Sunday Kind of Love
Featuring Kathy Engel, author of Ruth’s Skirts and coeditor of We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon. The event will be hosted by Katy Richey and Sarah Browning.
Arts Event: With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba by Nancy Morejn
Poet and translator Yvette Neisser Moreno will be leading a discussion on Nancy Morejón, one of the foremost Cuban writers and a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. With Eyes and Soul features poems by Morejón (Spanish with English translations) and photos by renowned photographer Milton Rogovin, offering a multi-dimensional portrait of the landscape and people of Cuba.
Somehow Tenderness Survives: Remembering Dennis Brutus, Poet & Activist
This tribute event will feature poetry and remembrances by poets Kenny Carroll, Elen Awalom, Holly Bass, and Sarah Browning, Sameer Dossani, former director of 50 Years is Enough, Neil Watkins of Jubilee USA Network, Dave Zirin, author of What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and others. Audience members will also have an opportunity to offer their memories or to read a favorite poem by Dennis Brutus. Program to be followed by a screening of I Am a Rebel, a 50-minute documentary of Brutus’ life by the South African filmmaker Vincent Moloi.
Two Poems
When Democracy arrives, you best click your heels.
Poets for Peace
As the United States escalates the war in Afghanistan, poets speak out.
Poetry Discussion: ‘The Earth in the Attic,’ by Fady Joudah
A discussion led by poet and translator Yvette Neisser Moreno, will feature The Earth in the Attic, by Fady Joudah, an award-winning poet, translator of Mahmoud Darwish, and member of Doctors without Borders. Joudah will be a featured poet at the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival. The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007.
This event is sponsored by The Writer’s Center and Split This Rock, and is free and open to the public.
The Writer’s Center cultivates the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work. We are an independent literary organization with a global reach, rooted in a dynamic community of writers. www.writer.org
Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness invites poets, writers, artists, activists, dreamers, and all concerned world citizens to Washington, DC, for four days of poetry, community building, and creative transformation, March 10-13, 2010. Featuring Sinan Antoon, Jan Beatty, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Andrea Gibson, Fady Joudah, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, Bruce Weigl, and many more. Readings, workshops, panel discussions, film, a book fair, and public action. www.SplitThisRock.org
The Writer’s Center is wheelchair-accessible. For more information, please email Yvette at yvettenm (at) verizon (dot) net, or call 301-879-1959. The Earth in the Attic is available for purchase for $16 at The Writer’s Center and Busboys and Poets.
Bees Swarm and Nowak Speaks: The Art of Extraction
The progressively spectacular art of the renowned Beehive Collective is coming to DC to join forces with the powerful social justice poetry of Mark Nowak. The theme of this blend of sight and sound display will address the true cost of coal and how regular people are challenging its impact.
The Beehive Collective is appreciated internationally for its educational graphics campaigns, at a regional level for its stone mosaic murals and apprentice program, and locally for its dedication to the revitalization of the old Machias Valley Grange Hall, a landmark building in their small, rural town. The Hive has been going and growing since 2000, at full speed! Their most recent campaign is exposing the cost industry’s strip mining injustices in the Appalachia.
Mark Nowak, Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, will read from his recent book, Coal Mountain Elementary. A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, WV miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.
This event is cosponsored by Foreign Policy In Focus, Split this Rock, and SALSA. A suggested donation of $5 would be appreciated for the travel and lodging expenses of the Beehive Collective but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. You can register for the event here.
Poets in the (Think) Tank: ROCKPILE Symposium
In anticipation of what is sure to be a music and poetry extravaganza at Busboys and Poets November 4, ROCKPILE artists David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg host an open discussion on art and activism, poetry, music and the troubadour tradition, censorship and the academy, community and collaboration.
ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer, legendary poet, musician, and essayist, and Michael Rothenberg, poet, songwriter and editor of Big Bridge Press. In the tradition of the troubadour and with the spirit of improvisation and collaboration, the duo will journey through eight U.S. cities and perform poetry, composed on the road, in a spontaneous fusion with local musicians in each city. Washington DC is the fourth stop of the ROCKPILE journey.
David Meltzer was an important figure in the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance and appeared in Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry,” a seminal work of that era. “Beat Thing” a book-length, poetic journal, published by La Alameda Press in 2004, won the Josephine Miles PEN Award in 2005. His books, Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz and No Eyes, Lester Young all reflect his deep connection and dedication to music throughout his career. His complete publication history is at http://meltzerville.com/.
Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, and editor and publisher of Big Bridge magazine online at www. bigbridge.org. His poetry books include The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press) and most recently CHOOSE, Selected Poems (Big Bridge Press). He is also editor for the Penguin Poet series, which includes selected works of Phillip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer and Ed Dorn. He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Phillip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press. Complete publication history can be found at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/Rothenberg m/
Fred Joiner is a poet living in Washington, DC’s Historic Anacostia neighborhod. He works as a systems administrator for a small progressive consulting company. He collaborates frequently with jazz musicians and his poems have appeared in Callaloo, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora.
Sarah Browning will moderate this event. If you can’t make it on November 3rd, be sure to attend ROCKPILE’s other DC events: 11/1 at The Writers Center in Bethesda, and 11/4 at Busboys and Poets.
Poem, ‘When I was Torn by War’
The poet ponders the effects of war.
Poems Against the Regime
Three Iranian-American poets write about protests, images, and a fallen demonstrator.
Party with Split This Rock
Split This Rock invites you to a party at Busboys and Poets! The restaurant will be donating fabulous appetizers 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. Suggested donation is $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!
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 by clicking here.
This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org or 202-787-5210.
Poem: “River, Page”
A river can be a lifeline for refugees, or it can be just another line of sorrow in a story.
Poem: “Three Gifts”
A poet from Iran remembers someone for whom time ran out too soon.
Poem: ‘The Genesis of Torture’
On the issue of torture, what goes around comes around.