Sarah Browning

More from John Hill on the Detroit Housing Crisis

2011-02-14T15:55:00.001-05:00

This post is to follow up on my guest posts last summer on the US Social Forum. In last summer's posts I talked about the housing crisis in Detroit and said I would find out about and report back on the causes of the crisis and what can be done about it.

I found the site of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shutoffs and spoke with them about the housing disaster and possible solutions.

The housing crisis that hit Detroit so hard did so in part because of the aggravating factors of the decline of the auto industry and capital flight already ongoing. Put on top of that subprime loan shenanigans, resulting foresclosures, evictions, and continued downsizing and outsourcing and you have the the Detroit housing meltdown.

According to the group's website:

• One in nine homeowners nationwide is either behind in mortgage payments or is in foreclosure.

• More than 80,000 homeowners have lost their homes in the Detroit area alone.

• The vacant-home rate in Detroit is 25 percent, second only to New Orleans.

• Michigan leads the nation in foreclosures caused by sub-prime lending coupled with the severe
economic downtown.

• One in every 137 homes in Michigan is in foreclosure.

• Michigan leads the country in unemployment and poverty. (Michigan’s unemployment rate is actually second in the nation after Nevada.)

Moratorium NOW! was formed in the spring of 2008 to fight for the passage of Senate Bill 29, which would stop all mortgage foreclosures and evictions for two years.

Their site (just updated) offers action steps and information on the crisis, related issues, and how you can help and contribute: http://www.moratorium-mi.org/

For more images of Detroit's structural decay, see this photo essay on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/26/detroit-decline_n_813696.html#218521

Fighting for justice: John Hill on the final day of the US Social Forum

2010-07-21T10:43:00.004-04:00

Saturday

Leftist Lounge, incinerator action, National Peoples' Movement Assembly

Last day. On the ride in my cab driver Sharif says that it’s a serious situation in Detroit. I tell him I’ve heard about how bad it is in some neighborhoods. I ask him if he can give me a tour of these neighborhoods later.

I sat out the Leftist Lounge last night, realizing I was too tired. One of my new friends, probably in his forties, was frightened by the fierce energy radiating from the multiple venues and retreated. Two activists there said it was great. They sat in a courtyard listening to Latin music. They also saw a break dance competition.

According to Jolie and Adam from ACE (Alternatives for Community and Environment (www.ace-ej.org/) there were about a thousand people at this mornings’ action, a protest against a local waste incinerator, the largest in the world. Adam said he could smell it. How was the demonstration? "Powerful."

I’m attending the National Peoples Movements Assembly, where a synthesis of the sense, beliefs, and proposals of all the roughly 100 PMAs that have taken place - about 50 in other cities, 50 here - are communicated to the plenary.

Children make their demands

The Bolivian ambassador to the United States addresses the assembly and is warmly received. There is a song and speech from the Children’s Social Forum. One boy keeps getting herded back from the edge of the stage. A girl steps out and gives a speech. It goes something like this:

We need you to help us because we need three things:

First, no bullies, because they hurt people and feelings;

Second, better food, because ours is cold and nasty;

Third, better school supplies, because ours are used and dirty.

I wander in and out of the assembly a couple of times. Once I see and hear an R&B band, four men up front in their matching getups. The music is happening and they have the moves.

Gaza freedom flotilla

I meet former US military officer Ann Wright, who resigned in protest over the invasion of Iraq. She has a pail of money. She is trying to raise $300,000 in three weeks to help finance a US boat to join the next Gaza Freedom Flotilla (ustogaza@gmail.com).

There are hip hop-style poets performing during the closing ceremony. We are dazzled by their verbal pyrotechnics with soul.

Brief tour of parts of West and East sides

I meet two WILPF women from Vermont plus Charlotte Dennet, author of The People v. Bush: One Lawyer's Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the Nationwide Grassroots Movement She's Encountered Along the Way (http://www.amazon.com/People-Bush-President-Grassroots-Encounters/dp/1603582096/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277657677&sr=1-2)

Sharif takes us through parts of the West and East sides. It’s eery how nature has encroached on the neighborhood, with fields where there were lawns three years ago. Block after block of empty boarded-up houses and some deserted but not boarded up. Animals in some of them, and people. No lights at night. No power.

Some houses are burned out hulks. Sometimes there will be a single well-fortified house standing in the middle of a bunch of abandoned ones. Then there’ll be a lonely block of nice homes in an otherwise forbidding area. There are abandoned businesses, gas stations, office buildings. We see a tall ornate building about 20 stories high with vines growing all over it, completely empty. Like something out of 12 Monkeys.

Sharif intones his refrain like a mantra as he gestures to the left and right: “This building: empty. This one: empty, This gas station: empty. This house: empty.”

He refuses to go down one street. In broad daylight. “They kill you,” he says.

Turns out this is coming from someone who has apparently faced death numerous times. His story: Iraqi soldier captured by the Americans in the Gulf War, enlists in the American army afterward and goes to Iraq and Afghanistan as a trainer. Escapes assassination by Iranian spies on three occasions. Comes to Detroit because of family and the Arab community. Has driven a cab for many years. Like my driver yesterday, says Detroit is worse than he’s ever seen it.

We’re taking pictures and sometimes we ask him to stop, which he does, barely attempting to see if anyone’s behind him because no one ever is. He says that three years ago, these neighborhoods had people, homes, and going concerns. I realize I have no clear understanding of what happened here, but I certainly am going to find out.

I see an old man sitting on a beat-up falling-apart stoop without a shirt. He does not look good. I am ashamed.

Defiance and hope

But Detroit is not defeated. Far from it. I’ll bet just about all the activists here are impressed by the energy, commitment, and spirit of local activists and the city that welcomes us warmly. Detroit is fighting. I’ll provide links to Sarah for people who want to join them.

Knowledge Is Born

The Detroit spirit is exemplified by rapper Knowledge Is Born

http://www.myspace.com/knowledgeis4eva/music/playlists/

When I wander out into the lobby during the last PMA, I see him perform. He's tall and thin with dreadlocks, playing an acoustic guitar. A woman stands by him, carrying a baby and sometimes singing. He has another rapper with him who jumps in sometimes. Sitting against the wall is a harmonica player, playing long notes floating over the music as Knowledge quietly raps.

"They say the sun never shines in the ghetto…"

The music is dreamy and quiet. There's no mike. I lean forward to hear it. There is defiance and also faith and above all the unmistakable feeling hope. I am overcome.

I listen to the CD when I get home. Couldn't find any lyrics online and I've run out of time so I transcribe these excerpts. (Apologies to Knowledge Is Born for any goofs.)

In these songs I hear anger…

“They poison us with our cooperation

We stand in line marching blind with our picket signs

For the cash we’re busted like a pimple

Come on we so simple

Only cause we was taught to be

We’re blind cause we really wasn’t taught to see

Caught up in the tv their poison iv”

faith…

“The lord has blessed me through it all he has kept me le’s see

Where do I begin shall I start with the end?”

defiance…

“They say I couldn’t make it

Intensified the pain all my life

And they said I couldn’t take it

My spirit they just laugh

That they couldn’t break it…”

“But I’ve been compared to those in high places

Who say they’re the best and lie with straight faces

And when its time for us to trade places

They’ll see the real deal...”

“Feeling higher and higher like an eagle that’s soarin’

But more like the lions in the jungle that are roarin’"

And hope…

“They say the sun never shines and the flowers never grow

Knowledge is born so the world will know...”

“Keep seeking

You’ll find”

US Social Forum 2010 in a word: ferment

So, met a lot of activists I’ll be working with, learned a lot, found out about a lot of resources, was inspired, ate some really good soul food, heard some amazing music, and find myself still strongly disinclined to ever stop fighting for justice.

John Hill has been an organizer, fundraiser, and activist working on many issues of social justice. Also a singer, songwriter, and musician, he now works to end corporate rule in the United States and to establish a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Links

Organizations working to establish democratic rule through constitutional amendments and other means: Corporations are not people and should not have the same rights as people.

http://movetoamend.org/

Move to Amend, a coalition including organizations whose links are below:

http://www.poclad.org/

http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/

http://duhc.org/about_whoWeAre.html

http://www.wilpf.org/

other democracy links…

http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/

Fired up and ready to go: Friday at the US Social Forum

2010-06-28T19:51:00.016-04:00

by John Hill
Venezuelan democracy
I start out at a workshop on building the democracy movement in the US. This is another good one. The panel includes an indigenous woman from Venezuela. She talks about the Venezuelan experience with democracy and how peoples’ assemblies in Venezuela have been influential in bringing about a different kind of society, one in which there is a minister of indigenous affairs and the president is accessible to the people. She talks about how the United States has a false democracy and how a country whose own house is in a state of chaos cannot really help other countries.
An Alaskan Native American at the workshop talks passionately about the ongoing assault against Alaskan Indians’ way of life, and the woman (whose name is buried in a giant stack of papers in my suitcase) makes a connection with this Alaskan and says she might be able to help by telling him about her own experience.
Granny D
Another panelist is John Bonifaz, of Free Speech for People.org. His group is working for “a constitutional amendment that puts people ahead of corporations.”
Bonifaz closes his remarks by attempting to refute a participant’s suggestion that the passage of such an amendment would have “a snowball’s chance in hell” by relating the following anecdote.
Granny D, the late democracy activist, decided that campaign finance reform was so important that she walked across the country as a way to dramatize its necessity. She took this walk at age 89. Bonifaz says that during Granny D’s life, nine constitutional amendments passed.
Corporations are not people
After lunch, I attend the Move to Amend Coalition (movetoamend.org) people’s movement assembly. Move to Amend is a coalition working for constitutional amendments that would end the status of corporations as “artificial persons.” This status was given to them as the result of an 1886 Supreme Court decision. The effect of the decision was to allow corporations, masquerading as people, to claim rights properly reserved for actual people under the first, fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments. Hundreds if not thousands of local, state, and federal laws that attempt to protect our elections, safety, health, environment, and right to organize have been overturned as a result of this doctrine.
The assembly is attended by about 50 activists from all over the country. It is well-organized, well-facilitated, effective, and crackling with energy. Youth is pretty well represented (people of color are not, and this shows that our still-young movement has not demonstrated to groups working on issues of concern to people of color that democracy organizing is relevant to their organizing).
There is a guy there that I saw at an earlier workshop. I had him pegged as a worn out naysayer. By the end of our workshop he is transformed. He walks up to me. He’s beaming. He says he hasn’t seen this kind of energy in years. He’s fired up. He’s ready to go.

John Hill has been an organizer, fundraiser, and activist working on many issues of social justice. Also a singer, songwriter, and musician, he now works to end corporate rule in the United States and to establish government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Practicing Democracy: More from John Hill at the US Social Forum in Detroit

2010-06-25T12:33:00.010-04:00

Wednesday

Wasserman and Fitrakis on Ohio 2004 election travesty

My afternoon workshop is presented by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis of the Columbus Free Press (http://freepress.org/index2.php), authors of a book claiming the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio, a story called “most censored” by Project Censored. I haven’t read the book yet, and am reserving judgment on whether their assertion is true, although everything I have heard and what they discuss in their workshop makes this plausible to me.

In any case, they have chronicled many cases of dirty tricks, voter intimidation, mysterious “technical failures,” people in suits masquerading as officials, huge lines in poor neighborhoods, and so on. Many of their sources are mainstream. Their account is sometimes merry as they relate levels of malfeasance so preposterous that you can only laugh before maybe bursting into tears at what a mockery was made of democracy. They also relate the abject surrender of the Democrats in the face of this and the inability of some in the left press to take the story seriously while offering no compelling reason why they have not done so.

Some might consider this a dead issue now. But to me it is instructive in that it helps us see exactly some of the reforms necessary to restore integrity to our voting process.

They call for two main remedies, if I'm getting it right: publicly counted paper ballots everywhere and the universal registration of every American citizen when he or she reaches the age of 18.

Thursday

The commons

Another enlightening cab ride to the forum in the morning. The cabbie says Detroit is worse than he’s ever seen it. He recounts a story of taking a desperate woman to the casino so she can try to win enough to keep from being thrown out of her house. She wins a thousand dollars to start, then loses it all. He picks her up later. She's in tears and doesn’t even have the cab fare.

But...I refer readers to Democracy Now’s coverage of the hope being brought to the city by the work of Detroit’s young activists.

My morning workshop is an interesting one about the “the commons.” This is a concept that goes back to Roman law, was in the Magna Carta, and came into English common law after that. It is the idea in part that aside from public and private property there is the commons, which consists in part of natural resources used by all, such as the air, water, and forest land. The commons provide a shared space, a resource that is shared within a community. The presenter, from the Alliance for Democracy, tells of how now, because our legislators and regulators are “compromised,” the public must often sue to gain use of these commons, which properly should be available to us as a “public trust.”

In the main hall at the Cobo Center, there are frequent cultural outbursts, enlivening the proceedings. I have seen a circle of people playing and singing traditional Mexican music (beautiful), a song and dance routine of people protesting the unfair practices of a local restaurant, and a drum troop parading through the hall and out into the street.

All's well that ends well?

My afternoon is taken up with a peoples’ movement assembly on building a nationwide progressive movement that will propose resolutions to be presented to the national peoples’ movement assembly at the end of the forum. This PMA is maybe misnamed, being mainly a discussion on what Greens and progressive Democrats and others can do together.

The workshop reveals to me a couple of enduring stumbling blocks of this segment of the movement. One is that there is still considerable disagreement among some as to whether to work with the Democrats or not, the other is that our deliberative processes in the movement are frequently chaotic, undisciplined, and not strongly facilitated. To me, this hinders democracy and weakens our effectiveness. If we’re trying to bring about democracy on a big scale, shouldn’t we be experts on its practice on a small one? To its credit, the assembly does achieve consensus on quite a few useful resolutions.

Sisterhood is powerful

Feeling a little burned out and ready for a break, I find myself accidentally at a delightful dinner with the some of the national staff of the Womens’ International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a 95-year-old organization which finally realized they would get nowhere lobbying our legislators if democratic reform is not brought about. Seizing an opportunity, I write out a contribution check and hand it directly to the director of development. Now, although technically not a woman, I am a proud member of WILPF.

John Hill has been an organizer, fundraiser, and activist working on many issues of social justice. Also a singer, songwriter, and musician, he now works to end corporate rule in the United States and to establish a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The movement to put the people back on top, where they belong - Further dispatches from Detroit

2010-06-24T10:31:00.013-04:00

by John Hill

Tuesday (continued)

Bike caravans and drum circles

I check in attendees during the morning. I have flown in, but many attendees have driven all night, some have come in buses and caravans from various cities. I hear from another Bostonian that there was a Boston bus. Some have come from pretty far away in caravans of bikes. I notice that despite their sometimes grueling trips, everyone I check in is patient and unfailingly polite.

I finally let someone take my place and I get some lunch. Later in the afternoon the opening march arrives after completing a loop in the city. It is raucous and energetic, with local activists leading the chants. Foreclosures and utility shutoffs are big local issues and the marchers shout their protest.

The marchers file in to the cavernous main room of the center and up to the stage where the opening ceremony is taking place.

And what an opening. We are treated to a half hour of Native American drumming, song, and dance. First the drum circle begins. Five or six Indian men of different ages bend over their drums, serious, careful, and intent. They begin to sing the in the high wailing tones passed down from their ancestors. Dancers come up to the stage in their colorful costumes, a man twirling as his feathers fly about him. Three women stand center stage: a young woman, a girl, and an older woman. All tall and proud as they face forward and dance.

My appreciation of this performance comes partly out of respect for the indigenous cultures of our country today, and admiration for how Native Americans have kept their culture alive as our government continues to fail them.

I am moved because our forum has given them a place of honor, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that drum circle, with the old men sitting by the young, teaching them, guiding them, so that they never forget who they are and where they came from (bent over their drums, serious, careful, and intent).

I’m back to my hotel room in the early evening for a little reading and to send off my first dispatch.

Wednesday

Voter rights, democracy wannabe

I’m out of the hotel and into a cab. I’m splitting it with a food activist with two nose rings. We talk about the connections between food issues (anything from school lunch programs to food access to community farming) and democracy issues. We’re both interested in defending our communities from rapacious corporate behavior. My mother is a water activist and I talk about her recent work. My food activist friend tells me about a big bottled water company targeting Latino consumers, playing on some of their memories of bad water in their native countries. I am struck by the contempt some corporations have for their “customers.”

The workshops at the forum are organized into “tracks” to help people make sense of the daunting list of hundreds of these workshops. I am sticking to the "Democracy and Governance" track because I am a democracy activist. What does democracy activist mean? In my own case it means someone who works for democracy because he believes that the United States is arguably not a real democracy and that many of our problems will be solved when we become one. I believe in progressive solutions, and while there is a common perception that we are a conservative country, serious public opinion polls repeatedly show that on many issues Americans are progressive in their views, and ahead of those who claim to lead us, just as the people of many nations are ahead of those that purport to lead them. So I feel that if the people can rule, progressive policies will follow.

My first workshop is on voting rights. Among the panelists is the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, an indispensable organization defending the rights of detainees, and by extension, all of us.

The panelists talk about a voters’ bill of rights, the recent Citizens United case opening up the floodgates of corporate contributions, and possible strategies for increasing voter participation, including making election day a holiday like they do in other countries. An important point is that not only are corporations drowning out our voices with their propaganda promoting their candidates, but that we have made it almost impossible for many would-be voters to even get to the polls and pull the lever. What kind of democracy is that? Are we a proud pioneer who should be a leading light, showing the world what a vibrant democracy looks like, or a democracy wannabe, less democratic than many European and other democracies and under the thumb of private entrenched power. Guess.

Abolitionists of Detroit tour

In the afternoon I take a walking tour of abolitionist Detroit. Our guide is Sean, a recent local college graduate. He tells us how Detroit was a key stop on the Underground Railroad, with most roads to Canada leading through it. He leads us down to the "Gateway to Freedom" statue commemorating Detroit’s role. He shows us a map of the sites of Underground Railroad safe houses downtown. Along the way he tells us about leaders and sites in the struggle. I’ll excerpt from a local website:

“[There is] George De Baptiste, a black businessman and member of the Second Baptist Church in Detroit. He bought a ship, the T. Whitney, to take runaways across the Detroit River to Canada. The Second Baptist Church at Beaubien and Monroe Streets in Detroit is a 160-year-old church that helped as many as 5,000 slaves escape to freedom.

"Seymour Finney was a white Detroit hotel owner who allowed slaves to hide in his barn at the northeast corner of State and Griswold.”

We’re told that Baptiste organized armed bands that had firefights with slave catchers, sometimes snatching escaped slaves off of boats to rescue them. We’re told how Finney would entertain slave catchers in his tavern, while former slaves hid back in the barn.

I find it appropriate that we are learning about one of our great American peoples' movements (abolitionism and the Underground Railroad) as we try to bring about another great movement in that tradition, the movement to put the people back on top, where they belong.

Dispatches from the US Social Forum - by Boston activist and musician John Hill

2010-06-23T13:29:00.008-04:00

Friends,

Over the next couple of days I have the privilege of posting dispatches from the US Social Forum in Detroit from my friend and former colleague John Hill, a kick-ass activist and musician living in Boston.

I give you here his initial impressions, wherein he arrives and finds his way to the convention center, there pitching in to help with registration, because the Forum is short-handed and because that's just the kind of guy John is. For those of us who can't be there, it's a little taste of the superb energy and commitment percolating this week in Detroit. Read on!

Sarah
**

Monday

When in the course...

I arrive at my hotel in Detroit in the afternoon. I want to get here early so I can settle in and prepare. In the evening I spend a good deal of time in the business center at the hotel conducting my “business,” which is to surf through the various forum sites, attempting to get my arms around the forum, which is big and sprawling.

Outside in the night there is a giant fireworks display, said to be one of the most spectacular in the world. A hotel person tells me it’s an early 4th of July celebration. I think it fitting that early-arriving forum participants are welcomed to the city with a celebration of Americans declaring their resistance to illegitimate authority. That that form of authority was quickly replaced with other forms just as illegitimate is one of the main reasons I and many other forum participants have come.

Tuesday

The United States Social Forum 2010

I’m off to the forum in a cab. After a quick and badly needed espresso stop we come up to the Cobo Center, a sprawling convention venue of the usual kind, which is the center of activities. Since there is an urgent need for volunteers to help with registration, I arrive a little early to pitch in. I figure it’s in the spirit of the forum to volunteer. And pretty soon I receive a comically sketchy training at the computer and I’m put to work.

As About US Social Forum online puts it: “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the  economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.

“We must declare what we want our world to look like and we must start planning the path to get there. The USSF provides spaces to learn from each other’s experiences and struggles, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, build relationships, and align with our international brothers and sisters to strategize how to reclaim our world.”

The forum is part of a process that began with the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. Here there will be hundreds of workshops, as well as many “peoples' movement assemblies” where “communities, movement sectors, and regions will gather, reflect, discuss, and articulate the big issues facing our world as well as explore strategic solutions and alternative practices."

There are also cultural event of all kinds, vendor tables, work projects and work brigades, direct actions, and tours. In addition, there is space and time provided for self-organized activities, including “social plenaries” (parties).

At the registration table I start checking people in. There are quite a few glitches and holdups at first, but soon I and my fellow volunteers are humming along.

People have come from all over the country, and it’s a very diverse group by any measure. Since the waits are a little long, people gab with each other in line and sometimes have to be interrupted in their conversations so they can actually check in! Many come under the auspices of organizations: There is United for Peace and Justice, Sociologists without Borders, Philly Stands Up, Young People For (that’s it: just Young People For), the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Wake up Walmart. I could go on, especially about the enthusiasm of the young people, but I can’t because I’m off to a workshop.

It's inspiring to see so many people (about 12,000) of so many kinds, all here to make things better, all refusing to be smoothed over and marginalized, all committed to change. As our banner says: “Another world is possible! Another US is necessary! Another Detroit is happening!

Tom Hayden: US TROOPS DEAD & WOUNDED IN AFGHANISTAN RISE 273/430 PERCENT IN TWO YEARS

2010-06-09T10:36:00.001-04:00

US SOLDIER DEATHS IN AFGHANISTAN RISE 273 PERCENT, WOUNDED RISE 430 PERCENT, SPRING 2008-SPRING 2010

by Tom Hayden

Despite rhetoric about military patriots and wounded warriors, the White House, Pentagon and mainstream media have minimized attention to startling increases in deaths and casualties suffered by American troops in Afghanistan since 2008. President Obama's current escalation is expected to sharply increase the already-dramatic numbers. Death tolls have risen by 273 percent this spring in comparison to the same period in 2008. There has been a 430 percent increase in Americans wounded in Afghanistan so far this year compared to the same period in 2009. The facts are these, based on Department of Defense data: As of today, June 8, the six-month 2010 US military death toll in Afghanistan has risen to 156, surpassing the 155 total for all of 2008. These numbers more than doubled in the period January-May between 2009 and 2010: from 61 dead in January-May 2009, to 142 through May of this year.

AMERICAN DEATHS

Jan.-May 2008-2010In January-May 2008, 38 Americans were killed; 61 died in January-May 2009, an increase of 60 percent. From January-May 2009 to January-May 2010 the toll rose from 61 to 142, or a one-year 132 percentage leap. From January-May 2008 to January-May 2010 American deaths jumped from 38 to 142 in this year's first five months, a 273 percent two-year increase.

AMERICAN WOUNDED

Jan.-May 2008-2010Between January and the end of April of this year, 960 American troops suffered wounds in Afghanistan, up from 181 during the same time frame last year, a 430 percent increase.Total US wounded in Afghanistan in all 2008: 793. [Between Jan-April 2008: 107]Total US wounded in Afghanistan in all 2009: 2,131.[Between Jan.-April: 181]

US SOLDIER SUICIDES AT 1,000, ALL-TIME HIGH

More US soldiers died from suicide in 2009 than were killed in either Afghanistan or Iraq. The suicide number was 334 for 2009, compared with 316 who died in Afghanistan and 149 in Iraq. The total from 2003-2009 was 923. According to the Houston Chronicle's unofficial count, there were 1,985 suicides from 2001 to 2009, including the Army, Army Reserve, Army National Guard, Navy, Navy Reserve, Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Marines and Coast Guard. At least 225 suicides have been added since the Chronicle's report of May 17, 2009. Readers should note that these totals are based on US Pentagon figures, not including the present period of May-June 2010 when fighting in Afghanistan is intensifying.

NOT COUNTED: PRIVATE CONTRACTORS

US casualty figures do not include dead or wounded private contractors. The number of contractor dead is released only through the US Department of Labor, under an insurance program known as the Defense Base Act. According to the Congressional Research Service, from September 2001 to the end of September 2009, there were 1,987 contractor deaths covered by the DBA, 73.4 percent occurring in Iraq and 14.5 percent in Afghanistan. Of the 289 deaths in Afghanistan, nearly one-third [100] occurred in the final six months of 2009, a figure certain to rise.

BUDGETARY COSTS

According to Stiglitz-Bilmes The Three Trillion Dollar War [2008], the hidden costs of American casualties in terms of total medical, disability, and Social Security Disability costs for veterans of Afghanistan alone will be $422 billion [best case] and $717 billion [realistic-moderate case].

The Dream the Dreamers Dream - My Piece on Words Matter

2010-06-08T13:00:00.003-04:00

We require many role models in this work of poetry, in this work of bringing poetry into the public square, where it might challenge, comfort, disturb, imagine; where it might make a better America.

As a role model, I choose Langston Hughes, father figure, inspiration, muse.

Read the whole essay here: http://abdul-ali.com/2010/06/06/installation-5/

It's part of Abdul Ali's terrific Fatherhood Series, in the run-up to Father's Day. Thank you for including me, Abdul!

DC's Council Members Shirk Responsibility for All Our Residents?

2010-05-19T10:48:00.003-04:00

Just back from the Save Our Safety Net rally. Was appalled to watch Vice Gray rush past us at the back entrance to the Wilson Building, without so much as a wave or a handshake. This is a man running for mayor? He won't get my vote until he stands up for all the residents of our city and agrees to raise taxes on our most fortunate citizens.

Then I learned from the organizers that my own Councilmember, Muriel Bowser, refused to meet with the Save Our Safety Net Coalition. Not even a meeting? And Councilmember Bowswer represents Ward 4, an area hard hit by foreclosures and the high cost of housing in our city. Shame!

DELAWARE POETRY REVIEW ANNOUNCES A STUNNING NEW ISSUE!

2010-05-11T11:25:00.002-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Dennis Forney (302) 645-7700 dnf@capegazette.com

DELAWARE POETRY REVIEW ANNOUNCES A STUNNING NEW ISSUE!

Delaware Poetry Review, well known for featuring some of the most intriguing poets of the Mid-
Atlantic region, has published a new issue. The Spring 2010 issue of the online journal features 13 poets, writing on subjects as diverse as migrating warblers, the cave paintings at Lascaux, a souvenir calendar of "hot priests," Hurricane Katrina, barbed wire underwear, chickpeas, and more.

Poets include current and former residents of the Mid-Atlantic:

 Daniel Armstrong, host of the Dreamers Reading Series in Frederick, MD;
 JoAnn Balingit, Poet Laureate of Delaware;
 Andrea Carter Brown, author of The Disheveled Bed;
 Sarah Browning, founder of Split This Rock Poetry Festival;
 Carmen Calatayud, winner of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry;
 Hayes Davis, one of Cave Canem's very first fellows;
 Frank Giampietro, winner of a Kingsbury Fellowship;
 Devon Miller-Duggan, a teacher and advisor for the University of Delaware Honors
Program;
 John Perlman, author of 22 books;
 Alan C. Reese, owner of Abecedarian Books in Harford County, MD;
 Pat Valdata, journalist for Cecil Soil and Chesapeake Bay magazines;
 Scott Whitaker, winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize and the Delaware Press Award;
and
 Pamela Murray Winters, a scientific copy editor and former music journalist.

This exciting new issue includes poets who have national reputations alongside emerging authors, a selection that captures some of the strongest and most distinctive voices coming from the Delmarva region.

The Delaware Poetry Review is published out of Lewes, DE, and is sponsored by the Cape Gazette newspaper. The journal is compiled by a collective of five respected area editors and publishers: Michael Blaine (also of the Broadkill Review), Dennis Forney (The Delmarva Quarterly and Cape Gazette), H.A. Maxson (Bay Oak Publishers), Richard Peabody (Gargoyle and Paycock Press), and Kim Roberts (Beltway Poetry Quarterly).

Free subscriptions are available upon request at the website. To read the latest issue, see
http://www.depoetry.com/.

Deadline Extended for Split This Rock Poetry Contest

2010-01-11T11:47:00.002-05:00

Split This Rock's adult poetry contest deadline has been extended until Friday, January 22, 2010. Please have your submissions postmarked by January 22.

To be judged by 2010 featured poet Chris Abani, the contest will award $1,000 in prizes for poems of provocation and witness.

Full guidelines at: http://splitthisrock.org/contests.html

Exciting news! Potomac Review will publish the winning poem in its Fall 2010 issue.

Please help spread the word about the extended deadline - share on your Facebook page, your blog, or send to friends and poet compatriots. This is a great opportunity for poets and we need your help getting the word out. Thank you!

Celebrating Beltway Poetry Quarterly's 10th Anniversary - Full Moon on K Street

2009-12-22T10:27:00.003-05:00

PREORDER YOUR COPY AT 25% OFF! ONLY UNTIL JANUARY 10th!

Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes. All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. Edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, this anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political.

Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet, Elizabeth Alexander.

A number of readings will take place throughout 2010, in the greater Washington DC area (and one in Chicago). See events page for details.

Click here to order: http://www.planbpress.com/fmoks_preorder.html

2010 Festival Registration Now Open! Same Low Rates as 2008!

2009-12-14T15:47:00.003-05:00

Split This Rock Poetry Festival invites poets, writers, artists, activists, dreamers, and all concerned world citizens to Washington, DC, for poetry, community building, and creative transformation as our country continues to grapple with two wars, a crippling economic crisis, and other social and environmental ills.

From March 10 through March 13, 2010, the festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism -- opportunities to speak out for social justice, imagine a way forward, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change.

Space is limited and registration fees increase after February 10, 2010. Please register early to reserve your spot! If you can't make it to the entire festival, one-day registrations are available.

In these tough economic times, we've kept the same low rates of $75 for festival passes, $40 for students. Rates go up February 10, so act now! And please help others attend by making an additional gift. Every dollar helps!

We offer a limited number of scholarships. Please read the Scholarship Guidelines and send us your application before February 20 (postmark deadline).

Please contact us if you need help with registration or need registration forms in an alternate format.

Visit the website for the program and schedule -- and keep checking back; we're adding information every day.

We can't wait to see you in March!

In peace and poetry,
Split This Rock

Looking for Lodging?

SpaceShare -- Split Your Car, Split Your Room, Go Green Thanks to the generous partnership of SpaceShare, you can find a hotel roommate, find a ride or a room, share space in your car, or offer a room in your home.
Just go to http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102885737975&s=2&e=001J3g8SLL_SiqYicF9F1daZ9O8h7kGAKD77yIA4fwjxr-LROfDjRh-ocKlVFPtN9k1SS11Pquw9fUoHsVezoYwBMOR4hwTW1Bb6L61ThSKy0iBpts6DXBvnhFJfuQf_tubuP8uy100wzc= to sign up.

Also, we are pleased to announce the Beacon Hotel as the "official" hotel for Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2010. Beacon's rates are modest compared to area hotels.
Reserve a room online or call 800-821-4367 (mention Split This Rock for our reduced rate).
For every reservation that mentions Split This Rock, Beacon will donate 5% of the room rate to Split This Rock.

Reservations at this rate are on a first-come, first-served basis through January 25, 2010. The Wednesday and Thursday rate is $209/night; Friday and Saturday rate is $129/night; and Sunday's rate is $189.

Visit the Where To Stay page for more options and details!

Spread The Word!

Please forward this email to your networks and post on your blog and Facebook page. We have beautiful post cards, too. Can you spread them around your community? Email us at info@splitthisrock.org with your snail mail address and we'll get them in the mail to you right away. Thanks!

2010 Adult Poetry Contest - less than one month to go!
Split This Rock is pleased to announce our third annual poetry contest, to be judged by Chris Abani, one of our featured poets for the 2010 festival. First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on SplitThisRock.org, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read the winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in March 2010. Deadline: January 4, 2010. See the website for guidelines: http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102885737975&s=2&e=001J3g8SLL_Sioa05OTr9y-eRfbMspIQrNIKLIzlCNRobZ66U8Y98pNCmYzzkdAr1hSNfu8mLNAzKWt_2i97LWkIGluMPrTt2dq9lu-DDjVEagC5AG4xcFvRw==

Call for Film and Video
Submit your original films or videos for the 2nd Split This Rock Poetry Festival, to be held March 2010. We are looking for artistic, experimental, and challenging film/video interpretations of poetry that explore critical social issues. Entries can be up to 15 minutes long. Deadline: January 15, 2010. See the website for guidelines and required entry form: http://www.splitthisrock.org/

Support Split This Rock
Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor, the Institute for Policy Studies. Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "IPS/Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks!

Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

King to Obama...

2009-12-10T15:30:00.003-05:00

On this day of Nobel hypocricy, I am struck by the words of another peace laureate, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said in his speech on Vietnam in 1967:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn?t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

**

Just substitute Iraq and Afghanistan for Vietnam and no other comment is needed.

Read Dr. King's whole speech here: http://www.writespirit.net/inspirational_talks/political/martin_luther_king_talks/beyond_vietnam/

Split This Rock Holiday Gift Guide

2009-12-10T11:08:00.002-05:00

The season of gift giving is upon us. If you're struggling to find gifts that show your passion for poetry and social justice, let us help you with the list below. Included are the most recent books and CDs of all kinds by poets who will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in March, especially the newest poetry releases.

We encourage you to seek out your local, independent bookstore to buy these books, thus helping support not only poets and poetry, but a vibrant and diverse local economy. If you live in the DC Metro area, check out the Teaching for Change bookstore at Busboys and Poets at 14th and V Streets, NW(www.busboys.com)

You can also support Teaching for Change by purchasing books online here. Just type an author or title into the search box in the upper right-hand corner of the home page.

Read on for an inspiring bookshelf full of suggestions!
**

Split This Rock Holiday Gift Guide

Chris Abani
*Song For Night (Novella) 2007 $12.95 Akashic Books
*The Virgin of Flames (Novel) 2007 $14.00 Penguin (available as an eBook)
*Hands Washing Water (Poetry) 2006 $15.00
Copper Canyon Press

Sinan Antoon
*I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (Novel) 2007 $8.37 (on sale) City Lights
*Baghdad Blues (Poetry) 2007 $10 Harbor Mountain Press

Francisco Aragon
*Puerta del Sol (Poetry) 2005 $12 Bilingual Review Press

Jan Beatty
*Red Sugar (Poetry - for Split This Rock's Review, check out Blog This Rock) 2008 $14.00 University of Pittsburgh Press

Martha Collins
*Blue Front (Poetry) 2008 $14.00 Graywolf Press

Cornelius Eady
*Hardheaded Weather (Poetry) 2008 $14.00 Putnam (also available as an eBook)

Martin Espada
Crucifixion in the Plaza des Armas (Poetry) 2008 £7.95 Smokestack (UK) Purchase at Inpress
*The Republic of Poetry (Poetry) 2006 $13.95 Norton

Andrea Gibson
Yellow Bird (CD) 2009 $12.95 CDbaby.com
*Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (Poetry) 2008 $15.00 Write Bloody

Allison Hedge Coke
*Blood Run (Poetry) 2006 £7.99 or $12.97 (US store available online) Salt Publishing (UK)
*Off-Season City Pipe (Poetry) 2005 $14.00 Coffee House Press

Natalie Illum
On Writer's Block and Acrobats (Poetry) http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102873267558&s=2&e=00181P-DMsOJ5HOowGlE7jm7d0VIzYTo_SOdqmwrXtlZZ0BiaALSQeU1OlWIouu5nAhYBM1ua_qtC-PhIwhFL7TZcxtfWEnbr3UHe701A5x3Uu_SE4ITFBElznPj-pXOHuyp__Pmd5fsAw=

Fady Joudah
*The Earth in the Attic (Poetry) 2007 $30 Cloth $16 Paperback Yale University Press
*If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish (Translated Poetry) 2009 $28 Hardcover Farrar Straus and Giroux

Richard McCann
*Mother of Sorrows (Stories) 2005 $14.00 Random House
*Ghost Letters (Poetry) 1994 $9.95 Alice James Books

Jeffrey McDaniel
*The Endarkenment (Poetry) 2008 $14.00 University of Pittsburgh Press

Lenelle Moїse
Madivinez (CD & MP3) $15.00 CDbaby.com

Nancy Morejόn
*With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba (Poetry and Photography) 2004 $19 White Pine Press

Mark Nowak
*Coal Mountain Elementary (Poetry - for Split This Rock's Review, check out Blog This Rock) 2009 $20 Coffee House Press

Wang Ping
*The Dragon Emperor: A Chinese Folktale (Folktale for ages 9-12) 2008 $25.26 Millbrook Press (A Division of Lerner Publishing)
*The Last Communist Virgin (Stories) 2008 $14.95 Coffee House Press
*The Magic Whip (Poetry) 2003 $15.00 Coffee House Press

Patricia Smith
*Blood Dazzler (Poetry) 2008 $16.00 Coffee House Press

A.B. Spellman
*Things I Must Have Known (Poetry) 2008 $16.00 Coffee House Press

Arthur Sze
The Ginkgo Light (Poetry) 2009 $15.00 Copper Canyon Press

Quincy Troupe
*Miles and Me (Memoir) 2002 $16.95 University of California Press
*Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems (Poetry) 2002 $30 Hardcover, $17 Paperback Coffee House Press

Bruce Weigl
*Declension in the Village of Chung Luong 2006 $14 Ausable Press/Copper Canyon Press

Anthologies

*Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing
Ed. Frances Payne Adler, Debra Busman, and Diana García. 2009 $32.95 University of Arizona Press (20% off if you mention the magic code: "FLR" when you order from University of Arizona Press : 1-800-426-3797)

Editors Frances Payne Adler and Diana Garcia are presenting a panel discussion about the anthology and the joys of teaching social action writing at the university level with contributors Martín Espada, Alicia Ostriker, Patricia Smith, and Melissa Tuckey. Also includes contributions by past and present Split This Rock featured poets Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Carolyn Forché, and Jimmy Santiago Baca.

*Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry Ed. Camille T. Dungy. 2009 $48.97 Cloth (on sale) $17.47 Paper (on sale) University of Georgia Press

Editor Camille Dungy is presenting a reading of contributors at Split This Rock: Gregory Pardlo, E. Ethelbert Miller, Remica L. Bingham, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Mark McMorris. Patricia Smith and Cornelius Eady (2010 Featured Poets) are also in the anthology as are past Sunday Kind of Love features Tim Seibles, Tara Betts, Patricia Spears Jones, and Terrance Hayes, among others.

I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights Melissa Kwasny and M.L. Smoker, Editors. 2009 $18. Lost Horse Press

Contributor Martha Collins is a Split This Rock Featured Poet in 2010 and contributor Philip Metres is participating in a panel at the 2010 festival. Other contributers include Carolyn Forché (2008 Split This Rock Featured Poet), Tamiko Beyer (2008 Split This Rock panelist) and Christi Kramer (a central Split This Rock activist).

* Books marked with an asterisk are also available via Powell's Books (http://www.powells.com/). Split This Rock recommends Powell's because it is a union shop.

History Repeats Itself...

2009-12-03T16:09:00.000-05:00

Couldn't be clearer... (Plus, a Bonus Bush Boneheader in the final line)

Obama: "We Did Not Ask for This Fight"
Bush: "We Did Not Seek This Conflict"

Obama: "New Attacks are Being Plotted as I Speak"
Bush: "At This Moment ... Terrorists are Planning New Attacks"

Obama: "Our Cause is Just, Our Resolve Unwavering"
Bush: "Our Cause is Just, Our Coalition [is] Determined"

Obama: "We Have No Interest in Occupying Your Country"
Bush: "I Wouldn't Be Happy if I Were Occupied Either"

(From MichaelMoore.com)

ACTION NEEDED: CALL THE WHITE HOUSE TO SAY NO MORE TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN

2009-11-19T15:40:00.000-05:00

Monday. Nov. 23 through Wednesday, Nov. 25
Call 888-310-8637.

Now is the time to make your voice heard!

For 3 days people from every corner of the country will be flooding the White House with calls. We oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan; we want the troops that are there now to be brought home! If you cannot get through on Monday, call on Tuesday or Wednesday. Most importantly, make your call and make your voice heard.

Use this toll free number to call the White House: 888-310-8637
(After a brief message you will be connected to the White House. These messages can only be left between 9 am and 5 pm Eastern time!)

If President Obama orders more troops to Afghanistan, United for Peace and Justice calls on all member groups to protest at Federal buildings or other public places the day of or the day after the decision is announced.

News reports suggest President Obama has rejected the current proposals for additional troops until there is an exit strategy. This could be a good sign but we cannot sit by and assume the right steps will be taken. The first step is to not send more troops. The next step must be the withdrawal of the troops currently there.

The decision the president makes will have a dramatic impact on the future of Afghanistan and the stability of the region. It will have a tremendous impact on our country as well: will billions of more dollars be spent sinking us deeper into this war or will we have the money needed for health care, education, job creation and so much more here at home?

This is the moment when we can have an impact.

Call the White House – 888-310-8637 - and tell them:

* No additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan.
* Start the withdrawal of U.S. troops and begin serious diplomacy and dialogue with all parties to the conflict without preconditions.
* Redirect the tens of billions of dollars spent yearly on Afghanistan war funding to human needs in Afghanistan and at home.

It is vitally important to also keep the pressure on Congress. While you are at your phone, won't you call to your Representative and Senators? They control the money for this war and will be asked for additional funds if more troops are sent.

Representatives in the House should be asked to commit to voting NO on more war money and also to sign on to Barbara Lee's bill - H. R. 3699 - which would deny funding for more troops in Afghanistan. The more signers on this bill, the better. It means more pressure on the White House. This strong bill has 23 co-sponsors. To see the list: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-3699

As a minimum every Representative should also be co-sponsoring Rep. McGovern’s bill H.R. 2404, which calls for an exit strategy from our military occupation of Afghanistan. Check to see if your Representative is among the 100 co-sponsors at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2404

Ask your Senators to introduce legislation in opposition to sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan and that calls for an exit strategy.

To call your members of Congress call the Congressional Switchboard at 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121. If you are not sure who your Representative is, click here http://capwiz.com/fconl/dbq/officials/

Please share the response to your calls by posting on the website: http://NoEscalation.org

In cites and towns around the country local groups are already planning public activities and protests on either the day the President announces an escalation, or the day after. We encourage you to organize a protest and be sure to post any activity you have planned. To find out what's planned in your area click here. A sample press release can be found by clicking here.

The White House call-in days are being jointly organized by the UFPJ, American Friends Service Committee, Peace Action, CodePink, Just Foreign Policy, Voters for Peace, Pax Christi, Common Dreams, Historians Against War and others.

Justice Delayed, Justice Denied - from Witness Against Torture

2009-11-19T09:55:00.001-05:00

Witness Against Torture Responds to Obama’s Statement that Guantanamo Will Not Close by January 2010.

Join us: Fast and Vigil to Shut Down Guantanamo, End Torture and Build Justice, http://www.witnesstorture.org/2010

Wednesday, November 18. President Barack Obama conceded today that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will not close within the one year mandated by the Executive Order he signed on January 22, 2009. This is a disappointment but not a surprise.

For months, the administration has been sending signals that it over-reached in its timetable. The given reasons for the delay are likewise familiar: that the Bush administration left a legal mess, requiring painstaking work to determine the ideal means for handling the remaining detainees; that it has been hard to find countries to admit detainees who cannot be resettled in their countries of origin due to fears of ill-treatment; and that unanticipated domestic resistance to Guantanamo’s closure, much of it fueled by fear-mongering and partisan politics, has slowed the process. These impediments, while real wrenches in the grinding wheels of policy, cannot excuse the moral and constitutional disaster that Guantanamo's continuing operation represents.
Since coming to office, the Obama administration has presented Guantanamo as an administrative problem, a cause of embarrassment, and a foreign policy liability. It has never faced Guantanamo for what it truly is: a grave injustice which the United States is duty bound, by the best of its traditions and basic standards of fairness and decency, to immediately set right.

"Justice Delayed is Justice Denied" — the great maxim of the Civil Rights Movement that made Barack Obama's political ascent possible — has been forgotten. Martin Luther King Jr.'s talk of "The Fierce Urgency of Now," repeatedly invoked by President Obama to push ahead with domestic reforms, has been replaced, for the Guantanamo detainees and anyone who cares about the rule of law, with "the fickle hope of eventually" and "the self-serving pledge of maybe."
All the while, the Obama administration proclaims its intent to put U.S. policies and practices in accordance with our laws and values.

Yet the United States continues to detain dozens of men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release. In the case of the remaining Uighurs, the administration has advanced the Orwellian conclusion that they are no longer prisoners — they just have nowhere to go, and must therefore remain on the dusty gulag.

Echoing the policies of Bush, Obama proposes the indefinite detention, without charge or trial, of detainees against whom no case has been built or from whom "evidence" was obtained through torture. The Obama Justice Department repeatedly invokes the "state secrets" defense to beat back legal efforts of those kidnapped and tortured to receive acknowledgment of their injury and compensation for it. And it has steadfastly refused to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute those who designed and ordered torture policies, choosing instead a limited inquiry into the most egregious cases of "unauthorized" detainee abuse.

Finally, it has allowed obsessive attention with the truly dangerous men in U.S. detention — such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders — to obscure the fact the great majority of detainees held at Guantanamo have been falsely imprisoned.

How is it tolerable within the framework of American laws and values to hold for even one day longer men who, innocent of any crime, have been stolen from their families, tortured, and dehumanized?

How is it tolerable to knowingly imprison innocent men while failing to indict officials who — a preponderance of public evidence suggests — are guilty of heinous political crimes and violations of human rights? How can the rule of law be restored when U.S. laws are not even enforced?
And how can the wreckage of the past be cleared when the key monument of that wreckage, the detention facility at Guantanamo, remains intact.

The Obama administration will continue to face enormous hostility — much of it paranoid, opportunistic, and vicious — to even its inadequate efforts to undo the worst of the Bush era policies. Those efforts must be supported, for the real good they will bring and to beat back domestic forces ready to plunge the United States into a new nightmare of lawlessness and wanton cruelty in the name of "national security."

But the administration must also be held to its words and promises.

Its failures cannot be masked with rationalizations and false deference to the constraints of partisan bickering and legal complexities. The inability to fulfill the mandate of the Executive Order to close Guantanamo within a year is just such a failure, making still more urgent the demand for true justice.

##
Witness Against Torture is a grassroots organization committed to closing Guantanamo, Bagram and ending torture. The group will hold a fast and vigil in Washington, DC from January 11, 2010—the date marking eight years since Guantanamo’s beginning as a "war on terror"
prison through January 22, 2010, the date by which the Obama administration committed to closing the facility. To learn more about the fast and vigil to Shut Down Guantanamo, End Torture and Build Justice visit http://www.witnesstorture.org/2010

--
Frida Berrigan
frida.berrigan@gmail.com

Kundiman announces Poetry Prize

2009-11-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

The Kundiman Poetry Prize for Asian American writers

Kundiman, Inc. is pleased to announce the inauguration of the Kundiman Poetry Prize in partnership with Alice James Books.

The prize is open to emerging and established Asian American poets. The award of $2,000, publication of the winning manuscript, and sponsorship of a reading make this a highly desirable prize.

Submissions are accepted from November 15, 2009 to January 15, 2010. Guidelines for submission are available to http://www.kundiman.org/%5BCLB%5D_Brightside/1.Source/prize.html

Alice James Books is a cooperative poetry press with a mission is to seek out and publish the best contemporary poetry by both established and beginning poets, with particular emphasis on involving poets in the publishing process. For more on Alice James Books, go to http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/.

Kundiman was founded in 2002 to provide opportunities for Asian American poets to perfect their skills through education and performance and to promote Asian American literature as a vital part of American letters. Its programs include a summer poetry retreat, held annually since 2004 and a reading series in New York City.

Kundiman’s partnership with Alice James Books for The Kundiman Poetry Prize is made possible through the support of Fordham University. For more information on Kundiman, go to http://www.kundiman.org.

One of my great heroes, Jim Hightower, gets fab recognition

2009-11-13T08:54:00.004-05:00

Recipient of the 2009 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship Announced

November 11, 2009 (New York, NY): The Nation Institute announced today that national radio commentator and bestselling author Jim Hightower is the 2009 recipient of the $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Hightower will receive the award on December 7 at The Nation Institute Annual Dinner Gala in New York City.

An advocate for everyday people whose voices are seldom heard in Washington and on Wall Street, Hightower believes that ³politics isn¹t about left versus right; it¹s about top versus bottom.² He broadcasts daily radio commentaries on subjects ranging from public healthcare to Hamid Karzai. They air on more than 150 commercial and public stations across the country.

Each month, Hightower publishes a populist political newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, exposing hypocrisy in Congress and targeting the abuses of big corporations. With more than 135,000 subscribers, the hard-hitting Lowdown has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter. An inspiring orator, Hightower delivers up to 100 fiery speeches a year, which has justly established him as America¹s most popular populist.² Twice elected as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, his term was praised for nurturing organic production, promoting alternative crops, regulating pesticides and monitoring groundwater, among other programs.

A New York Times best-selling author, Hightower has written seven books, including Thieves in High Places; If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There¹s Nothing In The Middle Of The Road But Yellow Stripes And Dead Armadillos. His most recent book, co-authored with longtime partner Susan DeMarco, is Swim Against The Current. Jesse Jackson, Jr. has said of him, ³Jim Hightower is a tireless champion for every American, and he has the right prescription for what ails our nation.²

Perry Rosenstein, President of the Puffin Foundation, Ltd., the co-sponsor of the Creative Citizenship award, said, ³Jim Hightower is a front line defender of our civil liberties. Swimming against the current is a challenge he welcomes at all times.² Hamilton Fish, President of The Nation Institute, the co-sponsor of the prize, said, ³Hightower is the standard bearer of progressive populism. With passion, keen intelligence and unsparing wit, he has been an indispensable leader in the struggle against concentrated power.²

You can find more information about Hightower on his website, http://www.jimhightower.com/.

Each year, The Puffin Foundation Ltd. and The Nation Institute recognize an individual who has challenged the status quo through distinctive, courageous, imaginative and socially responsible work of significance. Candidates are found in a broad range of occupations and pursuits, and the
award is intended to encourage the recipients to continue their work and to inspire others to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies they face in their careers. Jim Hightower is the ninth winner of the prestigious award. Previous recipients are environmental activist Van Jones, human rights lawyer Michael Ratner, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, educator and author Jonathan Kozol, journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, professor and anti-death penalty advocate David Protess, labor activist Dolores Huerta and civil rights pioneer Robert Parris Moses.

For more information on the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, go to www.nationinstitute.org/puffinnation/

Poetry Vanishes from the Print Post - My Letter Ran!

2009-09-19T09:04:00.002-04:00

Poets had gotten used to not being considered part of the "Arts" by The Post, e.g., the Sept. 13 Fall Arts Preview: Art -- Film -- Music -- Theater -- Dance. After all, we had the Literary Calendar on a Book World page and the marvelous Poet's Choice column: an actual poem in each Sunday's paper that acted as a small window into another way of seeing, amid the journalistic and opinion pieces. Now the stand-alone Book World is gone, and in its place are a few reviews in the Outlook section and a sadly foreshortened Literary Calendar. Poet's Choice is only on the Web, with a bare reference on Page B8.

Read the letter, which they ran in full, here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/17/AR2009091703143.html

Then consider writing your own letter to letters@washpost.com or post comments on this letter. Thanks!

Exciting news of the week - John Murillo's Up Jump the Boogie Forthcoming

2009-09-17T14:51:00.003-04:00

UP JUMP THE BOOGIE
by John Murillo
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 9/15/09
Cypher Books
info@cypherbooks.org / www.cypherbooks.org
310 Bowery
New York, NY 10012

Cypher Books will release Up Jump the Boogie by John Murillo, with a foreword by Martín Espada, on February 23, 2010 ($12.95, Paperback, 112 pages). Publication date: April 6, 2010.

Up Jump the Boogie is a series of lyrical dispatches from worlds hidden or denied. Murillo has survived every difficult scene in this book, transmuted each torn scrap of life into song with his skilled and compassionate alchemy. Meanings are woven from poem to poem as Murillo creates memories in his reader and then deftly evokes them, teaching her to feel what he has felt.

And his ambitions are no less than epic. He tells on one page of tragedy spanning continents and eras, and on the next plumbs the depths of personal loss, locking it all inextricably together in the 12-canto "Flowers for Etheridge," an ode to his poetic ur-father whose chant he carries on: "We free singers be." Murillo is a man who's been saved by poetry, and this is his book of rescue.

ADVANCE PRAISE
"Up jumps the boogie. That's almost all one needs to say. Murillo is headbreakingly brilliant. I didn't have a favorite poet for this year: Now I do. But with this kind of verve and intelligence and ferocity Murillo just might be a favorite for many years to come." – Junot Díaz

"The feel of now lives in John Murillo's Up Jump the Boogie, but it's tempered by bows to the tradition of soulful music and oral poetry. The lived dimensions embodied in this collection say that here's an earned street knowledge and a measured intellectual inquiry that dare to live side by side, in one unique voice. The pages of Up Jump the Boogie breathe and sing; the tributes and cultural nods are heartfelt, and in these honest poems no one gets off the hook." – Yusef Komunyakaa

John Murillo is the current Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has also received fellowships from the New York Times, Cave Canem, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachussetts. He is a two-time Larry Neal Writers' Award winner and the inaugural Elma P. Stuckey Visiting Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, and the anthology Writing Self and Community: African-American Poetry After the Civil Rights Movement. Up Jump the Boogie is his first collection.

TITLE: UP JUMP THE BOOGIE
AUTHOR: John Murillo
PUBLICATION DATE: April 6, 2010
PRICE: $12.95, Paperback
PAGES: 112
ISBN: 978-0-9819131-4-8
DISTRIBUTOR: Small Press Distribution • 800-869-7553 • www.spdbooks.org

Disappearing Acts: Poetry and the Washington Post

2009-09-13T08:19:00.005-04:00

I've been home from Italy a total of six Sundays. With the loss of The Washington Post's Book World while I was gone, we are now to content ourselves with the back pages of the Outlook section on Sunday mornings, including a ridiculously foreshortened Literary Calendar. It was rare that the old Book World would review poetry in its pages, but at least our events would be listed in the Calendar.

Apparently that is no longer the case. Each of the six Sundays I have been home I have scanned the Calendar in vain for a single listing of a poetry reading. It is as if DC's entire vibrant poetry scene had disappeared. I was particularly sensitive to the question this morning, as next week's Sunday Kind of Love, September 20, will be a special one: readings from the new anthology Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy, edited by Joanne Gabbin, the director of the Furious Flower Center for African American Poetry. I sent the listing to the Post weeks ago. But no, again, week 6, no poetry event listed.

I checked the Poetry News at Beltway Poetry Quarterly for comparison and found eight poetry events for the coming week, eight listed for last week.

If you dig around on the Post's website, you'll find a longer version of the Calendar, here. I counted six events listed there that include poetry. But how much traffic does the online calendar get, do we suppose? The link listed in the print version wasn't even correct. (Washingtonpost.com/Bookworld, listed in the paper, doesn't exist. The correct link is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artsandliving/books/, then you scroll down and click "Washington Literary Calendar" in tiny type half-way down the page.

Nor do poetry readings seem to rank with their cousin art forms as "going out" destinations, as I've never seen one listed in the Going Out Guide, the Style section listing that seems to have replaced the late, lamented Style On the Go. I've filled out their form with Sunday Kind of Love listings and haven't even made it to the online calendar, let alone the print version. I even wrote a letter of inquiry, but didn't hear back.

What's up? I know it's a favorite pastime of organizers and event planners to complain of inadequate coverage in the Washington Post (I can imagine the howls of protest from yesterday's teabaggers over the Post calling their numbers in the tens of thousands, when the organizers had been predicting a turn-out of 400,000...)

But on behalf of the whole poetry community, I protest our complete effacement from the Post. I think it's time for an old-fashioned letter-writing campaign. Will you join me? Letters to the editor guidelines are here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm

Or you can post a comment to the Literary Calendar: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artsandliving/books/. But you'll have to create an account and log in first. I'll write a letter myself and post it here soon. Also coming up: Why Poet's Choice should return to the print version of our city's paper of record.

Split This Rock on YouTube

2009-09-02T14:49:00.001-04:00

With support from the Humanities Council of Washington, we've posted 15 clips of Split This Rock's inaugural poetry festival on YouTube. Watch readings by Naomi Ayala, Kenny Carroll, Mark Doty, Carolyn Forche, and Galway Kinnell, as well as a short piece on the culminating event of the festival, the march to Lafayette Park where 132 poets and activists each contributed one line to a Cento poem, a gorgeous patchwork of voices calling for social justice and peace.

Watch Split This Rock on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/splitthisrock#

The Poetics of Labor Reading Series @ The Smithsonian

2009-09-01T15:30:00.001-04:00

From the marvelous Francisco Aragón, Director of Letras Latinas and Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2010 featured poet:

PLEASE CIRCULATE, FORWARD, POST, DISSEMINATE:

THE POETICS OF LABOR READING SERIES
@The Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.

To mark Hispanic Heritage Month, the Smithsonian’s National Museum Of American History presents two Latino poets who will performing selections from their works. These special readings are on the occasion of the Museum’s special exhibit

“Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942 – 1964”

which will be on display this fall until early 2010

The poets are DIANA GARCÍA, who is from California’s San Joaquin Valley and author of the collection, When Living Was a Labor Camp (University of Arizona Press), and QUIQUE AVILÉS, a native of El Salvador who graduated from D.C.'s Duke Ellington School of the Arts and has been writing and performing in the U.S. for over 20 years

There will be four opportunities to hear these poets read from their work:

Saturday, September 26: 11 AM and 2 PM

Sunday, September 27: 12 noon and 3 PM

The readings will take place in the exhibition space, 2nd floor, West

For my information about “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program,” please visit:

https://owa.nd.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=e82ac1503c454628bc9df76e7c4d7cf0&URL=http%3a%2f%2famericanhistory.si.edu%2fexhibitions%2fexhibition.cfm%3fkey%3d38%26exkey%3d1357

The museum is on the National Mall, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C.

“The Poetics of Labor” reading series is a collaboration with Letras Latinas, the literary program of Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Who Gets to Write Political Poems - A Riff Off Eileen Myles on Harriet

2009-08-30T06:30:00.007-04:00

I woke up this morning intending to weigh in on the Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet, about Eileen Myles' response to Sean Patrick Hill's review in Rain Taxi (not available online) of State of the Union, the anthology of political poems published by Wave Books. I haven't seen the anthology yet, or read Hill's review, and I certainly don't have time to read the hundreds of comments generated by Myles' opinion piece. Still, I have a lot to say about political poetry and Myles makes good points in her critique of Hill, who apparently voices the tired position that in order to have the standing to write a political poem one has to have directly experienced war or some other form of violence and persecution.

But every time I try to go to the site today my browser seizes up - I can't scroll, I can't do anything. And the Wave Books page on the anthology seems to be down so I'm having trouble finding out who's included in the collection. Telling? Hmmm - technological helplessness... as metaphor for women's relative powerlessness in cyberspace? Should I write a political poem?

Of course I'm being glib, but let's examine at Hill's basic premise (assuming Myles got it right): that only certain people -- veterans of conventionally understood war zones -- have the standing, the right, to write poems about the broader world. Only in America have I heard this position asserted. In Italy I had to explain at length why we needed Poets Against the War or Split This Rock. Italians couldn't imagine poets who write socially engaged works feeling isolated from the poetry mainstream.

We are all citizens of this fast-dying planet; we are responsible for its death. As Americans we consume the cheap products of poorly paid and otherwise exploited workers in our own country and around the world. We were governed for 8 years by a murderous, lying political regime. Even today, the Obama administration continues to wage wars in our name, to turn a blind eye to Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians, to impose US military bases all over the world, to support economic policies here at home that keep the poor and working classes powerless. Our systems of education, criminal justice, and health care are grossly inequitable.

Myles makes the critical point that if we are female or queer or a person of color, everyday life is a war zone in the United States: rape, hate crimes, violence in our neighborhoods and homes.

But even if we are "comfortably middle class," as Hill apparently accuses the poets in State of Union of being, it seems to me that we’re not given a pass. Indeed, we have an extra responsibility to speak out, to expose the inequities, to make clear the ways in which we benefit every day from, as in my case, white skin, education, heterosexual marriage.

I also deeply resent the notion that we should take some part of our lives (our relationship to the wider world) and rope it off, not write about it. Please don’t tell me what I can’t write about. I assert: Any topic is worthy of poetry. John Updike wrote a poem to a particular turd he “struck off” one afternoon. Childish? Perhaps. But no one told Updike what topics he should consider worthy of poetry.
I have read hundreds – perhaps thousands – of “political” poems while editing Poets Against the War anthologies, curating the Sunday Kind of Love reading series at Busboys and Poets in DC, and organizing now two Split This Rock Poetry Festivals. The fact of the matter is that there are as many ways to write a political poem as there are poets. More, in fact, since many poets write lots of different kinds of such poems. Poets are writing challenging, funny, grieving, confounding, angry, hopeful poems about our benighted and beautiful world. American poets are doing this and doing it in all kinds of interesting ways, far more poets than we can hope to feature in a decade of biannual festivals. I salute you all.

Rather than tread the tired territory of whether one should write political poems, and who deserves to do the writing, again and again, let’s read this work, spread the good word, celebrate these poems and poets. We could begin – and I will – with the poets who will read at Split This Rock next year, March 10-13, 2010. Check out this list: Chris Abani, Lillian Allen, Sinan Antoon, Francisco Aragón, Jan Beatty, Martha Collins, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Allison Hedge Coke, Andrea Gibson, Natalie Illum, Fady Joudah, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Richard McCann, Jeffrey McDaniel, Lenelle Moïse, Nancy Morejón, Mark Nowak, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, A.B. Spellman, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, and Bruce Weigl.

All of these poets are in the world, are poet-citizens, in a variety of ways. Lillian Allen is an originator of dub poetry and a leader on diversity and culture in Canada. Fady Joudah was a field doctor with Doctors Without Borders. Cornelius Eady is a founder of Cave Canem, the organization for African American poets. Jan Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker and an abortion counselor. Mark Nowak facilitates “poetry dialogues” with Ford autoworkers in the US and South Africa.

And their poetry reflects this diversity of experience and background: Jan Beatty’s plainspoken explorations of gender and working class life; Mark Nowak’s documentary poetics, weaving news accounts and corporate instructional guides into the poems; poem-songs of Lenelle Moïse; the often short sharp lyrics of Cornelius Eady; A.B. Spellman’s jazz-inflected sounds.

Political poetry – even the term is tainted, in America; at Split This Rock we often call it socially engaged poetry or social justice poetry –contains multitudes. To further adapt Walt Whitman, the godfather of these poets, social justice poetry is not a bit tamed, it too is untranslatable, it sounds its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Edward Kennedy, 1932-2009

2009-08-26T09:46:00.004-04:00

A quiet poem for such a public man, but reading "Mountain Dulcimer" on the Poetry Foundation web site this morning, I was moved by the poem's ability to embody both mourning and celebration at once, what I feel at the death of Ted Kennedy, the extraordinary senator from Massachusetts. And so I offer it below, with gratitude for Ted's lifelong commitment to justice.

Mountain Dulcimer

by Robert Morgan

Where does such sadness in wood come
from? How could longing live in these
wires? The box looks like the most fragile
coffin tuned for sound. And laid
across the knees of this woman
it looks less like a baby nursed
than some symbolic Pietà,
and the stretched body on her lap
yields modalities of lament
and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding
chants of grief that dance and dance toward
a new measure, a new threshold,
a new instant and new year which
we always celebrate by
remembering the old and by
recalling the lost and honoring
those no longer here to strike these
strings like secrets of the most
satisfying harmonies, as
voices join in sadness and joy
and tell again what we already
know, have always known but forget,
from way back in the farthest cove,
from highest on the peaks of love.

Summer Reading, Part 2: Ambroggio and Dixon

2009-08-20T21:42:00.006-04:00

Two very different poets in the mix of men of color I happen to be reading this summer. But each political in his particular way.

Melvin Dixon died of AIDS-related illness in 1992, the height of the epidemic. He gave the keynote address at the OutWrite Conference that year, and this is how he finished up:

As for me... I may not be well enough or alive next year to attend the lesbian and gay writers conference, but I'll be somewhere listening for my name.

I may not be around to celebrate with you the publication of gay literary history. But I'll be somewhere listening for my name.
...
You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember me.

Included in the posthumous collection of poems, Love's Instruments (Tia Chucha Press, 1995).

Here's a poem from the book:

Keeping Time

This night so gently
we circle the clock of streets.
I hear your feet before we meet,
I’ve come empty like this before.
My mouth parched on “hello”
fracturing me inside, my eyes
blurring like seaglass
at other faces you’ve shown.

So come with me again.
What we call ourselves they have
no names for, nor the peeled

fruit offered between us.
And with lips round in even
cadence, we shall recall
this night so gently.

- Melvin Dixon, from Love’s Instruments

And one in Luis Alberto Ambroggio's new Collected, edited by Yvette Neisser Moreno:

U.S. Landscapes

If each brick could speak;
if each bridge could speak;
if the parks, plants, flowers could speak;
if each piece of pavement could speak,
they would speak Spanish.

If the towers, roofs,
air conditioners could speak;
if the churches, airports, factories could speak,
they would speak Spanish.

If the toils could bloom with a name,
they would be called González, Garcia, Rodriguez or Peña.

But they cannot speak.
They are hands, works, scars,
that for now keep silent.

- Luis Alberto Ambroggio, translated by Yvette Neisser Moreno, from Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems, 1987-2006

Summer Reading: Abani and Shepherd

2009-08-19T09:24:00.005-04:00

By chance I've been reading poems by men of color this summer: Chris Abani and A.B. Spellman, featured poets at 2010's Split This Rock Poetry Festival; Reginald Shepherd and Melvin Dixon, both no longer with us, found at a used book store in Itaca, NY; Terrance Hayes, who read at Sunday Kind of Love last weekend; Luis Alberto Ambroggio, who kindly gave me his new book, Difficult Beauty, at last month's Sunday Love; and Rafael Campo, whose The Other Man Was Me I happened to grab off the shelf to read the day after we got home from Italy.

Of course themes of identity run through all their books. Also masculinity and sexuality, the body. Abani is Nigerian, displaced by the Biafran War, exiled by his country. War, exile, the search for home are ever present in his work.

I offer poems by Abani and Shepherd below and will try to post work by the others later this week.

The New Religion

The body is a nation I have never known.
The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping
from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that.
Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin-
covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark.
Like that. "The body is a savage," I said.
For years I said that: the body is a savage.
As if this safety of the mind were virtue
not cowardice. For years I have snubbed
the dark rub of it, said, "I am better, Lord,
I am better," but sometimes, in an unguarded
moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent
of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat
and the screaming grass.
But this distance I keep is not divine,
for what was Christ if not God's desire
to smell his own armpit? And when I
see him, I know he will smile,
fingers glued to his nose, and say, "Next time
I will send you down as a dog
to taste this pure hunger."

- Chris Abani, from Hands Washing Water

Kneeling Self-Portrait

Fluencies of light daily
with olive groves, pensive
green and silver leaves reflect on
noon lies. Unlovely Nemesis loves Narcissus

forced into fruitless bloom, and visits on him
the sins of bees. Strange boy
adoring water’s nothing, shadows
water captivates: this stream

shatters glass for every stone. Mirrors
are evil, held overhead as sky.
Persephone’s heralds string their gold
and black through pollen-addled air, singing

without respite, stinging light
into food for dead gods.
He doesn’t recognize his body
has no rights, no luck with bees.

- Reginald Shepherd, from Wrong

Party with Split This Rock August 27, 6 pm

2009-08-18T20:58:00.001-04:00

Featuring A.B. Spellman and Regie Cabico with the DC Youth Slam Team!

Thursday, August 27, 6-8 pm
Langston Room, Busboys and Poets
14th & V Streets, NW
Washington, DC

Split This Rock invites you to a party Thursday, August 27, 2009, 6-8 pm, in the Langston Room, Busboys and Poets at 14th and V Streets, NW. Busboys will be donating fabulous refreshments and creating a couple of funky Split This Rock cocktails.

Why party? Split This Rock has recently received nonprofit status, a crucial step on the road to becoming a permanent home for socially engaged poets from DC and nationwide. Plus, believe it or not, it's just 6 months until the second Split This Rock Poetry Festival. So we figure it's time to celebrate.

Reading and performing will be 2010 featured poet and DC leading light A.B. Spellman, along with Regie Cabico and the DC Youth Slam Team. See below for more details. Entry will be $10-$25, sliding scale, and you'll have a chance to bid on amazing prizes at auction. Come prepared for readings, for fun, for volunteer opportunities, and for celebrating! For more information: info@splitthisrock.org or 202-787-5210.

Can't make the party? You can still volunteer - just contact us at the above email or phone. We'd love to have you involved! And you can definitely still make a donation. Just click here or copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://splitthisrock.org/donate.html. Many thanks!

In peace and poetry,
Split This Rock

**

Poets Celebrating with Split This Rock August 27 - Join Us!

A. B. Spellman is an author, poet, critic, and lecturer. His poetry collection, Things I Must Have Known, was recently was published by Coffee House Press. He has published numerous books and articles on the arts, including Art Tatum: A Critical Biography (a chapbook), The Beautiful Days (poetry), and Four Lives in the Bebop Business, now available as Four Jazz Lives (University of Michigan Press). In recognition of Spellman's commitment and service to jazz, the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005 named one of its prestigious Jazz Masters awards the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy. He was a poet-in-residence at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia, where he taught various courses in African-American culture, and at Emory, Rutgers, and Harvard Universities, where he offered courses in modern poetry, creative writing, and jazz.

The DC Youth Slam Team - These young poets utilize their vocal energy and strength to channel emotions, to generate a message, or to just participate in the artistic field they enjoy. Through their poetic works, they rejuvenate the art of poetry and create individual identities with distinct voices. These teens are the future voices of Amerca. Welcome to the beginning of a movement.

Regie Cabico is the Director of Split This Rock's World & Me youth poetry contest and Artistic Director of Sol & Soul. Cabico is a poet, playwright, and spoken word performer. He took top prizes at the 1993, 1994, and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies and he co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. He received a NYFA Artist Fellowship for Poetry in 1997, NYFAs in 2003 for Poetry and Performance Art, and two Brooklyn Arts Council Poetry Awards. Cabico has been a teacher for Urban Word and developed a poetry and performance program for teens with psychiatric illness at Bellevue Hospital. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers in recognition of his work with diverse communities.

Brookland Poetry Series 2009 Line Up

2009-07-27T13:59:00.002-04:00

From the redoubtable Michael Gushue, the remaining 2009 readings in this terrific DC series, below.

Dear poetry, literature and Brookland aficionados:

Here’s an omnibus note on readings coming up at the Brookland Poetry Series for the remainder of 2009.

Brookland Poetry Series # 66 - August 12, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Our annual Iced Tea Social Poetry Reading.

Poems designed to cool you off and a variety of special iced drinks to quaff. An illustrative list: Lemon Ginger Tea, Rosemary Lemonade, Cherry Balsamic Iced Tea, Nectarine Basil Lemonade, Cucumber Mint Lemonade, Lemon Fennel Iced Tea, Watermelon Lemonade, Raspberry Limeade.

Brookland Poetry Series # 67 - September 9, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Our annual Sterling A. Brown Brookland Invitational Poetry Reading.

Celebrating the legacy and poetry of Brookland’s own Sterling Brown—D.C.’s first poet laureate. Readings of Sterling Brown’s poetry, poetry honoring Brown and his legacy, and poetry by others taught or influenced by Brown. Come hear Sterling Brown’s vibrant, scintillating and deeply moving verse.

Brookland Poetry Series # 68 - October 14, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
It Came From Beneath Brookland.

The monster of all poetry readings. Celebrating monsters, the monstrous, Godzilla, Gojira, and other teratogenic-, teratophobic- and teratophilic-related matters.

Brookland Poetry Series # 69 - November 11, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Lament for the Makers.

A celebration of departed poets. Poems by some of the poets who have died in the last two years will be read, along with brief bios or appreciations, or both. Poems by Tom Disch, Grace Paley, Aimé Césaire, Mahmoud Darwish, Hayden Carruth, W. D. Snodgrass, John Updike, Deborah Digges, Craig Arnold, Kamala Das and others.

Brookland Poetry Series # 70 - December 9, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
St. Lucie’s Day reading.

A celebration of light during the year’s midnight. Poems in honor of the winter solstice, the winter season, and the wintry subjects. Poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Jonh Donne, Kathleen Raine and others.

Join us for these readings at the Brookland Visitors Center, 3420 9th Street, NE. The BVC is 1/2 block from Brookland/CUA Red Line Metro across Monroe Street, and right across 9th Street from Colonel Brooks' Tavern. This reading is free and open to all. For further information call (202) 526-1632 or email mgushuedc@yahoo.com.

AND…please check out our website at http://www.bawadc.com/ for addition information, fabulous-looking posters for the readings, and other Brookland Area Writers and Artists* related matters.

Summer Issue of Beltway on It's Your Mug

2009-07-19T11:30:00.001-04:00

Great new issue of Beltway, with photos by the incomparable Thomas Sayers Ellis!

Beltway Poetry Quarterly
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

A terrific new issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly is now posted online! The IT’S YOUR MUG ANNIVERSARY ISSUE celebrates the first spoken word venue in Washington, DC, founded 15 years ago by Toni Asante Lightfoot. This special issue, guest edited by Toni Asante Lightfoot, with an introduction by Holly Bass, and photographs by Thomas Sayers Ellis, features 18 contributors, all active in the Mug Series:

Eric Antonio * Holly Bass * Toni Blackman * Jane Alberdeston Coralin * Joel Dias-Porter * Twain Dooley * Thomas Sayers Ellis * Brian Gilmore * Monica A. Hand * Reuben Jackson * Brandon D. Johnson * A. Van Jordan * Carolyn Joyner * Dehejia Maat * Ernesto Mercer * Lisa Pegram * Venus Thrash * Patrick Washington

As Holly Bass writes in the introduction: “Running from February 1, 1994 to August 20th 1996, the It's Your Mug's Tuesday night poetry reading was a community event had a lasting impact on Washington’s poetry scene. So many prize-winning books, plays, reading series, recordings and writing careers can trace their beginnings back to that humble little café. So much of DC spoken word community owes a debt to this reading series.” Holly tracks this rich history, including the artist collectives and reading series that were an outgrowth of this pioneering venue.

The issue includes 46 new poems. Read and be inspired!

Beltway Poetry Quarterly
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

"Who" is correct

2009-06-24T08:51:00.002-04:00

Many thanks to my Dad, Preston Browning, Jr., who let me know that in fact "who" is correct in the following sentence:

Plus a bunch of nonfiction writers who I'm sure are just as cool.

This was in a previous post about Sweet Literary Journal -- I had thought that the correct usage in that sentence was "whom," but Dad, the expert, says that: "'who' is correct since it's the subject of the verb 'are.' Using 'whom' in such a construction is sometimes done today but it's incorrect."

Thanks, Dad!

Happy Birthday, Gwendolyn Brooks!

2009-06-16T03:56:00.002-04:00

From the good folks at the Poetry Foundation:

Remember that poetry is life distilled.
—Gwendolyn Brooks

June 7, 2009, would have been Gwendolyn Brooks's 92nd birthday; to join us in celebrating one of America's greatest poets, check out the Hall Library stop on the Chicago Poetry Tour, which features archival recordings of Brooks reading from and speaking about the impressive span of her work. The program ranges from the intimate neighborhood portraits included in her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, such as "kitchenette building" and "the rites for Cousin Vit," to the political turn her poetry took in the '60s as she became involved with the black arts movement:

And we did such exciting things. And we went into the park and recited our poetry and we went to city jail. And the most exciting thing we did was just to walk into a tavern, and someone like Haki Madhubuti, once known as Don L. Lee, would say, "Look folks, we're gonna lay some poetry on you!" . . . And they would turn from their drinks, temporarily, and listen to poetry, which they hadn't come to the tavern to hear, of course.

The Poetry Foundation website offers a critical biography of Brooks, as well as contemporary articles, including Danielle Chapman's "Sweet Bombs," a review of the recently issued collection The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks.

For a broader look at Brooks’s effect on Chicago poetry, listen to "Confronting the Warpland," an original one-hour radio documentary produced by the Poetry Foundation. The show presents African American poets who have found influence and inspiration living in the city, and features Brooks, Tyehimba Jess, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Haki Madhubuti, Sterling Plumpp, and Margaret Walker in interviews, readings, and archival recordings.

Finally, Brooks is showcased in the Essential American Poets archive, selected by Donald Hall during his poet laureateship in 2006. Recorded at the Library of Congress in 1961, Brooks, in her early 30s, reads several poems not available on the Chicago Poetry Tour, including "the mother," "of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery," and "A Sunset of the City," which ends,

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

America's Sorry Policy

2009-06-10T03:49:00.001-04:00

On Obama's Speech in Cairo and US Policy in the Middle East
by John Feffer, the always-astute co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus

In 1697, five years after the judges of Salem, Massachusetts sent 20 suspected witches to the gallows, one man stood up in front of his congregation and apologized. Samuel Sewall was one of the nine judges that gave official sanction to the hysteria of the witch trials. In a remarkable act of contrition, Sewall took upon his head the "blame and shame" of the tragedy and wore a hair shirt until the day of his death to remind him of his sin. More intriguingly, he went on to become a champion of civil rights and an early abolitionist.

It would be truly breathtaking if George W. Bush - or any of the architects of the U.S. foreign policy fiascos of the 21st century - donned a hair shirt, repented of his actions, and performed an ideological about-face. The parallels with Salem are not trivial: the hysteria, the torture, the legal travesties. But don't hold your breath waiting for a mea culpa from the 43rd president. Instead, it's left to Barack Obama to come to terms with the Bush legacy.

Last week in Cairo, President Obama gave a much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world. In many ways the speech was extraordinary. The president reaffirmed his own personal ties to the Islamic world, quoted from the Koran, lauded religious tolerance, upheld the rule of law, recognized that "the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable," called on Israel to stop settlements, reaffirmed his commitment to nuclear abolition, and tactically refocused U.S. military campaigns against "violent extremism in all forms."

The speech "reflected a significant shift away from the ideological framework of militarism and unilateralism that shaped the Bush administration's war-based policy toward the Arab and Muslim worlds," observes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Phyllis Bennis in Changing the Discourse. It will be remembered, as Akiva Eldar writes in Haaretz, "as the last day of the 9/11 era." And the speech could also help shift the U.S. public's attitudes about Islam, which have been largely negative. "If it reduces American prejudice against Arabs and Muslims, then his address would truly mark a new beginning for U.S.-Muslim relations," writes FPIF contributor R.S. Zaharna in Improving U.S.-Muslim Relations.

For all its strong points, however, the speech didn't contain any apologies. The president might have taken the opportunity to apologize for the way the Bush administration demonized Islam, killed countless Muslim civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, supported repressive states in the region, and abrogated the civil liberties of Muslim and Arab-Americans in the United States. But the United States rarely does apologies. And Obama prefers to focus on the future rather than the past.

The closest the president came to an apology was when he mentioned U.S. complicity in the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government in 1953. He didn't apologize for the act (nor did Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 when she too acknowledged U.S. involvement in the coup). "Rather than remain trapped in the past," Obama said in Cairo, "I have made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward."

The president no doubt fears a slippery slope - apologize for one U.S. policy and the demands will escalate to apologize for them all. For the conservative attack dogs, meanwhile, the word "sorry" is like the scent of fear and weakness. At the merest mention of an apology, they will leap at Obama's throat.

And then there's the problem of current U.S. actions. We continue to support autocratic leaders in the Arab world. "Many Arabs and Muslims have expressed frustration that Obama failed to use this opportunity to call on the autocratic Saudi and Egyptian leaders with whom he had visited on his Middle Eastern trip to end their repression and open up their corrupt and tightly controlled political systems," writes FPIF senior analyst Stephen Zunes in How Not to Support Democracy in the Middle East. The Egyptian government's crackdown on dissent prior to Obama's visit was a painful reminder of U.S. double standards on democracy in the region.

Obama pledged to adhere to the timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, noted that the United States desires no military bases in Afghanistan, and referred to the $1.5 billion in infrastructure assistance for Pakistan. But we're still at war in these countries, and apologies, if they come at all, are issued long after the last shot is fired.

For all of the president's attempts to focus the debate on "violent extremists," U.S. aerial assaults and counterinsurgency operations are still claiming civilian lives in the Muslim world. This is particularly problematic in Afghanistan, as FPIF contributor Farrah Hassen points out. In his Cairo speech, the president "failed to acknowledge the growing civilian casualties due to increased U.S. drone attacks ostensibly aimed at dismantling the Taliban - a reality that only increases the risk of blowback against the United States, as opposed to winning the hearts and minds of Afghans, and of Muslims, alike," she writes in Lifting the Veil. "Indeed, a military investigation concluded the United States made mistakes after the May 4 airstrikes in the western province of Farah that killed dozens of civilians."

On the ground in Afghanistan, where support for NATO military operations has declined precipitously over the years, U.S. forces are experimenting with a new policy of prompt apologies for civilian casualties. The apologies are welcome in the region, but words can only go so far. "Apologies are good things," Maolawi Hezatullah, provincial council head in Kunar where U.S. troops killed six civilians in April, told Reuters. "But the foreign troops should convince the people that there will be no more such incidents."

Samuel Sewall didn't simply apologize for his role in the Salem witch trials. He tried to remedy his errors by working to ensure that such atrocities would never reoccur. We may not see apologies for U.S. conduct in the Muslim world coming from top U.S. officials. But if Obama manages to end the "collateral damage" to civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, then U.S. policy will change indeed.

Links

Eve LaPlante, "The Opposite of Thanksgiving," The Boston Globe, November 18, 2007; http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2007/11/18/the_opposite_of_thanksgiving/?page=full

"A New Beginning: Obama's Egypt Speech," The Huffington Post, June 4, 2009; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/obama-egypt-speech-video_n_211216.html

Phyllis Bennis, "Changing the Discourse: First Step Toward Changing the Policy," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6169); Obama's approach toward the Muslim world may be diplomatic, but it remains the work of mobilized people across the United States to end Obama's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, halt the occupation of Iraq immediately rather than years from now, stop U.S. military aid to Israel, and launch new negotiations with Iran not based on military threats.

Akiva Eldar, "Obama's Cairo Speech Signals End of 9/11 Era," Haaretz, June 8, 2009; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090535.html

R. S. Zaharna, "Improving U.S.-Muslim Relations," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6171); For the United States to focus only on improving its image in the Arab and Muslim world is to see only half of the picture.

Madeleine Albright, "American-Iranian Relations," March 17, 2000; http://www.fas.org/news/iran/2000/000317.htm

Stephen Zunes, "How Not to Support Democracy in the Middle East," Foreign Policy In Focus, http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6173; Obama failed to address Egyptian and Saudi repression in his address to the Muslim world.

Hossam el-Hamalawy, "Cairo Under Siege Ahead of Obama's Speech," The Huffington Post, June 3, 2009; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/03/cairo-under-siege-ahead-o_n_211154.html

Farrah Hassen, "Lifting the Veil," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6170); A Muslim-American reflects on Obama's Cairo speech.

Peter Graff, "New Tactic for U.S., NATO in Afghanistan," Reuters, April 17, 2009; http://uk.reuters.com/article/usTopNews/idUKTRE53G3L620090417?sp=true

Sweet is sweet!

2009-06-05T10:10:00.002-04:00

The new issue of Sweet: A Literary Confection is online, happily including my poem, "Kissing Girls" from The Smart Girl Poems. I'm very happy to be in the company of the magnificent Tim Seibles, as well as poets Barbara Daniels, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Laura McCullough, and Emily K. Bright. Plus a bunch of nonfiction writers who I'm sure are just as cool. (Should be "whom" but that would be um... uncool). Check it out here: http://www.sweetlit.com/issue1.3.html

Help Out GirlChild Press and Get a Great Book

2009-06-05T09:58:00.004-04:00

GirlChild Press is moving to the West Coast and they need help. Here's a note from the publisher, Michelle Sewell:

We have 300 first edition copies of Just Like A Girl left from our 1,200 copy run. It is cost prohibitive to ship them to the west coast when we relocate so we are asking that everyone buy a copy. Simple as that. They are $20.00 a piece. Go to www.girlchildpress.com/products.html

to make your order. We have about 20 copies of Growing Up Girl if you are interested in that anthology. If you would like a bulk order of 12 copies or more please email me at girlchildpress@aol.com for a special rate!

If you can't afford to buy a copy pass this announcement to someone with deeper pockets:)

Thank you for your continued support!

Michelle Sewell

Editor/Founder of GirlChild Press

(ps from Sarah - My poem "Poem for Turning 40" is included, plus lots of other terrific writings, poetry and prose. A perfect gift for the feisty gals in your life!)

Augusto Boal, 1931-2009

2009-05-21T04:48:00.002-04:00

From The Guardian (UK):

Augusto Boal, the visionary Brazilian theatre director and dramatist, who has died aged 78, spent his life proving that you didn't have to wait until "after the revolution" for worthwhile social improvements - you could use theatre to make radical changes in the here and now. Best known as the author of the 1974 classic Theatre of the Oppressed, which had grown out of his theatre movement of the same name, Boal was an inspirational and internationally recognised theatre guru.

Full obituary here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/06/augusto-boal-obituary

Panel Proposal Deadline Extended to June 30

2009-05-14T05:50:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

We've extended the deadline for proposals for panels, workshops, and sundry exciting festival events. Please spread the word - and send us your fabulous ideas. Thanks! The "Call" is below, for your convenience, with a link to the full guidelines.

- Split This Rock Team
**

Call for Proposals: Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2010

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness invites poets, writers, activists, and all concerned citizens to Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010 for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation as our country continues to grapple with two wars, a crippling economic crisis, and other social and environmental ills.

The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism -- opportunities to 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.

We invite you to send proposals for panel discussions, group readings, roundtable discussions, workshops, and small-scale performances on a range of topics at the intersection of poetry and social change. Possibilities are endless. Challenge us.

NEW DEADLINE: June 30, 2009.Details and guidelines are online at: www.splitthisrock.org/documents/2010_panel_proposals.doc

Discussion and community building are at the heart of Split This Rock. We value diversity, creativity, and new ideas. Check out last year's schedule for inspiration: www.splitthisrock.org/schedule.html.

Please join us!

Help Split This Rock Spread the Word

Forward this email, post it on your blog, send a message to all your Facebook friends. We are a grassroots movement and need your help to reach a wide variety of poets and poetry lovers. Thanks!

A Human Eye: Essays on Art & Society, by Adrienne Rich

2009-04-29T08:04:00.001-04:00

Reviewed by Michael Roth in the San Francisco Chronicle:

In an essay on the poet Muriel Rukeyser, Rich says that Rukeyser "was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair." And this, too, has been Rich's own perspective: a vision both unsparing and full of hope. Poetry has the power "to revive spirit, stimulate consciousness, restore a brutalized humanity."

Read the full review here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/24/RV6E174N6U.DTL

The Creativity Stimulus

2009-04-28T10:02:00.001-04:00

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon's 1968 election sealed the backlash of the "silent majority" were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven't community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?

Read the full article by Jeff Chang, a cover story in The Nation, here.

Is this blog blocked?

2009-04-28T07:53:00.000-04:00

Blogger says I've been tagged as a possible spam blog and is reviewing the blog. Has anyone received spam that says it's from this blog? I assume this is just the equivalent of being hauled out of security at the airport and having your bags "randomly" checked - but how do I know?

Rain Inside, by Ibrahim Nasrallah, from Curbstone

2009-04-23T08:37:00.003-04:00

An exciting note arrived from Sam Hamill today:

I wanted you to know that Curbstone Press (under my Middlepoint Books imprint with them) has just published a selected poems of the important Palestinian poet & novelist, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Rain Inside.

Check it out and please spread the word. Here's the Curbstone page for more information and ordering: http://curbstone.org/bookdetail2.cfm?BookID=209&view=BL

Read a few sample poems here: http://littleredleaves.com/LRL3/nasrallah.html

Sweet: A Literary Confection

2009-04-22T07:40:00.004-04:00

I'm very pleased that the new online journal, Sweet: A Literary Confection, has accepted one of my poems, "Kissing Girls," from the Smart Girl Poems. I'll post again with a link when the poem comes out, but in the meantime I wanted to spread the word about this delicious new offering, two issues young. Dig in!

In Memoriam: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 - 2009)

2009-04-21T10:42:00.001-04:00

Queer Studies has lost a founding figure. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick passed away April 12 in New York after a long battle with breast cancer. Many LGBT students and scholars benefited directly from the gifts of her teaching, mentorship, and friendship. It is almost impossible to imagine the incredibly rich, varied field we have today without Eve's brilliant work and her brave example.Eve's friend Cathy Davidson has a brief, moving blog post up announcing the news. Read more at Media Bistro's Galley Cat.

That "Glorious Bountiful Nightmare": musings on Christopher Nolan and "Milk"

2009-04-06T08:25:00.002-04:00

Throughout his life, Nolan's mantra was "accept me for what I am and I'll accept you for what you're accepted as." When a Hollywood producer asked to make a movie of his life, Nolan declined his offer. "I want to highlight the creativity within the brain of a cripple," he told the producer, "and while not attempting to hide the crippledom I want instead to filter all sob-storied sentiment from his portrait and dwell upon his life, his laughter, his vision, and his nervous normality. Can we ever see eye-to-eye on that schemed scenario?"

Read Kathi Wolfe's essay on the uses of anger in art and in social change, with musings on Christopher Nolan and the film, "Milk," here: http://www.scene4.com/html/kathiwolfe0409.html

Call for Proposals: Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2010

2009-04-03T05:37:00.001-04:00

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness invites poets, writers, activists, and all concerned citizens to Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010 for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation as our country continues to grapple with two wars, a crippling economic crisis, and other social and environmental ills.

The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism -- opportunities to 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.

We invite you to send proposals for panel discussions, group readings, roundtable discussions, workshops, and small-scale performances on a range of topics at the intersection of poetry and social change. Possibilities are endless. Challenge us.

The deadline is May 30, 2009.

Details and guidelines are online at: www.splitthisrock.org/documents/2010_panel_proposals.doc

Discussion and community building are at the heart of Split This Rock. We value diversity, creativity, and new ideas. Check out last year's schedule for inspiration: www.splitthisrock.org/schedule.html.

Please join us!

Help Split This Rock Spread the Word

Forward this email, post it on your blog, send a message to all your Facebook friends. We are a grassroots movement and need your help to reach a wide variety of poets and poetry lovers. Thanks!

What do you look for in a good poem? - Patricia Fargnoli

2009-03-31T03:21:00.001-04:00

I like this summary:

"Depth, beauty, spirit, craft, sound, humanity. Sometimes fracturing and remaking of reality, so that I as a reader can see a thing newly. Some news to help me understand my own life and its meaning."

The full interview of Patricia Fargnoli by Robert Lee Brewer is here: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Interview+With+Poet+Patricia+Fargnoli.aspx

Death of Walt Whitman, March 26, 1892

2009-03-26T04:24:00.005-04:00

From my friends of the cyberwalt list serv:

Today is the day Walt Whitman died.

Living in Camden, NJ at Mickle Street.

He is buried at Harleigh Cemetery in a granite "burial house" of his own construction.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,

he complains of my gab

and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

-- Walt Whitman

Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

2009-03-25T13:29:00.000-04:00

http://www.vibe.com/news/online_exclusives/2009/03/rhymes_with_reason/

An excerpt from Adam Bradley's, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

From the author: In my new book, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, I explore the ways that MCs have transformed the poetic tradition, extending the legacy of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. I argue that over the last four decades rap has helped bring about a renaissance of the word, returning rhythm, rhyme and wordplay to our daily lives. What follows is an excerpt from the book in which I describe how I uncovered an important truth about rap’s poetry in an unexpected place: a nearly abandoned beach in Brazil.
**********************************************

Rhythm is rap’s reason for being. I realized this several years ago in an unlikely place, a beach in a small seaside town outside of Rio de Janeiro. Unable to speak Portuguese, I had been making do by resorting to the traveler’s Esperanto of smiles and hand gestures, but I hungered for familiar words. One afternoon as I walked along the beach, I contented myself by idly reciting rap verses that came to mind. I was in the midst of Inspectah Deck’s opening lines from the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph” (“I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies/ and hypotheses can’t define how I be dropping these/ mockeries. .20.”) when I heard the first words uttered by another person that I had clearly understood in days.

“Wu-Tang Clan!”

My father’s life gives me a clue about how we got here

2009-03-16T10:17:00.002-04:00

I am pleased to post below an essay my friend Jennifer Freeman wrote on the eve of Barack Obama's election. In it, she uses her father's life -- and her speculations about how he might have voted in the election if he were still alive -- as a lens on the changes so many Americans have gone through in the past 50 years. I find it a very hopeful reflection.

**

I wish my father were alive to see Barack Obama’s candidacy. I would love to know how he felt about it. I’m pretty sure my father, the proud veteran of WWII, would be voting for Obama. That’s a surprise given who my father was; not surprising given who he became throughout his 84 years. I find it remarkable, and thrilling, that we are poised to elect an African-American president. My father’s life gives me a clue about how we got here. His evolution must mirror an evolution that has been taking place around the country for decades, in individuals and across generations, leading us to who and where we are today.

My father was always uncomfortable, at the very least, with people of other races and cultures. I was born 18 years after my father’s discharge from the Air Force where he was stationed in Italy and Egypt. My memories date no earlier than 1968 or so, but though 24 years had passed since his time in the war, I remember that Italians were still Wops to my dad, Egyptians were still A-Rabs. And yet his war stories reflected a subtle change in those 40’s era attitudes. He told a story of how none of the men in the unit at the base of Mt. Vesuvius believed the Italian geologists when they warned that it would erupt. My dad said they lost bombers and tanks that could have been saved if they’d heeded the warnings. I don’t even know if that story is true (Mt. Vesuvius did erupt in 1944, lava did pour over bombers, but I don’t know if it’s because the Italian warnings were ignored) but my father told the story with a note of disdain, or at least something a little smug, toward those who he said had refused to believe that “Wops” had any useful advice.

My Italian-American sister-in-law, whom my father adored, put to rest his waning anti-Italian bias. When he launched into yet another war story and my mother, two brothers and I rolled our eyes and cried for relief, Hank (nicknamed after her grandfather) was rapt and filled with questions. But when he referenced the I-talians (long-I), she’d always correct him “(short-I) talians, Frank, Italians.” He’d laugh and correct himself. She never let him get away with the mispronunciation or any slip back to Wop. She helped him overcome his anti-Catholic bias too, which had already taken quite a hit during the Kennedy era but was still there nonetheless.

During my childhood my father was uncomfortable with African-Americans too, and while I can’t recall anything specifically racist it seemed pretty clear that he was. Maybe it was the way he laughed with Archie Bunker instead of at him like the rest of us. Archie was beleaguered by a more liberal family, a changing neighborhood and changing times, just like my father. I recall how we berated him when he referred to Negros or colored people, until finally he corrected himself and learned to say “black.” He would often express his appreciation for black athletes or actors with an inadvertent tone of surprise or a qualifier -- “he’s good, for a colored guy.” We were merciless at those times, angrily demanding to know what he meant. He’d get flustered and say he didn’t really know, that he didn’t really mean anything. I guess we were part of changing him, but it seemed that the changes in his commentary were designed to avoid our abuse, not a reflection of any real change. I remember asking him how he’d react if I married someone black. We all baited my father like that, taunting him a bit, sneering at his prejudices. I felt bad for him in a way, saw how much he was a lonely island in his own home, yet felt righteous in my message and my style of delivery, however insensitive and ineffective, as only the youth can be righteous.

The Vietnam War also divided us. I remember vividly an argument between my mother and father when my mother declared that she’d encourage my brother to flee to Canada if the war was still going on when he became draft age. My father was furious and deeply wounded. His own sacrifice, his sense of honor and pride instilled during WWII could not reckon with my mother’s questions and the resentment she must have felt toward her country in 1970. Jeff was only 12 years old. It was an unnecessary argument, wound up in a hypothetical war 6 years in the future. But at that point it looked like Vietnam could go on that long, and in my mother’s eyes, there was no good reason why it should.

Another time I recall a discussion about busing, when Minneapolis like many cities was working to undo school segregation. We lived in a quiet, white suburb, watching it all from a safe distance. My mother said that that didn’t seem right, that they should include the suburbs in a busing plan. I don’t recall my father’s reaction, but I’m sure he was not gung-ho about busing his children over the line into North Minneapolis. Maybe he’d learned by then to keep his reactions to himself.

Over the years there were little signs that my father was changing with his family and the world around him, and that the changes were truly about him, not just a means to avoid our barrage of assaults. The first significant evidence was his shift from the Republican to Democratic party. He claimed it was Richard Nixon who did that. He felt deeply betrayed by Watergate. He said it helped him see that the Republican party was becoming a party interested only in helping the well-to-do. The Republicans my father was drawn to were frugal, small “c” conservatives who appealed to values rooted in his upbringing on Minnesota and Iowa farms. After Watergate, he began to appreciate the Democrats focus on “the little guy” like him. Throughout the rest of his life he became a loyal and tireless volunteer on many a democratic campaign.

By early 2000 it seemed that my father had changed quite a bit when it came to issues of race. I was suddenly struck by this when he and my mother moved into an assisted living facility. They introduced me to the aides who came to help clean up their apartment, take their medication and get ready for the day. Nearly all of these men and women were Haitian or African-American. I remember coming by for a visit and finding my father and one of his Haitian aides sharing pictures and stories of their grandchildren. He would have found this impossible 20 years before.

After my mother passed away my father became increasingly frail and began to need the help of his aides more and more. They were there all the many times he fell or the EMTs needed to be
called. During those days the suspicious, mistrustful manner of his younger days was nearly gone, given way to a man much more frail, a little nervous, but grateful for the kindness of these strangers who were his daily support.

The father I recall from 1968 – 1975 or so would have most certainly voted for John McCain, Watergate notwithstanding. He simply could not comfortably vote for a black man, even if he was a Democrat, even if my father had turned away from the Republican party to be in the party that stood up for the little guy. But the father with tender admiration and appreciation for his hard-working health aides, I’m certain he would be voting for Obama. It brings tears to my eyes to think that, and wish that he were here to see this day. I’m sure he’d be proud of his country right now.

by Jennifer Freeman

Split This Rock Poetry Contest Deadline Extended

2009-03-11T10:26:00.001-04:00

Contest Deadline Extended!

New Deadline for 2009 Split This Rock Poetry Contest: March 23

$1,000 awarded for poems of provocation & witness

Patricia Smith, Judge

NEW Postmark Deadline: March 23, 2009

We've extended the deadline for the 2nd annual Split This Rock poetry contest, to be judged by poet and National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith.

So, if you missed the deadline, don't panic - just send those poems! And please help us spread the word by forwarding this notice widely and posting it on your blogs. Thanks!

First place receives $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each.

Winning poems will be published on SplitThisRock.org, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2010.

$25 entry fee. Proceeds support the next festival (March 10-13, 2010).

Find full details and guidelines online at: http://splitthisrock.org/contests.html

Sloganize: The new time waster

2009-03-10T09:35:00.002-04:00

On one of those dopey post-lunch internet meanderings, I stumbled just now on Sloganize, which claims to transform your run-of-the-mill words into a... slogan! Here are my attempts:

At the intersection of poetry and social change: "At the intersection of poetry and social change, your family will love you!"

Poems of provocation and witness: "See the world with poems of provocation and witness."

Then it told me it worked best with two-word combos, so I tried:

Poetry activism, and got: "My poetry activism, your poetry activism, poetry activism for all!"

And the worst, with "poetry change," I got: "Poetry change, innovate your world!" Maybe that should be our new slogan at Split This Rock... (Somehow I think not.)

So, see what you think - try out a two-word combo and post any interesting results in the Comments. Goofy!

This Side of Early - 2nd book of poems by Naomi Ayala

2009-03-09T09:16:00.002-04:00

I am very pleased to post this announcement by Curbstone Press of the publication of Naomi Ayala's second collection of poems. I've not seen the book yet, as it's hard to get stuff here in Italy, but I am looking forward to it - a long-awaited moment.
**

"In This Side of Early, Naomi Ayala exhibits astonishing range, proving that great poetry is worth waiting for. Like Whitman, Ayala contains multitudes; she is a poet with an ethereal vision of another world."--Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Naomi Ayala's poems explore wide-ranging themes in an ever-changing landscape--from the city streets to the introspective solace of the woods. These lyrics deconstruct the political world of man, offer hope through a compelling, lyrical spiritual intimacy, and bridge the gap between the two with words full of ecological intensity.

"Naomi Ayala's strong, supple poems pull a reader right inside. Haunting secrets scuttle along beneath the rafters of every day--she hears them in the mystery of animals and culture and time, connection and disconnection, and sings their resonant song."--Naomi Shihab Nye

This Side of Early

http://www.curbstone.org/bookdetail.cfm?BookID=207

This Side of Early by Naomi Ayala Original Paperback Curbstone ISBN: 978-1-931896-46-7 68 pages $13.95

Patrick Leahy proposes Truth & Reconciliation Commission for Bush - Sign a Petition in Support

2009-03-05T09:17:00.004-05:00

From Democrats.com (not an official Dem org):

Dear Friend,

We have just emerged from a time when White House officials often acted as if they were above the law. That was wrong and must be fully exposed so it never happens again.

That is why Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney Administration. These abuses may include the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws.

Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. The best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.

Please join me by signing Senator Leahy's online petition at http://www.BushTruthCommission.com -- urging Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

Haikus for President Obama on Blog This Rock

2009-02-20T10:03:00.000-05:00

After lunch counters,
deafening hoses, snarling dogs,
you, basking in light.

-- Patricia Smith

A new green blue day
and high hatted trees! And sun!
Can you see it? Sir?

-- K. Bonanno

Read more at http://www.blogthisrock.blogspot.com/

Reminder: Split This Rock at AWP

2009-02-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

Don't forget to join Split This Rock at Table #309 at the AWP bookfair this week. We'll be announcing some of the line-up for the 2010 festival, writing haiku post cards to the new prez, and sampling Italian chocolates. Plus a reading, book signing, reception, and more!

Details here: http://www.facebook.com/inbox/readmessage.php?t=1013681834686#/event.php?eid=47663823324&ref=share.

Hope to see you in Chicago!

Split This Rock 2009 Poetry Contest

2009-01-30T03:30:00.003-05:00

Benefits Split This Rock Poetry Festival - Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010$1,000 awarded for poems of provocation & witness

Patricia Smith, Judge
Deadline: March 9, 2009 (postmark)

Split This Rock is pleased to announce our second annual poetry contest, to be judged by National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith. First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on http://www.splitthisrock.org/, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2010.

Details:
Submissions should be in the spirit of Split This Rock: socially engaged poems, poems that reach beyond the self to connect with the larger community or world; poems of provocation and witness. This theme can be interpreted broadly and may include but is not limited to work addressing politics, government, war, leadership; issues of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, body image, immigration, cultural heritage, etc.); community, civic engagement, education, activism; and poems about history, Americana, cultural icons. Read the winning poems from 2008 here: www.splitthisrock.org/contest2008.html.

Submission guidelines:
- Send up to 3 unpublished poems, no more than 6 pages total, in any style, in the spirit of Split This Rock (see above).
- Staple one cover page to your submissions containing your name, address, phone number, email, and the titles of your poems. This is the only part of the submission which should contain your name.
- Enclose a check or money order for $25 (made out to "Split This Rock") to:
Split This Rock Poetry Contest, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036
- Simultaneous submissions OK, but please notify us immediately if the poem is accepted elsewhere.
- Postmark deadline: March 9, 2009.
- For more details, contact info@splitthisrock.org.

Patricia Smith, author, poet, teacher, performer, is the author of five books of poetry: Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a book of poems chronicling the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina; Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), a 2005 National Poetry Series selection, winner of the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize, and finalist for the 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Close to Death (1993); Big Towns, Big Talk (1992); and Life According to Motown (1991). In addition, she has authored the history "Africans In America" and the children's book Janna and the Kings. Smith's work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. She is a National Book Award Finalist, Pushcart Prize winner, Cave Canem faculty member, and four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history.

Reading in Chicago, Childhood Home

2009-01-29T06:08:00.001-05:00

Global War on Terror's End?

2009-01-28T04:31:00.001-05:00

From the very smart and ever thoughtful John Feffer, Co-Director of Foreign Policy in Focus:

Last week, shortly after being inaugurated, President Barack Obama ended the "global war on terror" (GWOT). Or so The Washington Post reported. The new president countermanded the Bush administration's extralegal approaches by mandating the closure of Guantánamo within a year, outlawing the use of torture in interrogations, and putting the CIA out of the secret prisons business. Obama announced that he wanted to "send an unmistakable signal that our actions in defense of liberty will be as just as our cause."

Sounds good. But the Post's declaration might be just as premature as President George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on the USS Lincoln that signaled the "end" of the Iraq War.

On the civil liberties front, for instance, the administration retains the right to use renditions, by which the CIA secretly abducted suspects and transferred them to third countries without trial. "I think it's a glaring hole," Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights said last week on Democracy Now! "I think that one way that the Obama administration could have dealt a more decisive blow to the illegal Bush policies and even the rendition policy, which originated under Bill Clinton, is to specifically reference this and to say that we are going to disavow this."
Also, the inmates at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, which holds more prisoners than Gitmo, and the thousands held in Iraq won't get the case-by-case review accorded to their counterparts in Cuba. Non-military agencies like the CIA, after a six-month review, might get "additional or different guidance" on interrogations - and who knows what that means. And, as Politico points out, the guy in charge of the 30-day review of Gitmo is the same fellow who was in charge for the last two years - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. That's not exactly a recipe for reform.

But even if Obama holds to his word on torture, closes Guantánamo within the year, applies the same yardstick to detainees at Bagram and in Iraq, and eliminates the Clinton-era policy on extraordinary rendition, the death of the "global war on terror," as Mark Twain once said of his own prematurely published obituary, is greatly exaggerated. Indeed, on the day after it published GWOT's obituary, The Washington Post reported on two U.S. unilateral air strikes in Pakistan that killed 20 suspected terrorists. Although it observed an uncharacteristic silence over these strikes, the Pakistani government has previously expressed outrage at these violations of its sovereignty.

Then there's Afghanistan, which will be the new epicenter of U.S. counterterrorism strategy. Here's the relevant excerpt from the official White House statement on foreign policy: "Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on the greatest threat to our security - the resurgence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They will increase our troop levels in Afghanistan, press our allies in NATO to do the same, and dedicate more resources to revitalize Afghanistan's economic development."

Why does Obama believe that he can escape the same outcome in Afghanistan that Bush faced in Iraq? As former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern argued in a recent appeal for a five-year "time-out" on war, "In 2003, the Bush administration ordered an invasion of Iraq, supposedly to reduce terrorism. But six years later, there is more terrorism and civil strife in Iraq, not less. The same outcome may occur in Afghanistan if we make it the next American military conflict."

So, is this a kinder, gentler GWOT? Certainly the new Obama administration is more concerned about observing international law. It's more prudent in its willingness to use diplomacy over force. But so far at least, the new president still treats terrorism as a war to be won rather than an endemic problem to be dealt with, patiently and largely by law enforcement agencies. We're still at war in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and for the time being in Iraq. We're still selling arms to Indonesia, Israel, and Colombia as part of an overall counterterrorism approach. The Pentagon's new Africa Command (AFRICOM) still looks at counterterrorism through a military lens.

Sounds to me like we haven't seen the last of GWOT quite yet.

Split This Rock at AWP in Chicago - Join us!

2009-01-27T08:50:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

Here at Split This Rock we are excited and moved by the possibilities presented by our new president, Barack Obama. We loved seeing Bush and Cheney whisked away by helicopter. They are gone from our city. We’d like to see them in jail, but for the moment we’ll settle for gone.

We know that all of you helped our country arrive at this historic moment and we are grateful for your vision, dedication, and tireless efforts. We also know that social change never rains down from above but grows up from the roots, from all of us. There is much to be done to build justice and peace. We recommit ourselves and Split This Rock to this essential work. We hope you will continue to walk with us on this road.

Our first opportunity to meet up in 2009 is just a few weeks away in Chicago. If you’ll be at AWP, please join Split This Rock. Sarah Browning is coming in from Italy and we’re planning several events, including a reading on Thursday night, February 12. Stop by Table #309 to say hello, learn about the next festival in 2010, and pick up guidelines to the 2009 contest, judged by National Book Award Finalist and 2008 Split This Rock poet Patricia Smith. (Guidelines are also online at: http://splitthisrock.org/contests.html.)

At the table, you can pick up your invitation to Split This Rock’s reception at Saturday’s cocktail hour. Please plan to join us for food, drinks and networking from 5-8 pm that evening. We’ll also have book signings and postcards to the new president – bring, or compose on the spot, your haikus of hope for President Obama! Details on all the happenings, below.

If you have a few free hours at AWP, please consider volunteering at the table. It’s a great way to meet people and hear about the exciting work socially engaged poets are doing all over the country. You’ll also be on the receiving end of a lot of our gratitude, a terrific way to start the new era. To volunteer, please contact Sarah at browning@splitthisrock.org. Thanks!

Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Melissa, Sarah, Regie, and Jaime
Split This Rock

**

From Chocolate to Chi: DC Poets in Chicago
Thursday, February 12 at 7:00 pm

Poetry reading by Sarah Browning, Regie Cabico, Sage Morgan Hubbard, John Murillo, Kim Roberts, and Melissa Tuckey

Insight Arts, 1545 W. Morse Ave., Chicago, IL (773) 973-1521, info@insightartsliberation.org. Free admission. Open mic as well as the featured readers. http://insightartsliberation.org/. Insight Arts is in Roger’s Park on Chicago’s Northside, near Northwestern and Loyola Universities, half a block from the Morse redline stop.

Sarah Browning is author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She co-directs Split This Rock Poetry Festival with Melissa Tuckey, author of Rope as Witness. Regie Cabico is a Def Poetry Jam veteran and Artistic Director of Sol & Soul, an arts and social change organization in DC. Sage Morgan Hubbard is a graduate student at Northwestern University and a teacher with Young Chicago Authors, Sol & Soul, and DC WritersCorps. John Murillo is a two time Larry Neal Writers’ Award winner, a New York Times Poetry Fellow, and Cave Canem alum. Kim Roberts is the author most recently of The Kimnama and editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

**

Split This Rock Reception
Saturday, February 14, 5-8 pm
Undisclosed Location
Free food and drink!

Please join us for a reception as AWP winds down. It’s a chance to network and get to know one another better, be part of discussions about the ever-evolving Split This Rock, and share with us your ideas and suggestions for how the organization can serve your needs. Stop by Table #309 for your invitation containing location details.

**

Book Signing by Kim Roberts, The Kimnama
Saturday, February 14, 10:30 am
Table #309

KIM ROBERTS is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and author of two books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994). She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington. She was awarded a 2008 Independent Voice Award from the Capital BookFest.

**

2009 Split This Rock Poetry Contest Guidelines now online!

Split This Rock is pleased to announce its second annual poetry contest, to be judged by National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith. First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on http://www.splitthisrock.org/, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read the winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2010. Reading fee of $25 benefits 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Deadline: March 9, 2009. For full guidelines: http://splitthisrock.org/contests.html or stop by Table #309 at AWP in Chicago.

**

Volunteer at Split This Rock’s Table at AWP

If you can offer a few hours of your time greeting people at the bookfair, please contact Sarah at browning@splitthisrock.org. You’ll be teamed up with another volunteer and provided plenty of information and support. Plus, you’ll get lots of praise and thanks from us – priceless!

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem

2009-01-21T10:02:00.000-05:00

Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. A chapbook edition of Praise Song for the Day will be published on February 6, 2009.

Inauguration Day in Torino

2009-01-21T09:51:00.002-05:00

Tom and Ben and I were invited to a Birthday Party/Inauguration Watching Gathering last night at the home of one of Ben’s classmates. At the last minute Tom’s colleague Jennifer, whose son Alberto goes to the school and who introduced us there, had to cancel, as Alberto wasn’t feeling well.

So we were introduced to the mother of the birthday boy outside school at pick-up time and set off on foot through the ice and slush along the river with her and a posse of 10-year-olds headed for the party. The family spent several stints in New York over the years and so the parents Valeria and Simone speak excellent English. Phew.

We found ourselves, in fact, in a warm and welcoming environment. Adults arrived in waves from work over the course of the evening. And Valeria brought out wave after wave of food platters: mini panini with salami, prosciutto, or mortadella. Celery stuffed with gorgonzola. Bread sticks, a specialty of Torino. Massive blocks of hard cheese. Warm little pastry envelopes filled with apricot jam and sprinkled with sugar. Birthday cake, of course. Little marinara pizzettas, just red sauce. Endive with pomegranate seeds. And bottle after bottle of wine – red, white, prosecco.

Valeria waited until it was clear we were ObamaHeads and then took off the sweater she was wearing to expose her Hope T shirt, with the beautiful red and blue portrait of Obama that’s become so ubiquitous this winter.

We watched the inauguration on CNN on the large TV in the living room. It came via their internet cable, as the Sky satellite dish was malfunctioning. So there were frequent stutters and misses both in the picture and the sound. Moreover, a dozen or more Italian 10-year-olds were rioting through the place. At the very moment that Elizabeth Alexander began her lovely poem the kids brought out their noisemakers and began blowing – in celebration of the birthday boy, the inauguration, or for the sheer joy of making the loudest noise possible.

It was surreal to watch such a momentous event in such a chaotic environment. But I loved it. The mood was festive and celebratory and not somber, as it might have been at home. We met fascinating people: a science journalist for Italian TV who had to leave the party early to go home and write something on Obama and stem cell research, energy, and environment for today’s show. Her husband, not in attendance, is a member of parliament from Torino, in a left-wing party. Laura began to tell me the history of left electoral politics in Italy, why it has been so fractured. I want to get more clarity on this, but I did understand that there were many smaller parties in the past, then they tried uniting into one large party, the Partita Democratica. But that experiment has been a failure, according to Laura, and there is talk again of breaking apart, to come together in coalition in the future.

Simone, our host, is a professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, leading a masters program in food studies that combines history, anthropology, sociology, and sciences. It’s affiliated with Slow Food University in nearly Bra. He also teaches in an American Studies program at another university, as his own field is the experience of Italian immigration to the US and the history (I think I got this right) of Italian food there.

Our other host Valeria is a tour guide. We met two auto engineers (Fiat headquarters are here) and a yoga instructor. Almost everyone spoke marvelous, idiomatic English. It made me ashamed of my pathetic Italian. Though I was able to discuss the lunches at Ben’s school with the monolingual grandma: Schifoso, my son says, disgusting, I told her. Yes, Ferdi says the same, she agreed. Italy’s Worst Cooks, we call them. You must complain, she says. Protesta. All together.

Tom and I drank too much and I cried during Aretha Franklin’s My Country Tis of Thee (and thank God she didn’t sing God Bless America) and Tom blew raspberries at George Bush. Just after the swearing in, the kids marched around the apartment waving American flags. Later, I spotted Ben wearing 6 or 8 of them stuck in his collar and waistband, a gorilla mask over his face. Sadly, no camera.

I always roll my eyes at the speeches and their celebration of an assumed American Exceptionalism. But I felt even more acutely last night the sheer arrogance when Obama declared in ringing tones that American is ready to lead again. Tom called out, You hear that, you Italians, America will be leading you now. Aren’t you pleased? As if America is the nun and Italy and all the other nations are little Madeline and her pals lining up in two straight lines behind. (I’m remembering that Madeline and Co. wreck a certain amount of havoc, so perhaps the comparison is more apt than I suppose.)

But we were the only ones objecting. Italians must be so used to this rhetoric by now that they can’t bother to complain. Or perhaps they were being polite to us. Or the chaos of the party obscured the words. Or they don’t care – like the rest of us they are just grateful for the End of an Error, moved by the election of our first Black president and by the massive outpouring of support from the American people, hopeful for a saner and more just American foreign policy.

A kind soul took pity on us and drove us home, though we live in the exact opposite direction from his house. He spared us a bus ride and a tram ride and waiting in the cold for each of them on their infrequent evening rounds. We have small cars in Italy, he apologized, as we wedged our big American butts into his tiny Fiat. Yes, and thank God, we said. Maybe someday America will learn a thing or two from you.

E. Ethelbert Miller and Andy Shallal on AP/AOL News

2009-01-20T09:02:00.002-05:00

Split This Rock's own E. Ethelbert Miller and Andy Shallal, artist and owner of Busboys and Poets, are both featured in a photo and audio montage of responses to Obama's impending presidency. Miller is heard reading his O Poem. Click here and scroll down to "From I Have a Dream to Yes We Can."

Just Hours Away ...a note from Michael Moore

2009-01-20T04:24:00.002-05:00

Hard to be away from DC on this glorious, astonishing day. Almost impossible to write what I feel, so I am sharing a letter from Michael Moore that came into my In box just now. Wishing everyone a celebratory, wonderful ObamaDay!
**

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Friends,

This happy, happy day!

We have made it through the Dark Ages and here we are, in one of the most redemptive moments history has ever witnessed. Barack Obama is our best hope to get it right, to heal our national soul, to reach out to the rest of the world with an olive branch instead of shocking brutality.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who has worked to make this day happen. For many, the madness goes back, not eight years but twenty-eight years, to the tragic day Reagan was sworn in to dismantle our precious "government of the people" and our beloved way of life.

To all of you who have spoken up and spoken out, who have written letters and marched for peace, for all of you who never gave up, you are the true heroes today. Many of you have suffered great economic losses. Some of you have endured a loved one being shipped overseas to senseless and shameful wars, and thousands of you have seen those loved ones returned home, no longer alive. It has been a heartbreaking time.

But the sun comes out at noon today. The disgraced outgoing president will slide out the side door and head to Crawford to sell the Hollywood set known as the Bush "ranch" before he settles down in an exclusive neighborhood in Dallas. I would encourage Mr. Bush to issue one final pardon before noon today -- his own. He had better issue a blanket pardon for all crimes that may have been committed since 2001 by himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the whole gang. Serious laws were broken, a war was concocted on a lie, and now, please, justice must be carried out.

So let us move forward and fix the horrible mess we are in. We are fortunate to have a new president who is smart and kind and committed to serving his country. Take a moment today and think about what you can do to join him in helping him do his job. We're all in this together. Our country has been so profoundly wrecked by an administration who decided to mug our constitution and then steal what they can for their Wall Street cronies on the way out the door.
Here is my plea: Let's not leave Barack Obama alone to clean up the mess. As he takes his oath today, please take one yourself -- to work harder than ever to end these wars, create universal health care, save our planet, end poverty, increase knowledge and establish a true government "of, by and for the people" (instead of "of, by and for the lobbyists, the bankers, and the war profiteers").

On a personal note, it's no secret that I have had to suffer an avalanche of hate and attack as I stuck my neck out to simply do my job. Some day I will tell you what the true cost of this has been for me, but not today. Today is a time for celebration and optimism and hope. I'm glad we all lived to see this incredible moment. And I thank each of you for your support of my work and your dedication to our democracy.

12:01pm can't come soon enough!
Happy Inauguration Day!

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

Poems About Museums on Beltway Poetry Quarterly

2009-01-18T12:37:00.003-05:00

I'm honored to have a poem included in this terrific issue of Beltway. Here's the announcement from editor Kim Roberts:

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM BELTWAY POETRY QUARTERLY!

http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

Beltway Poetry opens 2009 with a new issue devoted entirely to poems about museums. Thirty-three poets write about museums, historical sites, and other public places devoted to preservation and exhibition. The poems address the institutions and "their collections, their workers, and the many ways in which they fulfill their founders’ hopes of enlarging the scope of civic life," as guest co-editor Maureen Thorson writes in her introduction. "In these poems, poets engage in conversations with artists, their subjects, and with art itself. They stand in witness to the forces of history."

So join us in this luminous collection of poems. Saundra Rose Maley asks King Tut,"...is there a crossing over/ Or is this life just what it is, a sandal strap/At best?" Margaret Yocom speaks in the voice of a man who amassed old logging equipment for a museum in Maine. Kendra Kopelke lets the woman in a Hopper painting speak: " He put me here/like a candle/to ignite the room." Stephen Cushman imagines painter's models, "posing in a yoga twist,/head going one way, torso another." David Gewanter writes of a museum store clerk, " I love to see my mother behind//the counter, tidying up the fossil fish/and reptile rulers." Linda Pastan contemplates death from a safe distance, asking, " Whose skulls are these,/and isn't it dread/that informs our pleasure//in this canvas?"

Poets included:

M.C. Allan * Francisco Aragón * Anne Becker * Mel Belin * Rose Berger * Jody Bolz * Dan Brady * Sarah Browning * Stephen Cushman * Kyle Dargan * Amani Elkassabany * Martin Galvin * Parris Garnier * David Gewanter * Andrew Haley * Reginald Harris * Alan King * Rosemary Klein * Kendra Kopelke * Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda * Mary Ann Larkin * Barbara Lefcowitz * Saundra Rose Maley * Lalita Noronha * Linda Pastan * Ann Rayburn * M.A. Schaffner * Edna Small * Cheryl Snell * Marcela Sulak * Melissa Tuckey * Margaret Yocom * Katherine E. Young

Special thanks to editorial assistants Jessica Roxburgh and Alyssa Schimmel for their work on this issue.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly, now in its ninth year of online publication, is available for free online at http://www.beltwaypoetry.com.

>>>>>>

Subscribe!

Subscriptions are free. There are two options.

JOURNAL ONLY. If you would like to get email notices four times a year with announcements of new issues, please join our subscription list at Mutual Aid. Go to: http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/beltwaypoetryquarterly.

DC LOCAL LISTINGS. Want more? If you would like a subscription PLUS information about readings, calls for entry, and other literary events in the greater DC region, please join our DC list at Mutual Aid. Go to: http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman./listinfo/beltway.

Poetry and Conflict: A Message on Gaza from DC Poets Against the War and Split This Rock

2009-01-12T03:57:00.005-05:00

With so much power, the hardest thing is not to kill.
-- Aleksandr Kerensky

Dear friends of Split This Rock,

It is with great sadness we greet you as the conflict in Gaza intensifies.

DC Poets Against the War opposes the use of force against civilians and supports the Geneva Convention. We therefore oppose Israel's use of military force in Gaza, the use of rockets as a means to settle disputes, and the use of blockades to prevent food, doctors and medical supplies from entering Gaza. We join the world in calling for an immediate ceasefire and we are disappointed in the Bush administration's refusal to speak out against this massacre.

We recognize that this is an emotional issue for many with friends and relatives living on both sides of the borders. We join the peacemakers in both Palestine and Israel in calling for ceasefire, and diplomacy.

We join peacemakers in calling for a change of direction in US foreign policy towards the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and an end to occupation.

We hope that through constructive dialogue here at home we can develop more nuance, more consensus, more willingness and motivation to work together to end this terrible and ongoing conflict.

Meanwhile, we wanted to share a few resources for those who want to learn more or to act.

For peace and justice,

your friends at
DC Poets Against the War
and Split This Rock

**

Another Day Will Come

by Mahmoud Darwish

Another Day will come, a womanly day
diaphanous in metaphor, complete in being,
diamond and processional in visitation, sunny,
flexible, with a light shadow. No one will feel
a desire for suicide or for leaving. All
things outside the past, natural and real,
will be synonyms of their early traits. As if time
is slumbering on vacation..."Extend your lovely
beauty-time. Sunbathe in the sun of your silken breasts,
and wait until good omen arrives. Later
we will grow older. We have enough time
to grow older after this day..."/
Another day will come, a womanly day
song like in gesture, lapis in greeting
and in phrase. All things will be feminine outside
the past. Water will flow from rock's bosom.
No dust, no drought, no defeat.
And a dove will sleep in the afternoon in an abandoned
combat tank if it doesn't find a small nest
in the lover's bed.

Translated by Fady Joudah. From: Poets for Palestine, edited by Remi Kanazi.

**

Activist Organizations and Resources for Peace:

J Street: J Street is the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.

US Campaign to End the Occupation: The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a diverse coalition working for freedom from occupation and equal rights for all by challenging U.S. policy towards the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is based on human rights and international law, providing a non-sectarian framework for everyone who supports its Call to Action.

Coalition for Justice and Accountability: A group of activists from the Washington, DC metro area who have come together to resist US and Israeli wars and occupations carried out and maintained with the goal of dominating the Middle East and controlling its land and resources.

Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights: Palestinian NGO in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza Strip.

Gaza Siege: A site set up for resources related to Gaza, includes background on the Gaza conflict, lots of analysis, Humanitarian aid organizations, etc. (warning graphic front page).

The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development: DC-based organization whose cultural program promotes the work of artists from Palestine as well as from the Arab and Islamic worlds through art exhibits, book signings, film screenings and musical performances.

ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE - Protests, memorials, and other actions are happening throughout the US (and world). To find an event near you go to:Calendar of Protests

BOOKS

Poets for Palestine
A recently released book of poems and art edited by Remi Kanazi which includes a diverse range of voices, from a peace perspective. If you find this crisis challenging your humanity-- this book is an excellent resource.

Understanding the Palestinian Israeli Conflict, a primer (book) by Phyllis Bennis, available via interlink books. A great resource for understanding the conflict from an international law perspective, with an easy to read Q & A format. A good starting place.

Funding for the Arts - What More You Can Do

2009-01-08T08:43:00.005-05:00

Dear Artists and Supporters of Art,

If you've signed the Split This Rock petition asking that 1% of the stimulus package support the arts, thank you! If you haven't yet, please go here to sign it:http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/artsstimulus/index.html

With your support we now have more than 3,000 signatures! Thanks to the Institute for Policy Studies' work on the Hill, the proposal has won support from representative John Conyers and from the progressive caucus who have passed the proposal to Nancy Pelosi. The Obama transition team has also shown some interest.

While this is great progress, it is also true that the halls of Congress are teeming with lobbyists, with many competing interests asking to be included in the stimulus package. So we have to be sure that Congress also hears from artists, writers, and arts supporters. It's time to make some noise!

The House aims to have a draft of their stimulus package by the end of January. What this means is we have about three weeks to make an impact. Here are several things you can do to help ensure the arts aren't left behind:

1. Share the petition with friends and ask them to sign in support: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/artsstimulus/index.html
(Feel free to cut and paste the sample letter below.)

2. Email or call your legislators--US representatives and US senators--to ask that 1% of the stimulus package support the arts. (Cut and paste the sample letter below, if you like.) Find contact information here: www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

3. Contact the Obama transition team to express your support for the 1% for the arts petition. Submit your ideas to at http://www.change.gov/.

4. Be creative! Use your artistic medium to raise awareness about the campaign. Writers--write! Drummers? Drum! Hand out fliers at your next public event. Or organize an arts event in your community to draw attention to this campaign.

5. Post information about the campaign on your blog, or write a letter to the editor to raise awareness about this campaign.

6. Join our Facebook cause--"one percent for the arts campaign: a stimulus plan for the arts" and use the site as an opportunity to network and link up with other arts advocates in your community.http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/event.php?eid=47790950247&ref=nf

Please share any blogs or events with us at info@splitthisrock.org, and we will post links on our website.

SAMPLE LETTER TO FRIENDS

Dear Friends,

As you know, Congress is gearing up to pass a $800 billion stimulus package with the goal of creating jobs and stimulating the economy. I am writing to ask that you join Split This Rock's and the Institute for Policy Studies' campaign, calling for 1% of the stimulus package be used to support the arts.

The arts are an integral part of our economy and a vital part of our culture and heritage. Unfortunately, arts programs are often the first to be cut in times of crisis, and many programs have already been cut in our public schools and communities.

Sign our petition today, and please share this appeal with friends: www.ipetitions.com/petition/artsstimulus/index.html

Thanks,

**

SAMPLE LETTER TO CONGRESS

Dear Honorable Representative,

I am writing in support of the Split This Rock and Institute for Policy Studies call that 1% of the stimulus package be used support the arts.

Much of the art, music, writing, and theater we appreciate today came from Works Progress Administration funding in the 1930s. WPA funding created thousands of jobs for artists, writers, musicians, theater workers, and performers. Our generation deserves no less. I've joined thousands of artists and arts supporters in signing a petition. To read more, please visit: www.ipetitions.com/petition/artsstimulus/index.html

Sincerely,

Harold Pinter, 1930-2008

2008-12-27T11:15:00.001-05:00

With thanks to Stephen Kobasa, for sending the following:

Another prophet and poet dead, but we still have the voice. The passage below is the conclusion to Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech:

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

One Percent for the Arts!

2008-12-27T08:49:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends of Split This Rock,

Season's greetings & happy Solstice.

As Santa makes his rounds this year, Congress too, is gearing up to pass a $600 billion stimulus plan, with the goal of creating jobs. The stimulus package will pass with or without our support. The question is, what will it contain?

Split This Rock has teamed up with Institute for Policy Studies to ask Congress to include the arts in its stimulus package. The progressive caucus is supporting our call, but this won't happen without public support. Please help us make some noise!

We're asking that 1% of the stimulus plan be dedicated towards support for the arts, in a program modeled after the Works Progress Administration program that employed thousands of artists and writers during the 1930s. Artists and writers are part of the economy and the work we do changes lives, unfortunately, artists and writers also tend to be underemployed and undervalued for their work. This is an opportunity to restore NEA funding, get artists and writers back into our schools and other public spaces, and create new opportunities for the arts.

Take a moment, please, to sign our petition and send word along to friends. We apologize for giving you work to do during the holidays, but Congress aims for the stimulus plan to be on Obama's desk his first day in office. Sign the petition to Congress:http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/artsstimulus/signatures.html

You can also vote for this idea on the Ideas for Change website:http://www.change.org/ideas/view/arts_stimulus_plan_one_percent_for_the_arts

Please also help get the word out by posting a link to these sites on your Facebook page, and by forwarding an email to friends.

Love and Warm Greetings,
Your friends at Split This Rock
Sarah, Melissa, Regie & Jaime

Split This Rock
c/o Institute for Policy Studies
1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
info@splitthisrock.org
www.splitthisrock.org
blogthisrock.blogspot.com

Split This Rock's mission is to call poets to a greater role in public life and foster a national community of activist poets; to build the audience for poetry of provocation and witness from our home in the nation's capital; to celebrate poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination by organizing festivals and other public events; to foster opportunities for poets to participate in creative activism for social justice and peace; and to provide resources that inform and inspire poets and equip them to play an active role as public citizens.

Women poets blogging

2008-12-02T04:43:00.002-05:00

A student named Tom Speaker is conducting research on poetry, gender, and blogging and asked me (and a number of other women poets who blog) to answer some questions on the topic. I found the exercise so interesting that, with Tom's permission, I am posting his questions and my answers below.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these issues. Please comment!

1. Have you ever published in a women's only anthology/website/forum or other venue? Why or why not?

I have published in Just Like a Girl, an anthology of women’s poetry, and I have submitted work to other publications. I have also given public readings in women’s reading series and at feminist bookstores. While I hope that we will all read and listen to poetry by all kinds of poets and read across our differences, I also believe there is still a role for targeted women’s venues, just as there is for poets of color or poets with disabilities, for example. For one thing, these targeted venues give women the opportunity to examine feminist or female issues in a context with their peers; that is, we get a chance to see what other women are writing about given subjects and to be in a kind of dialogue together. Another role of these venues is to promote women’s voices, which sadly still need additional support; witness, for example, the fact that only one out of five of the finalists for the National Book Award this year was a woman.

2. Are women's poetry blogs changing notions of gender? In literature? In society? If so, how?

Poetry blogs often help to build a sense of community and women’s blogs play a key role in that function. Of course women have often been community builders in literary culture, so this is not a new role. It’s been harder in the past for women to promote themselves and distribute their own work; blogs make this work easier and allow women to bypass the traditional means of promotion (which are disappearing in any case) such as publishers and reviewers. I think this is quite a significant change and is allowing the more widespread distribution of women’s voices – both their poetry and their other writing about poetry, the literary life, art and social issues, and the “poetry business,” for lack of a better term.

Women have traditionally been less well represented in the role of critic than as creative artists. As women and other traditionally marginalized groups become “tastemakers,” we are truly changing notions of gender (and race and class and sexuality and physical ability, for that matter), as well as of poetry itself. The internet is playing a crucial role in this shift, as there are more opportunities to write and publish reviews and other critical writings online. (I am indebted to the poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller for helping me understand the crucial role of the critic.)

3. What are your own personal motivations for placing your poetry in your blog or online magazine?

I think I have only once posted a poem of my own on my blog. I’d rather have other people publish my work and use the blog to promote discussion, champion poets I love, spread the word about events at the intersection of poetry and social change, and think aloud about the topics that preoccupy me as a poet and activist. I’ve also used my blog to promote groups and events I’ve been involved in organizing, such as Split This Rock Poetry Festival and DC Poets Against the War.

I was a little late in submitting my work to online magazines, being just old enough to have a deeply held, instinctual preference for the printed page (I’m 45). But now I am very appreciative of the opportunity to reach a worldwide audience, crossing so many boundaries. Most people in the United States are not even aware of the existence of printed literary magazines and even if they are they have no idea how to get a hold of them or where to begin to differentiate between them. Online magazines obviously overcome these difficulties and allow potential readers of all sorts to find my work. For me this serves a political as well as a literary function, since I write a lot of socially engaged poetry, a genre that has sometimes had a hard time finding its way in traditional venues for poetry in the US.

4. On the internet, has women's poetry helped to advance any feminist causes? Give examples if possible.

A good deal of the poetry published on the web against the war in Iraq has been by women, and I believe peace to be a central feminist cause. As this is the issue I have been most active in over the past several years, it is the one with which I have the most familiarity. I published several poems from the perspective of mothers of American soldiers in a special wartime issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly I edited in 2006. (Interestingly, one was by a man.) As Martín Espada has written, poetry can give politics a human face, and one of the faces of this war is the family irrevocably damaged by the loss of a child. Many readers told me these were among the most affecting poems in the issue.

5. Do you perceive any sexist biases on the Internet, and what do you perceive these to be? Is there pressure on the Internet for women to conform to "masculine" poetry standards? Are these pressures greater or lesser than in the past? Give examples if you can.

It’s a paradoxical situation: On the one hand, as I wrote above, there are a great deal more opportunities for women to reach a broad audience – with their poetry and their prose. On the other hand, a virulent, even violent sexism is still alive and well in the world and our very visibility and accessibility means that we are more exposed, more vulnerable to sexist attack than previously, especially with the potential for anonymity on the web. I am not speaking from personal experience, as I’ve never been subjected to this kind of harassment. But I know it happens. Nor am I speaking of disagreement and discussion. I am speaking of sexist name-calling and harassment, an altogether different thing. I do think I’ve censored myself a little bit because of this possibility, choosing not to write much about issues of sex and sexuality, for example, on the blog.

6. Do you see the aspect of anonymity inspiring more sexist vitriol on the web in poetry-related forums? Has anonymity helped to spread anti-feminist perspectives? Give examples if you can.

Please see my answer above. I don’t spend a lot of time reading poetry-related discussion forums, so I can’t comment specifically.

7. Do you think there is any connection between gender and the formal (not subject-oriented) aspects of poetry? If so, can you describe the connection?

Not intrinsic, no. I think women have been discouraged from being formally inventive by all sorts of forces, literary and more broadly historical and cultural. But many women have been battering down those walls for years and will continue to do so. One advantage poetry has over other art forms is there’s no money in it. So the pressure to conform, while still present, is substantially less. Not that I’m OK with this situation – there absolutely should be more money for poetry!

Election Night in Rome - how to contain myself?

2008-11-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

A large bar and grill at the Termini train station, hundreds of Americans crammed inside. Homemade Rome for Obama posters decorate the place, which is already fairly exhausted-looking by the time we arrive at 4:30 am, the party having started at 1 am. At the pancake breakfast buffet, there is a choice of two kinds of pancakes: the Obama cake, the darker one, is filled with candied fruit and tastes disturbingly like the awful fruitcakes of my youth. The only bad coffee in Rome. But I am grateful to be here, thankful to the folks of Democrats in Rome who have brought us together.

The crowd is mostly white. A lot of young people, but other ages too. Ben is the only child. He has begged to be allowed to come and after first saying no (as his Evil Twin emerges when he is tired), I relent. After all, what is more important to his future: A good night’s sleep so he can be alert for a one-hour Italian class and some math out of a workbook or witnessing the most historic presidential election of our lifetimes? I am so glad we are all here together – and our friend Eve – and the sweet interracial couple from Ohio who sit next to us – and the other wondrous folks in the room – and the thousands dancing in the streets of DC – and the millions celebrating around the world.

It is when they call Virginia that I begin to weep. I know it is the hundreds of thousands of new residents in the northern part of the state who have swung the state. But I also know of the thousands of tireless Virginia progressives like my cousin Yogi, my Aunt Mary Jo – lifelong Virginians, Virginians from families that have lived in Virginia for 400 years. They’ve worked their whole lives for this moment, this space to breathe. And then too the Virginians who never thought they’d vote for a Black person for president, who at first were afraid, who grew up on a diet of suspicion and contempt. Some of them, too, voted for Barack Obama, I am certain of it, glimpsing a new way forward.

It is 5 am and I can’t stop crying. I don’t realize it, but it is 8 pm on the west coast and the polls have closed in California. Within minutes of announcing Virginia’s triumph, CNN calls the presidency for Obama and the restaurant – its two stories of tired, sweaty expatriates – explodes. As does my weeping – all the caution and reserve and anxiety and fear rushes out of me and my body heaves and sobs. Ben is surprised at the force of it and keeps hugging me. We are all hugging now as people all over the world are doing at this same moment, as I know my friends and comrades are doing in DC, and dancing in the streets. Here it is more restrained, though Eve is crying as hard as I am and the whooping and hugging and cheering continue.

We stay for the speeches and I cry through both, even McCain’s. The incredible lightness of this moment, Jesse Jackson crying in the crowd at Grant Park, surrounded by a million sisters and brothers, all colors, all ages. And not a squeaker, a landslide. The lightness, the joy.

We walk home through the dawn of Rome, as the sun comes up in the clear sky, the rains of election day having swept the city clean. We are wearing our ROMA AMA OBAMA T shirts and grin at everyone we pass. Some smile and point, others turn away. But with only the slightest encouragement we raise our arms above our heads and chant, OBAMA! OBAMA! We laugh and buy Ben a celebratory cornetto con cioccolato. At home I step out on our terrace and look out at Rome, look out at a new world.

Witness Against Torture Applauds Decision on Guantánamo Detainees

2008-10-07T16:35:00.000-04:00

http://www.witnesstorture.org/100days

For Immediate Release, October 7, 2008

In a courtroom packed with anti-torture activists and members of the Uigher community, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina struck a landmark blow against the Bush administration and its policy of indefinite detention at Guantánamo in Washington, DC today.

The case involved seventeen Uighers, ethnic Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantánamo despite having been deemed unthreatening and cleared for released. The United States has continued to hold them, arguing they would face persecution if repatriated to China. Judge Urbina called their continued detention "illegal," and ruled that the government has to "release them here" in the United States.

When the government argued that bringing the men to the United States might result in their apprehension by the Department of Homeland Security, Judge Urbina grew angry and frustrated, saying "these Uighers will not be touched until I see them in this court… The petitioners must be brought to me on Friday [October 10th] and nothing will happen to these people before then." The government is expected to appeal the ruling, postponing what would be the first time in nearly seven years that prisoners at Guantánamo would appear before a U.S. court of law.

The Uighers, who are members of a repressed minority within China, have been held without judicial oversight for nearly seven years. Fleeing a Chinese crackdown, they were arrested by security personnel in Pakistan soon after September 11, 2001 and were transferred to U.S. military custody in exchange for bounties of $5,000 a piece. After being subjected to torture in Pakistan, the men have languished in legal limbo at Guantánamo. A smaller group of Uighers was released from Guantánamo in 2006 and granted entry into Albania.

Members of Witness Against Torture, a grassroots movement to shut down Guantánamo, were present at the hearing and heartened by Urbina's ruling. "Once again the courts are ruling in favor of justice," said Matthew W. Daloisio, of New York City, one of the group's organizers. "Judge Urbina is opening the doors of the United States to these innocent victims of the White House's war on terror."

"This is a good step," comments Helen Schietinger, a Washington, DC resident and another organizer with Witness Against Torture. "And in the context of a presidential race in which both major candidates have called for the closure of Guantánamo," she continues, "this ruling could be the beginning of freedom for many of the more than 200 men who remain imprisoned at the U.S. Naval Base there: but we have to make it happen. In the coming weeks and months, we have a historic opportunity to reverse the disastrous policies of the last seven years."

Witness Against Torture has launched a campaign to close the U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and end torture by the United States within the first 100 days of the new President's administration. Joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights, United for Peace and Justice, the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International, War Resisters League, the School of the Americas Watch and other groups, Witness Against Torture will begin a nine-day fast on January 11, 2009, which marks seven years since the opening of the prison at Guantánamo.

The campaign to Shut Down Guantánamo will begin formally on January 20, the inauguration of the next President. The campaign brings together a coalition of groups and individuals who will take part in demonstrations, educate Congress and the public, and engage in nonviolent direct action. Witness Against Torture will maintain a physical presence at the White House and organize activities — from film screenings to lectures and community meetings — in Washington, D.C., and across the country.

To learn more about the Campaign, visit http://www.witnesstorture.org/100days

Off to Rome

2008-08-31T03:32:00.001-04:00

I'm headed to Italy for a year -- in a few short hours. I'm told it's not the easiest thing getting internet hook-up over there, so I will be blogging even more intermittently than I have been the past month or so.

I'll try to post some pictures and give impressions when I can. Am already gearing up to protest Cheney's Roman Holiday September 9. Watch for us on BBC World News...

Ahmed Faraz: poet of love and defiance

2008-08-27T22:20:00.000-04:00

The loss of another great.

From the Daily Times of Pakistan:

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Ahmed Faraz, who died in Islamabad on Monday night after a long struggle with a host of ailments, having taken ill in the first week of July while on a visit to the United States, was a classicist like Faiz Ahmed Faiz who, like him, produced poetry of great lyrical beauty and who, like his mentor, never hesitated to stand up against oppression and never was afraid of suffering for his beliefs.

Faraz, steeped in the classical tradition, was the true inheritor of Faiz’s mantle. Like Faiz, he suffered prison and lived in exile during the dark days of military rule in the 1980s. Like Faiz, he was loved by the people, especially the young, and nobody wrote with more intensity about love than Faraz. He gained fame as a young man – he was teaching at Peshawar University at the time - and while much in the way of comfort and the easy life forsook him on more occasions than one, his fame and his popularity never languished. Few poets have had more of their work set to music and performed by the great singers of the age than Faraz.

Almost always, he found himself on the wrong side of the government of the day. From Ayub, through Yahya, through Bhutto and down to Musharraf, Faraz was always viewed by the establishment as the rebel he was. He was never afraid to write what others only whispered about and he never let adversity stray him from the path he had chosen for himself. More of his poetry is remembered and recited by his admirers in his own country, in India and wherever Urdu is loved and spoken, than that of any other poet of modern times.

The journalist Iftikhar Ali recalled in New York as the news of Faraz’s death broke, “Faraz was a year senior to me when I joined the Islamia College Peshawar, in 1954. He was remarkably handsome, full of life but very much into poetry. He would gather students around him and read out his mostly romantic poems. There was no open mixing of male and female students in those days. But somehow his poems managed to reach girl students who felt greatly attracted to him. He would receive dozens of hand written letters from them, not only those at the university but from a women’s college in the city as well. The well-to-do ones would have their servants deliver their letters while others would drop them in front of Faraz at bus stops. At that time, he loved to watch hockey and would lead slogans at the annual match between the two old rivals -- Islamia College and Edwards Collge.”

During Bhutto’s days, Faraz was sent home by Maulana Kausar Niazi for writing a couplet that some considered heretical, a misstep that was soon rectified. He lost his job under the Zia regime and he spent many years in exile in Europe and America, quite a few of them in London. His great poem Mohasra (The Siege) remains one of the most powerful indictments of military rule. Faraz told the BBC in a recent interview that he would never like to leave Pakistan because he wanted to live in the country, which was his home, because it was there that he would want to continue his struggle against dictatorship. “I am against dictatorship and military rule. The time has not yet arrived when I should escape from the country out of fear. I will stay home and fight.” He was actively involved in the movement that has built itself around the ousted chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Faraz used his influence to urge writers and poets to join the protest.

Few people know that in 1947 when the uprising in Kashmir against the Maharaja’s rule began, among the volunteers who went in to fight on the side of the Kashmiris was the teenager Ahmed Faraz from Kohat. He said in a recent conversation that his heart bleeds at the military aggression to which the people of Waziristan and Balochistan have been subjected. He said what we know today as Azad Kashmir was not liberated by the army but by Wazir tribes who went into the state to fight the Maharaja’s forces. Faraz, asked why he had returned the Hilal-i-Imtiaz conferred on him by the Musharraf regime, felt that he could not keep the award because it was given to him by a military regime, although many people had told him that it was an honour conferred on him by the people of Pakistan. He said whenever the country has come under an army rule, it has suffered grievously, to the extent of being rent asunder, as in 1971.

Ask why he had not written another poem like Mohasra, he replied, “Because I do not want to write the same poem again. In Pakistan, things do not change and, consequently, the poems I wrote in the past have not become dated."

In Memoriam: Del Martin (1921 -2008)

2008-08-27T21:58:00.000-04:00

From Charles Flowers at Lambda Literary Foundation

Del Martin (1921 - 2008)

Dear Friend,

With great sadness, I report that the legendary Del Martin (pictured on the left) passed away on Wednesday, August 27, with her wife, Phyllis Lyon by her bedside.

These two great pioneers smashed barriers for lesbians throughout their 55 years together. Co-founders in the 1950s of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization in the United States, they battled homophobia in the National Organization for Women in the 1960s; founded the Lyon-Martin Health Services clinics for lesbians in the 1970s; and in the new millennium, became the first gay couple to be married in San Francisco - twice. Their books Lesbian/Woman and Lesbian Love and Liberation are classics in lesbian literature. In 2003, Joan Biren immortalized their amazing lives in her award-winning documentary No Secret Anymore: the Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

Our thoughts are with Phyllis, as we treasure the legacy of Del on this very sad day.

Sincerely,
Charles Flowers

Lambda Literary Foundation

From the Associated Press, by LISA LEFF:

Del Martin, a pioneering lesbian rights activist who with her lifelong partner became a symbol for the movement to legalize gay marriage, died Wednesday morning. She was 87.

Martin died at a San Francisco hospital two weeks after a broken arm exacerbated her existing health problems, according to Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Her partner of more than 55 years and wife of just over two months, Phyllis Lyon, was with her.
"Ever since I met Del 55 years ago, I could never imagine a day would come when she wouldn't be by my side," Lyon, 83, said in a statement Wednesday.

"I also never imagined there would be a day that we would actually be able to get married," she added. "I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed."

Martin and Lyon exchanged vows at San Francisco City Hall on June 16, the first day same-sex couples could legally wed in California, after being together for more than half a century.
Mayor Gavin Newsom, who officiated the wedding, singled them out to be the first gay couple to be declared "spouses for life" in the city in recognition of their long relationship and their status as pioneers of the gay rights movement.

"The greatest way we can honor the life work of Del Martin, is to continue to fight and never give up, until we have achieved equality for all," Newsom said Wednesday.

The couple, who in 1955 co-founded the nation's first outspoken advocacy group for lesbians, Daughters of Bilitis, similarly served as the public faces of the marriage debate four years earlier, when Newsom in 2004 challenged California's one man-one woman marriage laws by directing city officials to issue licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Their marriage, along with those of almost 4,000 other couples, were invalidated later by the California Supreme Court.

The action laid the groundwork for a series of lawsuits that ultimately led a 4-3 majority of the same court on May 15 to strike down the state's gay marriage ban. Martin and Lyon were two of the original plaintiffs.

"We would not have marriage equality in California if it weren't for Del and Phyllis. They fought and triumphed in many battles," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. "Through it all, their love and commitment to each other was an inspiration to all who knew them."
An imposing and uncompromising figure, Martin in 1970 wrote an influential article for the Advocate magazine that criticized what she saw as the gay rights movement's persistent chauvinism. The schism, which mirrored the increasing cultural influence of the women's movement, eventually prompted Lyon and Martin to adopt feminism and racism among their causes.

Trained as journalists, they together wrote "Lesbian/Woman," a landmark 1972 book in which they tried to make the point that lesbians should be seen for more than their sexuality and simultaneously offered a frank, no-nonsense account of lesbian relationships.

A year later, Martin became the first out lesbian to serve on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women, a position she won despite opposition within the feminist organization. Critics in the group feared the impact of having a leader that many in the mainstream still viewed as socially deviant.

Born as Dorothy Taliaferro on May 5, 1921, in San Francisco, Martin acquired the surname she would use the rest of her life from her four-year marriage to her college sweetheart, James Martin. They had a daughter, Kendra, before they divorced.

In "Lesbian/Woman," Martin recounted that the growing realization that she was attracted to women initially sparked thoughts of suicide. She eventually worked through her feelings despite the discrimination and threat of arrest gay people faced during the conservative 1950s.

When she started working for a construction trade publication in Seattle, she carried a briefcase without worrying whether it made her appear manly. The briefcase was the first thing Lyon noticed about her future spouse, she always recounted in stories about how the two met.
"Ultimately, it gets down to self-acceptance. If you accept yourself, you don't give a damn what anyone else thinks," Martin said in "No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon," Joan Biren's 2003 documentary about the couple.

Martin is survived by Lyon; her daughter, Kendra Mon, a son-in-law, two grandchildren and her sister-in-law.

In Martin's honor, Newsom ordered the American flags at City Hall and the rainbow flag in the Castro District, the heart of the city's gay and lesbian community, to be flown at half-staff until sundown Thursday. Plans for a public memorial are pending.

Judith Arcana Talking About Grace Paley on KPFA

2008-08-26T17:09:00.000-04:00

from Judith Arcana, literary biographer of Grace Paley:

This note, sent one year after Grace Paley's death, is to let you all know that on 8/20/08 KPFA in Berkeley aired a special section of Dennis Bernstein's "Flashpoints" show commemorating Grace Paley's death ... Dennis and I talked for a little over half an hour about Grace, remembering her with much pleasure (the whole show is about an hour long) ......... Includes Paley reading a poem.

You can find the KPFA show at: http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=27954 ..........

Scroll to the 20-minute mark in the show.

In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

2008-08-13T12:34:00.000-04:00

It is with very great sadness that I note the death of the extraordinary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

I thank Dan Vera for these links:

Obituary in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/middleeast/11darwish.html

Video on youtube from AlJazeera:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7behEhDSsFU

More soon.

Get Together with family and friends, eat and support the arts!

2008-07-14T21:45:00.001-04:00

Have lunch or dinner at Mark’s Kitchen on Tuesday July 15th in Takoma Park from 11 am to 9 pm and they will donate 15% of the day’s sales generated during this event to Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center.

Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit contemporary arts center located in
the Arts & Entertainment District in downtown Silver Spring. Pyramid’s mission is to
promote and nurture artistic excellence through programming in the artistic mediums of paper, printmaking, book arts and digital media.

It is that simple.

When: Tuesday, July 15th
11:00 am – 9:00 pm

Where: Old Town Takoma Park
7006 Carroll Avenue

Beltway seeks poems about museums

2008-07-14T21:43:00.000-04:00

In just a couple of weeks, Beltway Poetry will be open for submissions for a special themed issue. We will be reading during the month of AUGUST only. Please see below for complete details. And please feel free to forward this on to others you think might be interested!

Many thanks.
Kim Roberts, Editor
Beltway Poetry Quarterly
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com
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Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an online journal, seeks poems for a special themed issue celebrating museums. Poems should be about specific museums (of any kind, of any size, in any location) or specific items exhibited in museum collections. The issue will be co-edited by Kim Roberts and Maureen Thorson.

Only poets who live or work in DC, VA, MD, WV, or DE are eligible. Poems may be any length. Submit up to 4 poems by email only. Poems that have already appeared in print publications are acceptable if copyright has reverted to the author (and author secures any permissions for reprinting). Poems appearing elsewhere on the web are not eligible.

Submit poems in the body of a single email (no attachments, and please no multiple emails) to beltwaypoetryquarterly@gmail.com. Include your full contact information (snail mail address, phone, email) and a one-paragraph bio. Incomplete entries and those made outside the one-month reading period will not be considered.

The issue will be published in January 2009. All entries must be received during the month of August 2008.

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About the co-editors:

Kim Roberts is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Maureen Thorson is the author of two chapbooks, Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), and Mayport, winner of the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship for 2006. She is editor of Big Game Books, a literary small press specializing in collectible, limited edition, hand-made books.

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Beltway Poetry Quarterly
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

Split This Rock Photos on Flickr - More and More

2008-07-10T16:33:00.000-04:00

We're getting new photos up on Flickr every day. Check them out here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/splitthisrock. These are all by Jill Brazel. Contact her at: jill@jillbrazel.com

Forebears Issue of Beltway Poetry, new for summer!

2008-07-07T13:57:00.000-04:00

from the fabulous Kim Roberts:

Beltway Poetry Quarterly announces a new issue!

Volume 9, Number 3, Summer 2008
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

The Forebears Issue includes essays that celebrate individuals and locations important to their writing:

a photo essay on DC AUTHOR'S HOUSES by Kim Roberts and Dan Vera
Taquiena Boston and Vera J. Katz on OWEN DODSON
M.A. Schaffner on AMBROSE BIERCE
Grace Cavalieri on ANN DARR
Olivia Barbee on GWENDOLYN BENNETT
Kathi Morrison-Taylor on JOAQUIN MILLER
Myra Sklarew on LEON-GONTRAN DAMAS
Merrill Leffler on GABRIELLE EDGCOMB
Elisavietta Ritchie on JOHN PAUKER
Mark Opsasnick on JIM MORRISON and BEAT COFFEEHOUSES

We hope you enjoy! This issue is the third in a series documenting the rich literary history of Washington, DC. Read it here: http://www.beltwaypoetry.com

Beltway Poetry Quarterly is also pleased to welcome our new summer intern, Alyssa Schimmel. Alyssa is serving as an editorial assistant, and has already updated one of our most popular sections of the Beltway Resource Bank, which provides links to other web sites featuring individual area poets, past and current. The Poet Links list can be found here: http://washingtonart.com/beltway/poetlinks.html

Finally, we are happy to announce that Maureen Thorson has agreed to co-edit a new themed issue of the journal, on the subject of museums. We invite poems on the theme from any poets currently living in DC, MD, VA, WV, or DE, and will be reading entries throughout the month of August. Full guidelines can be found here: http://washingtonart.com/beltway/about1.html

Foreign Policy In Focus Summer Film Series

2008-07-02T12:32:00.000-04:00

The FPIF Annual Summer Film Series Opens with the Academy-Award Winning Taxi to the Dark Side.

July 3, 2008 5:30pm - 7:30 pm
Busboys and Poets
2021 14th St NW
Washington, DC, USA

Join us for the five of the best foreign policy films of the year!

The Foreign Policy In Focus Annual Summer Film Series gets underway with the Academy-Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. Please join us and our two guest speakers, Farrah Hassen, Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and Andy Shallal of Iraqi Voices for Peace and the owner of Busboys and Poets.

July 3, 2008 5:30pm - 7:30 pm
Busboys and Poets
2021 14th St NW
Washington, DC, USA

If you haven't seen it yet, this is your chance to watch a shocking documentary about the Bush administration's use of torture on political prisoners.

Alex Gibney's TAXI FROM THE DARK SIDE is a perpetually shocking documentary about the Bush administration's use of torture when dealing with political prisoners, with a particular focus on those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. The title of Gibney's movie is derived from the treatment meted out to an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar, who was mistakenly fingered as a terrorist, then killed during a torture session conducted by American troops. Despite the title, Dilawar's case is just a small part in Gibney's jigsaw, as the director uses excruciating and comprehensive details surrounding the taxi driver's death as a starting point in his search for the people who have permitted such incidents to occur. Gut-wrenching and fully uncensored pictures from Abu-Ghraib feature alongside interviews with military personnel (some of whom tortured Dilawar) as Gibney's search slowly heads into the upper echelons of the military and, ultimately, into the Bush regime itself.

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE is a powerful, well-executed piece of filmmaking. Gibney's skills as a director come to the fore as he manages to pull some surprisingly candid revelations from his subjects, while his choice of newsreel clips featuring the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are extremely well chosen. Perhaps the most eye-opening scenes come from a press trip to the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, where Gibney and others are given a tour of the facilities, including the site gift shop, where gallows humor is stretched to breaking point with the sale of souvenir t-shirts bearing the legend Behavior Modification Instructor. The film concludes with Gibney pulling the focus back to Dilawar once again, highlighting the futility of his death as a number of commentators show how torture isn't, and never has been, an effective method for extracting information from people.

The FPIF film series is co-sponsored by Busboys and Poets Restaurant and the Progressive Intern Network.

Free and Open to the Public!

Calendar of Films (all at Busboys and Poets Restaurant):

Taxi to the Dark Side
Best Documentary - Academy Award
Thursday, July 3
5:30-7:30pm
Speakers: Farrah Hassen, Newman Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies
and Andy Shallal, Iraqi Voices for Peace and Owner of Busboys and Poets

Camden 28
Best Documentary - Philadelphia Film Festival
Friday, July 11
5:30-7:30pm
Speaker: Marcus Raskin, Co-Founder and Distinguished Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Cocalero
Nominated, Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary - Sundance
Friday, July 18
6:00- 8:00pm
Speaker: Sanho Tree, Fellow and Director of Drug Policy Project, Institute for Policy Studies

Body Of War
Best Documentary - Hampton International Film Festival and Best Documentary - National Board of Review
Friday, July 25
5:30-7:30pm
Speaker: Geoff Millard, Iraq Veterans Against the War

MAQUILÁPOLIS
Outstanding Achievement in Documentary - Tribeca Film Festival and Audience Award for Best Documentary - Barcelona International Women's Film Festival
Thursday, July 31
5:30-7:30pm
Speakers: Sarah Anderson, Fellow and Director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and Manuel Perez Rocha, Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Who is a witness?

2008-07-02T09:29:00.000-04:00

A long discussion thread on a poetry list serv I belong to, inspired by C.D. Wright's book of poems about men incarcerated in Louisiana, One Big Self, about whether poets can be "witness" to conditions they themselves haven't experienced. I just eavesdropped for awhile. But was finally moved to write something this morning. Here it is:

As the poet E. Ethelbert Miller likes to point out, James Baldwin spoke of the witness as being altogether different from the observer, as the witness is called upon to testify. We are all witnesses to our country’s outrageous prison-industrial complex, which has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Let me say that again: The US has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. The people we lock up – mostly poor men of color – are voiceless and considered altogether expendable.

I have also not yet read CD Wright’s book, and I’m with those who have not been moved by previous work I’ve read. But I am in favor of any poet or artist, indeed any citizen, drawing attention to the human impact of our policy decision to lock up so many of our brothers and sisters. The stronger the poems as art, of course, the more effective they will be. But how can we question a poet’s right to write about our inhumanity as a society? Isn’t this, in fact, our responsibility?

ANTIWAR LEGAL VICTORY CELEBRATED!

2008-07-01T18:05:00.000-04:00

Please distribute widely. Thanks.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Malachy Kilbride 202-841-2230
Ann Wilcox 202-441-3265

ANTIWAR LEGAL VICTORY CELEBRATED!

Tuesday, July 1, 8 AM
WashingtonDC Superior Court, 500 Indiana Avenue NW

July 1 - An antiwar legal defense victory rally and press conference was held today outside of Washington DC Superior Court and was attended by US military veterans and peace activists from around the country. Paul “zool” Zulkowitz of Woodmere, NY, represented by antiwar attorney Ann Wilcox, won an agreement with the United States Government on June 30. Zool voiced opposition during the public hearing with General David Petraeus at the Senate Armed Services Committee chaired by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on April 8, 2008. Zool stood and chanted “Bring them home, bring them home! . . . ,” was arrested and charged with one misdemeanor count of “disruption of Congress.” Rather than a jury trial and possible 6 months in jail, zool walked out of the courtroom with a diversion agreement and a dismissal of the stay-way order from Capitol Hill.

Ann Wilcox of the National Lawyers’ Guild, stated that: “The offer of dismissal before judgment is a victory, because the Government does not necessarily want to expend the time and resources for a jury trial. Further, the Government may not want to provide a forum for antiwar views in the Court of Public Opinion.”

“Contrary to Sen. Levin's view, citizens attending a public hearing are not an 'audience',” zool said. “Though I might have considered the Petraeus hearing to be a farce, a public hearing is not theater, the Committee is 'doing the people's business,' and citizens, members of the public, have a responsibility to hold elected representatives accountable for the way they do the people's business.”

“This is a great victory for zool…” noted Malachy Kilbride board president of Washington Peace Center, “But, people need to know that the government is cracking down on those who openly dissent against the war and occupation of Iraq.” Kilbride said “Since the build up to the war in 2002 over 15,000 people have been arrested protesting the war. However, we are now at a point in which serious jail time and stiff sentences are being meted out to those exercising their First Amendment rights” Kilbride said.

“I am pleased zool can have this victory…and that we now see a glimmer of hope at a time when arrests are rising and stiff sentences are being handed down…” said Lori Perdue, a veteran, who also has protested the war and is a member of Veterans for Peace from Missouri.

“We congratulate zool for the courage to speak out against the occupation of Iraq during the Petraeus hearing and for having the government recognize his right to free speech. This is a victory for all of us, since the trend has been in the opposite direction with peace activists facing more arrests, harsher charges and more onerous sentences. Of course, it is the warmakers, not the peacemakers, who should be facing criminal charges.” said Medea Benjamin of California and a founder of the peace group Code Pink.

Poets at the Torture Survivors' Vigil

2008-06-30T09:34:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to poet Joe Ross, left, for arranging for several of us to read at the 24-hour vigil in support of torture survivors organized by Torture Abolition Survivor Support Coalition (TASSC). It was a great privilege to be there with those who have witnessed and survived so much.

Joe has posted a brief report with pictures on his blog at: http://livewrite.blogspot.com/2008/06/poets-at-tasscs-anti-torture-white.html. Thanks, Joe, and to Robert Waxman for the pictures.

Rare Video of Frank O'Hara Reading a Poem - art, life, love - it's all there

2008-06-30T09:23:00.000-04:00

Art is good, but life is better - both together in this marvelous poem read by Frank O'Hara: http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2008/06/frank-ohara-having-coke-with-you.html. With thanks to Edward Byrne for posting it.

Persis M. Karim's "Rumi’s Conversation with Shams on the Occasion of his 800th Birthday"

2008-06-26T10:47:00.000-04:00

Persis M. Karim won 2nd place in the Split This Rock Poetry contest judged by Kyle G. Dargan for her poem, "Ways to Count the Dead." (Check it out - along with the other winners - here.) I hadn't been familiar with her work previous to the contest, so it was with great pleasure that I came upon "Rumi’s Conversation with Shams on the Occasion of his 800th Birthday" at Pedestal Magazine. Highly recommended - a good tonic for today.

Writing Workshop Leadership Training by Pat Schneider

2008-06-23T13:11:00.000-04:00

A rare opportunity to study with the brilliant Pat Schneider in North Carolina. My first writing teacher, she changed my life forever.

Amherst Writers & Artists
Writing Group Leadership Training Program
August 20 – 24, 2008 Marshall, NC, Bend of Ivy Lodge

Have you ever thought about the possibility of leading writing groups? Learn the unique method developed by Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others (Oxford University Press 2003). This intensive five-day training will teach you the principles that distinguish Amherst Writers & Artists from other approaches. Trainees will also learn:

Creating and maintaining a safe creative environment
Responding helpfully to group members’ writing
Leadership and group facilitation skills
Exercises and prompts to use with writing groups
How to structure a writing group session
Practical aspects of leading writing groups
Leading writing groups for traditionally silenced people
Facilitating the healing potential of writing groups

Here’s what some recent trainees have said about the AWA Training:

“So far from home, so far from what I expected, so far from the person I was when we started this training four days ago. I came to improve my skills and gain confidence as a leader. Who knew that I would be transformed? As a leader, yes, but also as a writer – and as a person…”

“It was an inspiring training, full of joy and promise. The support I received from everyone truly astonished me…”

“What I most appreciated about the AWA leadership training was the way in which it was led. The whole training moved seamlessly… The participants were immediately empowered to speak up with their writing voices and their trainee voices. There was just the right balance of writing and training…”

For further information, please visit our website at www.amherstwriters.com.

Amherst Writers & Artists
P.O. Box 6011, Florence, MA 01062
413-253-3307

An Honorable Way Out of Iraq

2008-06-23T12:25:00.000-04:00

by Adil E. Shamoo, Foreign Policy in Focus

The Iraqis have reached a consensus — the U.S. should leave Iraq. Regardless of whether they are Kurds, Sunni, or Shi’a; regardless of political party, there is a general agreement that the United States should depart soon — within the year, or at most, three years. Yet some Americans, especially conservatives, are shocked that the Iraqis would show such a lack of gratitude to the United States...

Instead of negotiating a long-term presence, the U.S. should be negotiating a withdrawal. Both large portions of Iraqis and U.S. citizens are widely supportive of a timetable for withdrawal.

Read Shamoo's excellent 10-point plan for withdrawal at Foreign Policy in Focus here.