok Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism-four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

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!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Karren Alenier Write-Up of Dennis Brutus Memorial

The following is an excerpt from Karren Alenier's blog discussing the Dennis Brutus event last Sunday. To read the full article and see more pictures of the event, click here.

The occasion of the Dresser meeting the venerable Brutus was the 2008 Split This Rock poetry conference. As a keynote speaker, Dennis Brutus viscerally made real what conference organizer Sarah Browning meant by naming her conference Split This Rock. What was especially moving to the Dresser was how such a modest and giving person could stand and suffer great hardship in the name of social justice and good common sense. Without hearing him speak, the Dresser would not have attended the LaFayette rally that crisp Sunday in March. The Dresser told those assembled that she was inspired to speak because of what Dennis Brutus said at the Split This Rock conference and she saw that Mr. Brutus who was standing in front of the crowd was moved by that confession. Afterwards, she spoke with him face to face and he embraced her. He said he was hoping people would be moved to action.

Photo credit: Karren Alenier

Celebrate Four Years of SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE

Celebrate Four Years of SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE
With Young DC Poets Abdul Ali, Danielle Evennou, and Adam Pellegrini
Sunday, January 17, 2010, 4-6pm
Langston Room - Busboys and Poets
@ 14th & V Streets NW

Abdul Ali is an alumn of Howard University where he edited The Amistad and became a writer. Since then, he has organized readings, exhibits, radio programming, and most recently joined the staff of Split This Rock Poetry Festival. He resides in Ward 6 but used to live in Ward 1. "Poems are all about breath. The breath will take care of form."

Danielle Evennou is the recipient of a 2010 Young Emerging Artist Grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is board president of the DC women's spokenword organization, mothertongue, coordinating/hosting regular spokenword events and projects. She also serves as a co-host for Sparkle: a queer-driven reading series for all, at Busboys & Poets 5th & K. Danielle was a featured reader at Queering Sound 2009, Capital Pride 2009, and Poetic Situations, as well as at Sparkle.

Adam Pellegrini is currently working on an MFA in poetry at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's lived in DC for the past year and a half with his beautiful girlfriend. His poetry has recently been published in the new anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC. Adam is also the co-editor of Cartographer Electric, an online journal of poetry and fiction.

Sunday Kind of Love takes place the 3rd Sunday of every month in the Langston Room at Busboys and Poets' 14th & V location. The series is co-hosted by Sarah Browning and Katy Richey and co-sponsored by Busboys and Poets and Split This Rock.

As always, bring a poem for the open mic! For more information: browning at splitthisrock dot org.

Photo of the Week: Abdul Ali

This new feature will highlight a different photo each week from the 2008 festival. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Abdul Ali, Split This Rock Program Associate, at the 2008 opening ceremony in Busboys and Poets. Abdul will be reading at Sunday Kind of Love this Sunday, January 17.

Photo Credit: © jill brazel photography
To contact: jill at jillbrazel dot com

Activist Vital Stats: Laura Craig Mason, Updated

This new feature will showcase activists that embody the spirit of Split This Rock in the world. If you would like to suggest an activist to feature, please contact me at khsplitthisrock at gmail dot com.

Activist Vital Stats: Laura Craig Mason

Name: Laura Craig Mason

Location: Montgomery County, MD.

Causes: Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force: The Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force is an all-volunteer, non-violent group founded in the 1980s to promote peaceful and safe access to women's health clinics in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. I have been lucky enough to work with them for 5 years, and it has been both challenging and rewarding work.

Visions in Feminism: Visions in Feminism is a local conference held annually in the DC area since 2001. Each year Visions in Feminism seeks to provide a forum for diverse perspectives on feminist praxis. Last year I taught at the conference, and this year I am lucky enough to be on the collective that is putting it together.

Personal website: My podcast ‘Fully Engaged Feminism’ is now 1 year old!!

Inspirational Quote: "My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you...We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."- from “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action “by Audre Lorde. I have the inside of my arm tattooed with ‘Your silence will not protect you.’

A favorite poem or poet: There are too many poets & poems to single out as ‘the one best’ but time and again I turn to the writings of Marge Piercy. I really love her poem ‘For Strong Women’ from The Moon is Always Female.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

why aren't you feminine, why aren't

you soft, why aren't you quiet, why

aren't you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined

to do something others are determined

not to be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

to butt her way though a steel wall.

Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding

inside. A strong woman is a woman making

herself strong every morning while her teeth

loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

a tooth, midwives used to say, and now

every battle a scar. A strong woman

is a mass of scar tissue that aches

when it rains and wounds that bleed

when you bump them and memories that get up

in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love

like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

A strong woman is a woman who loves

strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;

she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf

sucking her young. Strength is not in her, but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

A Poetry Discussion: Declension in the Village of Chung Luong

Split This Rock and The Writer’s Center present:

A Poetry Discussion:
Declension in the Village of Chung Luong by Bruce Weigl
“The book's locus is Chung Luong, birthplace of Weigl's Vietnamese daughter, Hanh, and one of the poorest and most beautiful places on earth.”

Discussion led by Katherine Howell and Yvette Neisser Moreno

Thursday, January 21, 7:15 pm
at the George Washington University
Rome Hall Rome 351
801 22nd St. NW, Washington, DC
(1 block East of Foggy Bottom Metro at I and 22nd Sts; For a campus map, click here.)

Free and open to the public. Rome Hall is wheelchair-accessible.


Declension is available for purchase for $14 at The Writer’s Center and Busboys and Poets.

Bruce Weigl—an award-winning poet, translator of Vietnamese poetry, Vietnam War veteran, and Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Ohio—will be a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Declension in the Village of Chung Luong is his 13th book of poetry.

The Writer's Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers. www.writer.org

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness invites poets, writers, artists, activists, dreamers, and all concerned world citizens to Washington, DC, for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation, March 10-13, 2010. Featuring Sinan Antoon, Jan Beatty, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Andrea Gibson, Fady Joudah, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, Bruce Weigl, and many more. Readings, workshops, panel discussions, film, a book fair, and public action. www.SplitThisRock.org

For more information: yvettenm at verizon dot net or 301-879-1959