March Sunday Kind of Love: Jericho Brown & Remica Bingham

March Sunday Kind of Love 

Featuring: 

Jericho Brown & Remica Bingham

 Sunday March 17, 2013

   5-7 pm

Busboys & Poets (14th & V)
                                                          2021 14th Street, NW  

                                       Washington D.C. 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

Jericho Brown was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and once worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans.  The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award.

Remica L. Bingham earned an MFA from Bennington College and is a Cave Canem fellow. Her first book, Conversion, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and was published by Lotus Press. Her second book, What We Ask of Flesh, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press in February 2013. Currently, she is the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. For more information on her work and upcoming events, please visit: www.remicalbingham.com.

Poetry Workshop with Jericho Brown

"Jump-Start Your Engines"

Poetry Workshop with Jericho Brown

 

Saturday March 16, 2013

   2-5 pm

Split This Rock
1112 16th Street NW
Suite 600
Washington DC, 20036

    

In this workshop, Jericho Brown will guide participants in generating new work through a set of unconventional exercises that keep our ears open and fingers moving. The workshop engenders new ideas about writing, and as there is a profound relationship between reading poetry and writing it, participants will read, discuss, and even recite the work of several poets whose examples might lead us to a further honing of our craft.  

**Poets should bring a single, short poem of their own for one of the exercises if time allows.

Jericho Brown was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and once worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans.  The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award.

The workshop will be limited to 12 participants and is expected to sell out, so register today!

Workshop Fee: $25, participants must register in advance.
Scholarships available. 

REGISTER HERE

For more information:

info@splitthisrock.org   202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Emily K. Bright

   

Community  

It is nearly midnight and I'm

scrubbing at the grout.

The dishes, washed,

are put away. This is how I love

the people in my house,

with baking soda and a sponge.

We build our community

from the kitchen out,

knowing eggs or cornbread

stretch a meal to feed

the neighbor boys, who come

when we sit down to supper.

They always join us

when we offer, always ask

to use the phone to talk to girls.

They claw through adolescence

and such obstacles I never had to face:

gangs and constant relocations,

Michael's father half-way through

his fifteen years for selling. I learn,

I learn from them. Outside, sirens

flash their blue and red again.

I sweep footprints in a pile,

fill the bucket for the mop.

So much is beyond my circle of control.

But this house, this place of gathering,

it shines, if only for a few to see,

if only through the morning.

-Emily K. Bright

From Glances Back (Pudding House Press, 2007).

Used by permission.

Emily K. Bright holds a BA in English from Williams College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. Her chapbook Glances Back was published by Pudding House Press, and she has had individual poems appear in such literary journals and anthologies as Other Voices International, North American Review, Come Together: Imagine Peace, and Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude. Follow her blog on teaching, writing, and social justice at http://www.emilykbright.blogspot.com.

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.   

Poem of the Week: Sam Hamill

True Peace  

Half broken on that smoky night, 

hunched over sake in a serviceman's dive 

somewhere in Naha, Okinawa, 

nearly fifty years ago, 

 

I read of the Saigon Buddhist monks 

who stopped the traffic on a downtown 

thoroughfare 

so their master, Thich Quang Dúc, could take up 

the lotus posture in the middle of the street. 

And they baptized him there with gas 

and kerosene, and he struck a match 

and burst into flame. 

 

That was June, nineteen-sixty-three, 

and I was twenty, a U.S. Marine. 

 

The master did not move, did not squirm, 

he did not scream 

in pain as his body was consumed. 

 

Neither child nor yet a man, 

I wondered to my Okinawan friend, 

what can it possibly mean 

to make such a sacrifice, to give one's life 

with such horror, but with dignity and conviction. 

How can any man endure such pain 

and never cry and never blink. 

 

And my friend said simply, "Thich Quang Dúc 

had achieved true peace." 

 

And I knew that night true peace 

for me would never come. 

Not for me, Nirvana. This suffering world 

is mine, mine to suffer in its grief. 

 

Half a century later, I think 

of Bô Tát Thich Quang Dúc, 

revered as a bodhisattva now--his lifetime 

building temples, teaching peace, 

and of his death and the statement that it made. 

 

Like Shelley's, his heart refused to burn, 

even when they burned his ashes once again 

in the crematorium--his generous heart 

turned magically to stone. 

 

What is true peace, I cannot know. 

A hundred wars have come and gone 

as I've grown old. I bear their burdens in my bones. 

Mine's the heart that burns 

today, mine the thirst, the hunger in the soul. 

 

Old master, old teacher,

what is it that I've learned?

-From Border Songs (Word Palace Press, 2012) 

 

Used by permission. 

 

Sam Hamill is the author of more than forty books, including fifteen volumes of original poetry, most recently Border Songs (Word Palace Press, 2012); four collections of literary essays; and translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese classics. He co-founded, and for 32 years was editor at, Copper Canyon Press. An outspoken political pacifist, in 2003, declining an invitation to the White House, he founded Poets Against War, compiling the largest single-themed poetry anthology in history, 30,000 poems by 26,000 poets.

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.   

Poem of the Week: Stephen Kuusisto

 

                  

Life in Wartime  

There are bodies that stay home and keep living.

Wisteria and Queen Anne's Lace

But women & children too.

& countless men at gasoline stations.

Schoolteachers who resemble candles,

Boys with metabolisms geared to the future,

Musicians trying for moon effects...

The sky, which cannot expire, readies itself with clouds

Or a perfect blue

Or halos or the amoebic shapes

Of things to come.

The railway weeds are filled with water.

How do living things carry particles

Of sacrifice? Why are gods talking in the corn?

Enough to feel the future underfoot.

Someone is crying three houses down.

Many are gone or are going.

-Stephen Kuusisto

 

Used by permission.

Stephen Kuusisto is a graduate of the "Writer's Workshop" at the University of Iowa. He directs the Renée Crown University Honors Program at Syracuse University where he holds a Professorship in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He speaks widely on literature, diversity, disability, education, and public policy.  He is the author of Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and the acclaimed memoir Planet of the Blind, a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year".  Steve has made numerous appearances on programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline NBC, National Public Radio and the BBC. His most recent book, "Letters to Borges" has just been published by Copper Canyon Press.

 

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.   

Poem of the Week: Samiya Bashir

                

Manistee Lights

Brother I don't either understand this

skipscrapple world that is--these

slick bubble cars zip feverish down

paved rushes of notcorn of notbeets

of notcabbage and the land and the land--

You should know, man, nothing

grows down here anymore except

walloped wishes and their gouged out

oil cans. Where bloodroot might span our

distance sit these bars land mined in the sand

lit from the inside eye these cages they twist us

they tornado us. No.

I don't understand. Not those grates

not the grackles circling overblind

all perched so close to the beach there

we could smell winter freeze. In spring

did the wind bring the scent of smelt?

Remember? Even strike years mother

found smelt by the fingery bagful

and fried them almost whole.

It was almost enough.

 

-Samiya Bashir

Used by permission.

Originally published in Taos Journal of Poetry and Art. 

 

Samiya Bashir's second book of poems, Gospel, was a finalist for both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and along with her first collection, Where the Apple Falls, the Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cura, The Rumpus, and Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, and was recently honored by the Aquarius Press Legacy Award and two Hopwood Awards from the University of Michigan. An Ann Arbor, Michigan native and recent NEA Writer in-Residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts,

Samiya teaches creative writing at Reed College.

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.