Haiku Postcards to the President: AWP 2013 Edition

Haiku Postcards to the President: 

AWP 2013 Edition

 

If you were at AWP this year, you may have stopped by Split This Rock's table at the bookfair and encountered one (or all) of the smiling faces above. These are a few of our staff and volunteers who may have urged you to write a haiku postcard to President Obama.  We've read through them all and pulled the most inventive, the most powerful, the funniest. Read them below! And thanks to all those who shared their voices with us.

The whole campus cheered

The night you were elected

We watched. Eyes wide-tears.

-          Lianne McCray

The silence before the drone

And the heavier silence

Forever After

-          Corrie Etter

Snow blows in the wind

Empty apartment windows

Dusty with promise

-          Lyle Daggett

Birds fly high over

The city. Snow muffles loud

Mouth voices below

-          Dr. Virginia Gilbert

Split the rock and hear

Musical notes rise to

Awaken your sleeping soul.

-          Satya Plalaparty

On the subject of

Drones – focus on the bees, sir,

Not on weaponry.

-          Liz Lanedale

Mr. President

Take congress out for Tacos.

Everything will change.

-          Kate Eber 

The love of country,

Honor, pride, justice, and peace

Collide a rainbow.

-          Yolanda J. Franklin

Yes humanity

Yes peace yes music of love

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

-          Dawn Lonsinger

Be your conscience. Don’t

Bow under the weighted snowfall

Of everyone’s gaze.

-          Andrew Kozma 

Because I love her

I want to marry her lips

Legalize our kiss

-          Leigh Phillips

Holes on highways leave

Broken bits of gravel in

The craks of my skin

-          Nicole Byrne

Education for

Our youth, or do you intend

To make drones of them?

-          Pages Matam

Poem of the Week: Jericho Brown

                

  

'N'em  

 

They said to say goodnight

And not goodbye, unplugged

The TV when it rained. They hid

Money in mattresses

So to sleep on decisions.

Some of their children

Were not their children. Some

Of their parents had no birthdates.

They could sweat a cold out

Of you. They'd wake without

An alarm telling them to.

Even the short ones reached

Certain shelves. Even the skinny

Cooked animals too quick

To get caught. And I don't care

How ugly one of them arrived,

That one got married

To somebody fine. They fed

Families with change and wiped

Their kitchens clean.

Then another century came.

People like me forgot their names. 

-Jericho Brown 

Used by permission.

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.

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: Remica Bingham

Photo by: Rachel Eliza Griffiths



Things I Carried Coming Into the World


The weight of my parents,
the dawn of them;
my grandmother's lackluster
life; the guilt of my grandfather's mistress
after he'd been scalded with hot
water, tender flesh boiling on his back;
my color, the umber slick of it
deepening over two weeks' time,
an aunt worrisome it would never stop;
the heart of a boy whose name
was forgotten before it was given
who passed me a note in fourth grade
that I spat upon and shot back
in scribbled, torn pieces;
obligation, the bane of memory,
the cleft a loss in 1967 creates
when a mother of mine
two mothers removed
is left broken on the sidewalk
after a drunk white man
jumps the curb
in the colored neighborhood,
the sorrow of the familiar voice
that has to tell me this;
my father's falsetto
before nicotine had its way
with his song; Jesus and all
his demands; soft hands;
the sight of a woman
at my first funeral, called away
to God, erupted, brought back
in a mega-church;
the bend of a slow, steady hump
overpowering an uncle's back;
my godson's vermillion face,
the uncertainty of him,
the walk I took with his mother,
past the clinic
through the divide;
a fistful of wanting; foreign bodies
wandering through my own;
a blow to the insides when distance
walks in; the braid of death,
streaked and ribboned against
my family's back, its greedy
interruption, its persistence,
the unwanted strands
of the thick-lcaed thing.



-Remica Bingham


Used by permission.
From What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan Press 2013).


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, was recently released 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.

 
Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all ofthe 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: Philip Metres

              

    

 

 

Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker's Stroke  

How a Basra librarian

could haul the books each night,

load by load, into her car,

the war ticking like a clock

about to wake. Her small house

swimming in them. How, the British

now crossing the limits

of Basra, the neighbors struck

a chain to pass the bags of books

over the wall, into a restaurant,

until she could bring them all,

like sandbags, into her home,

some thirty thousand of them,

before the library, and her brain,

could finally flood into flame.

-Philip Metres

Used by permission.

Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), which was the winner of the 2012 Arab American Book Award, To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize.  He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Philip blogs at http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com.  

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all ofthe 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.   

Split This Rock to Rock AWP 2013!

Heading to AWP in Boston March 7-9? Spend time with poet-activists of Split This Rock!

Visit us in the Bookfair at Table B2, March 7-9. In addition to hanging out with us and other socially engaged poets, you can:    

Board Chair Dan Vera, and Youth Programs Coordinator Jonathan Tucker horsing around at AWP 2012

• Write a haiku post card to President Obama
• Enter to win a free registration to Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2014
• Join Regie Cabico & Brittany Fonte, the editors of Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, for a book signing on Thursday, March 7, 1:30-2:45 pm. 
• Join co-founder Melissa Tuckey, winner of the ABZ Books Award for Tenuous Chapel, for a book signing on Thursday March 7 and Friday March 8, 4:30-5:30 pm. With wine!

Split This Rock @ AWP! Off-Site Event Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here    Thursday, March 7, 2013  6-8 pm   Readings from the new anthology, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, in conjunction with an exhibit of artists' books responding to the 2007 bombing of Baghdad's "Street of the Booksellers."  With Kazim Ali, Alise Alousi, Amaranth Borsuk, Sarah Browning, Contributing Editor Persis Karim, Philip Metres, and Terese Svoboda Reception to follow Free and open to the public  Cambridge Arts Council Gallery  City Hall Annex 344 Broadway Cambridge, MA  Central Square T stop on the red line Co-sponsored by Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Project, Cambridge Arts Council, Center for Arabic Culture, PM Press and Split This Rock

Split This Rock AWP Reception     Friday March 8, 2013  7-8:15 pm Hynes Convention Center, Room 207   Join us for drinks, mingling, and a short program featuring Martín Espada, Lenelle Moïse, and Saeed Jones reading his Split This Rock 2013 Poetry Contest Winning Poem! Free drink for the first 50 to arrive!    Sarah Browning, Patricia Smith, and Melissa Tuckey at AWP 2009

Melissa Tuckey Book Launch: Tenuous Chapel

Melissa Tuckey Launches Award-Winning 

First Book

Tenuous Chapel  

    

Sunday March 24, 2013

   5-7 pm

NOTE LOCATION: Busboys and Poets (14th & V)

2021 14th Street NW

Washington, DC 20009

Join Melissa Tuckey, co-founder of Split This Rock, for a book launch and reading from her award-winning book of poems, Tenuous Chapel. With special guests, Sarah Browning, E. Ethelbert Miller and Joseph Ross.

Tenuous Chapel was chosen by Charles Simic for the prestigious ABZ first book award. In his forward, Simic writes, "If the hope of any poem is to render the experience in a fresh unsettling way, she has that gift." The book moves from the intimate and personal to the communal and political. It's a search for the sacred in a time of war and environmental destruction.

Join us as we toast Melissa and celebrate this exciting book of poems!  

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR TENUOUS CHAPEL:

"Melissa Tuckey's voice and vision are entirely her own. These precise and surprising poems reinvent a kind of Imagism with fresh eyes and a profound sense of real-world compassion, a poetry hard-earned and patiently well made."   Sam Hamill

“The poems in Melissa Tuckey’s Tenuous Chapel are stark yet radiant, ecstatic yet somber, metaphysical yet grounded in the intimate, the communal, and the political.  She confronts the bewildering complexity of a violent world with candor and clarity, with wit and grace, with tenderness and wisdom. It is hard not to be held by the spell of these enigmatic and uncanny poems that delight and surprise at the turn of each line."  Eric Pankey

"The poems in this impressive first book are evocative, elusive, spare, with heady feats of juxtaposition: Melissa Tuckey has pared their engaging narrative and descriptive elements down to emotional essences that invite the reader’s involvement. Highlighting both family matters and larger political and social issues, the poems often reference disappearance, and many are set in winter; but the builder of this Tenuous Chapel is ultimately able to 'make green an offering' and 'believe in progress at a time when / everything is going backward.' " Martha Collins