Photo of the Week: Hope is the Thing With Feathers

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Two festival participants at the 2008 Cento.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

“the beautiful, needful thing”: in memory of Dr. Dorothy Height

This morning in the nation’s capitol, mourners said farewell to Dr. Dorothy Height, a life-long Civil Rights activist to whom this nation owes a debt of thanks. Rather than end my blogging stint on Harriet describing some of the revolutionary things that National Poetry Month has allowed this nation and its poets to accomplish, as I had originally planned, I have decided to dedicate this space to the memory of Dr. Dorothy Height. This is fundamentally about poetry, too, because I am curious about the ways we have and can and will memorialize the women and men who make this world the sort of place in which I want to live.

- Camille Dungy on Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation - read the full piece here, including a nice shout out to Split This Rock.

Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners

What happened earlier this month happens almost every day somewhere in the world: Miners are killed at work. And why do they die--or for whom? Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China's Shanxi province die, in part, for us. As consumers who walk the aisles at WalMarts, dollar stores, and suburban shopping malls, we fuel the extraction of coal and other minerals every time we purchase items that are intimately connected to miners around the world.

- from "Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners," by Split This Rock 2010 featured poet Mark Nowak, published yesterday in Common Dreams. Read the full piece here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/26-7 and add a comment or link to your FB profile to get the word out. Thanks!

Poem of the Week: Ocean Vuong

Kissing in Vietnamese

My grandmother kisses

as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,

where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes

through the kitchen window,

as if somewhere, a body is falling apart

and flames are making their way back

through the intricacies of a young boy’s thigh,

as if to walk out the door, your torso

would dance from exit wounds.

When my grandmother kisses, there would be

no flashy smooching, no western music

of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe

you inside her, nose pressed to cheek

so that your scent is relearned

and your sweat pearls into drops of gold

inside her lungs, as if while she holds you

death also, is clutching your wrist.

My grandmother kisses as if history

never ended, as if somewhere

a body is still

falling apart.

-Ocean Vuong

Used by permission.

Ocean Vuong emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 at the age of one and is currently an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appear or are forthcoming in the Connecticut River Review, North Central Review, PANK, and Asian American Poetry among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and lives with an 84 year old roommate in Brooklyn, NY.

Vuong appeared on the panel Children of Warriors: Inheriting War Anthology Reading during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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

Split This Rock urges DC City Council to Resist Arts Funding Cuts

I urge the Council to resist the cuts to the Commission’s budget proposed by the Mayor and to recognize the essential role that arts and culture play in the life of the District of Columbia and its residents, whose poetry explores the city’s past, negotiates its present, and imagines its future. Without poetry, we are a city without a story.

From Split This Rock Co-Director Sarah Browning's testimony in support of arts funding at the DC City Council hearings April 27, 2010. Read her full testimony on the web site of DC Advocates for the Arts here.

Photo of the Week: Colorado T. Sky

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Poet Colorado T. Sky reads at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival's Friday Open Mic.

Photo Credit: Daniela Schrier

Poem-of-the-Week: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

After The UPS Man Shouted "Feed Your Baby At Home" Through His Truck Window

.......Beauford, North Carolina May 2007

Bionic Feeding Woman

whips breasts out, sprays

privacy netting over him,

through the window. She slays

public ignorance. Offensive,

angry and green, she stays

right where she is, extensive

superpower network plays

the news: Continental Airlines,

2003, Deborah Wolf charged

a terrorist during times

of war for milky discharge

in the face of passenger

complaint; Toys R Us

September 2006, stranger

for a children's store to fuss

when Chelsi Meyerson

busted out her right to feed

in the store's corner, shunned

by five harassing employees

who called security. Cover-up!

Applebees' manager told

Brooke, mother of 8. Cover up!

insisted the United steward,

throwing a used blanket across

Alina and her baby Rose.

Captain Areola, Boob Boss,

Mutant Nipple, each goes

on nursing, fighting the disease

of propriety like diaper rash,

growing muscles, curing degrees

of fever with a stubborn milky cache.

-Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Used by permission.

Melisa "Misha" Cahnmann-Taylor is the co-author of Teachers Act Up! Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre (2010, Teachers College Press) and Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice (2008, Routledge) and has published poetry and reviews in many journals including APR, Alaska Quarterly, Georgia Review, Barrow Street and Quarterly West. She won the 2004, 2005, and 2008 Dorothy Sargent Prizes. Cahnmann-Taylor is Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.

Cahnmann-Taylor appeared on the panel Birth and the Politics of Motherhood in Poetry during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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