Friday, December 31, 2010

Monica Raymond, Notes on “Collateral Damage Noted”

I've been trying to catalogue creative means of dissent, symbolic actions that move beyond the protests that became typical and stereotypical during the post-1960s movements for rights and justice. Here's a good example of how artists continue to engage the political without disappearing into harangue.

Monica Raymond, Notes on “Collateral Damage Noted”

On Memorial Day of 2005, I took part in a performance conceived by Tom Plsek at the large open plaza in front of Boston City Hall. “Collateral Damage Noted” was to be a sound meditation on the civilians killed in the Iraq war. The latest reliable figures place this total at almost 25,000, he wrote in his call.

Plsek’s idea was that musicians would stand in a circle and sound a note for perhaps ten or twelve seconds,then pause, averaging three to four long notes a minute. Each note was to represent the life and death of an Iraqi civilian. By his calculations, if a hundred musicians did this for an hour, we would have made enough notes to account for the Iraqi women, children, and non-combatant men killed till then.
read more here....

Monday, December 27, 2010

Deema Shehabi, Melissa Kwasny, and Anna Moschovakis.

reading from Deema Shehabi on Vimeo.

Congratulations to my friend, Deema Shehabi, on her forthcoming book! And to Anis Shivani, for covering her work, as well as the work of Melissa Kwasny (poet and editor of I Go To the Ruined Place: Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights), and Anna Moschovakis, poet and member of the Ugly Duckling Presse collective.

Anna Moschovakis Reads from You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Feb. 2011, Coffee House Press) from CoffeeHousePress on Vimeo.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

"Christmas Soccer Game, 1915" by Robert Cording

"Christmas Soccer Game, 1915" by Robert Cording


I suppose what made it possible
Was that no one expected more
Than a day of unhurried hours, better
Food, some free time to reread old letters,
Write new ones. Small Christmas trees
With candles lined both sides of the trenches
And marked the two days’ truce.

Who can explain it? – one minute troops
Are sitting in mud, the next raising themselves
Out of the trenches, as if all they needed
Was a soccer ball to remind them
Of who they were. Imagine a Scotsman
Heading the ball into the air and catching it
On his instep, then flicking it across

The frosted grass to a German smoking
A cigarette who smiles and settles the ball,
Then boots it back. Soon a few soldiers
From both sides circle around the Scotsman
And the ball moves quickly back and forth,
Left foot, right foot, all of the men rocking
From side to side, the ball, the cold,

Making good neighbors of them all.
A game’s begun, a real match without referees,
Attack and counterattacks, the ball crossing
From side to side, a match played,
We can imagine, as if it were all that mattered,
As if the game’s sudden fizzes of beauty –
Three crisp passes or two perfect triangles

Laying end to end and pointing to the goal –
Could erase what they had learned
To live with. Laughing, out of breath, dizzy
With the speed of the ball skipping over
The frozen earth, did they recognize themselves
For a short while in each other? History says
Only that they exchanged chocolate and cigarettes,

Relaxed in the last ransomed sunlight.
When the night came and they had retreated
To their own sides, some of the men
Wrote about the soccer game as if they had to
Ensure the day had really happened. It did.
We have the letters, though none of them says
How, in the next short hours, they needed,

For their own well-being, to forget everything
That had happened that Christmas day.
It was cold, the long rows of candles must have
Seemed so small in the dark. Restless, awake
In the trenches, the men, I suppose,
Already knew what tomorrow would bring,
How it would be judged by the lost and missing.



– Robert Cording, Common Life: Poems (Fort Lee: CavanKerry Press, 2006), 39–40.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Asymmetries (after Spencer Tunick) by Philip Metres, courtesy of World Literature Today (2010)



Asymmetries (after Spencer Tunick) by Philip Metres, courtesy of World Literature Today (2010)


Longing to grasp the familiar, names
-----against the anonymous
appendages & naked flesh, a nipple the eye
-----could nuzzle, to hide in
dark islands of hair, I near the photo –

-----as if the body erotic
could shield against the camera’s scalpel.
-----In its distance, the bodies
without faces line a riverbank, shade
-----into some darker shadow...

obeying the desire of gravity. I’m thinking
-----of Iraq, how they lay out
each disinterred nest of femurs & ribs
-----on separate sackcloths,
trying to punctuate the run-on sentence

-----of oppression & unfettered
blood. All’s asymmetry. After making love,
-----once you said every face,
split in half, fit so precariously, so comically,
-----we spent the next half

-hour shading one side of our faces in the mirror,
-----then the other. This world
is centaur: half dream, half nightmare.
-----Wandering the gallery,
we drift onto an imagined balcony

-----& gape at the traffic
of bodies jamming the crossroads, im
------mobile sculpture of
pure fact, dangling odd-angled & earth
------bound us.




Read more in the recent issue of World Literature Today.

Monday, December 20, 2010

"Dear Michael (2)" by Mark McMorris

I heard Mark McMorris read at Split This Rock 2010, and I'm struck by the way in which the recent wars filter into his new book, Entrepot, from Coffee House Press.  Coffee House Press has made a real mark in contemporary poetry with excellent recent books by Mark Nowak, Ange Mlinko, and Julie Carr, among others, with a vision of social engagement and philosophical nuance.  McMorris' poem reminds me at once of contemporary poststructural theories of language (where language is, to quote Robert Hass, elegy to the thing it signifies) and the tradition of war poetry, in which the poet attempts to sing the unsingable, to speak the unspeakable of war.  I believe there's a hint of Dickinson here, as well, "Success is counted sweetest."
"Dear Michael (2)"  by Mark McMorris


The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit
is what exits from the wound it documents.
The wound is deaf to what it makes; is deaf
to exit and to all, and that is its durable self,
to be a mayhem that torments a city. The sound
comes first and then the word like a wave
lightning and then thunder, a glance then a kiss
follows and destroys the footprint, mark of the source.
It is the source that makes the wound, the wound
that makes a poem. It is defeat that makes
a poem sing of the light and that means to sing
for a while. The soldier leans on his spear.
He sings a song of leaning; he leans on a wound
to sing of other things. Names appear on a page
gentian weeds that talk to gentian words, oral
to local, song talk to sing (Singh), and so
he goes on with the leaning and the talking.
The wound lets him take a breath for a little
because it is a cycle of sorts, a system or a wheel
a circle that becomes a wheel and is not a sound
at all, the idea of a sound and the sound again
of an idea that follows so close; say light
and then is there light or a wound, an idea of being
itself in the thing sound cancels. Is there ever a spear
a soldier that leans in, a song that he sings
waiting for a battle? This soldier is only a doorway.
Say that book is a door. I say the soldier
and the local, the word and the weed, the light
and the kiss make a mayhem and a meeting.
So then that the voice may traverse a field
it transmits the soldier on a causeway to the city
leaning on a spear and talking, just after the wound opens
that never creaks and closes, and has no final page.


Mark McMorris
Entrepôt
Coffee House Press

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Happy Advent, Everyone! Poems & Music in the Dark Time


This Advent program of poems and music came into being thanks to Gail Roussey, of Campus Ministry, and in collaboration with Cynthia Caporella, the Director of Music at John Carroll University.  Thanks to the musicians (listed at the end of the program) and Lydia Munnell, who read the scriptural epigraphs of the poems.  (I have yet to send these poems out, as they are a departure from my work, and I'm not quite sure if they have fully emerged as poems.)

This is the note to the poems included in the program:

Antiphons for Advent


Years later, I now believe that the psalms and readings and prayers I heard as a child in Mass were among my first experiences of poetry—a language that draws us into its song, that claims us, even when we don’t understand all its meanings. The longer I write, the more I admire the durable language of Scripture. Despite its translations from distant languages, its vivid evocation of the sacred flows in and between the lines. I am still awed when I read the poetry of Isaiah:

The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue,
That I might know how to speak to the weary
A word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
He opens my ear that I may hear…

These poems were begun during Advent 2008, when I wrote a poem every day, in the season of darkness, of anticipation and hope. Reading Scripture, I tried to have a dialogue with the stories, taking up ideas and phrases and turning them over and through my own life. In the process, I found myself writing two kinds of poem: meditative poems (often about my own immediate life), and prayer poems (poems that attempt to speak to the divine).

The first type of poem meditates on Scripture through my immediate surroundings—the increasingly dark and cold weather, being a dad to two young children, and witnessing from a distance the wars over our horizons. In this new millennium, I continue to be struck by the vulnerability of human life in the face of oppression and devastation around us, in us.

The second type of poem comes out of my desire to write prayers that could be shared with people of faith, but were entirely my own. I have puzzled over prayer as long as I’ve been repeating my prayers from catechism. The word “prayer” comes from precaria—a root shared with the word “precarious.” In prayer, we seek a kind of sturdiness that the world often does not offer.

The notion of the “antiphon” struck me as precisely what I was after, in both these types of poems. “Antiphon” comes from the Greek: ἀντίφωνον, ἀντί "opposite" + φωνή "voice". The notion of an opposite voice, a voice in opposition, appealed to me as one who struggles in faith. Actual liturgical antiphons are responses, usually sung; the “O Antiphons” are sung at Vespers in the last seven days of Advent. These poems are my personal antiphons, sung first to myself, and now shared with you in the silence of print and through my own voice.


Philip Metres
2010






 

"SPAM's carbon footprint" by Craig Santos Perez

Craig Santos Perez has been unrolling an epic poem over the years about his native island, the Pacific Island of Guåhan, a crucial counterepic to the ways that the "U.S. territories" get figured into American history.  I first read of his work from Tinfish's publication of his first book, and have been intrigued ever since.   According to the bio, Perez, a native Chamorro originally from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks, including constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, 2007), all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007), and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press in 2008) has been taught in universities across the United States and the Pacific. The latest is from unincorporated territory [saina].  His poetry, essays, fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Sentence, and Rain Taxi, among others.


______________________

"SPAM's carbon footprint"  by Craig Santos Perez

Guam is considered the SPAM® capital of the world. On average, each Chamorro consumes 16 tins of SPAM® each year, which is more per capita than any country in the world. Headline: Guam Struggles to Find Its Roots From Beneath Growing Piles of SPAM®. Guam, Hawaii, and Saipan have the only McDonald's restaurants that feature SPAM® on the menu. I went to the "World's Largest K-Mart" in Guam and I was amazed at the SPAM® display...it was like a whole "Wall of SPAM®." SPAM® has a place not only in the stomachs of Guam's people, but in our hearts as well. Here SPAM® is considered a gourmet luxury and is often presented as a gift at birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Hormel even made a Hot and Spicy SPAM® especially formulated for Guam with Tabasco already added to it! A culinary legacy of American troops stationed in the Pacific during World War Two, the GIs noticed how much the people of Guam loved SPAM®, so they started to jokingly call it "Chamorro Steak." Not coincidentally, SPAM® is also popular in Hawaii, the Philippines, Okinawa, and Saipan, all places with a history of a U.S. military presence. In fact, SPAM® may have been responsible for Hitler's defeat. The Allies would not have won WWII without SPAM®. Plus, it's processed so I guess we can keep it forever right? Wow, I haven't seen this much SPAM® since I lived on Guam and the car dealership there started offering 50lb bags of rice and cases of SPAM® with every purchase. The end result can be found in the newspaper's obituary pages. In 2004, Public Health reported that heart disease was the leading cause of death on Guam, representing 33.7% of deaths. You can rub the entire block of SPAM®, along with the accompanying delicious gelatinous goo, onto wood furniture. The oils from the SPAM® moisturize the wood and give the furniture a nice luster. Plus, you'll have enough left over to polish some of your neighbors' furniture. You'll be like Santa Claus meets Mr. Clean. How did I miss hearing about the "In Honor of Guam's Liberation" SPAM®! I thought I had collected them all! But as I got older and tried to be "healthier" (whatever that means, haha), SPAM® faded from my consciousness. Then I met my future wife, who is Hawaiian, and SPAM® became part of my life again. Maybe the economic downturn will help people truly appreciate SPAM® instead of loathing it. SPAM® doesn't have to be unhealthy. I eat SPAM® on a regular basis and I'm not dead yet. Just switch to SPAM® Lite. In the devastating wake of Typhoon Omar, SPAM® arrived. Hormel Foods donated 40,000 cases of the belly-filling foodstuff to the Salvation Army's disaster relief effort. That's about six million SPAM®burgers! Despite rumors, SPAM® is NOT made of such odds and ends as hooves, ears, brains, native people, or whole baby pigs. SPAM® is for realz made of pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, sugar, and sodium nitrate, if you can belief it. The name itself stands for Specially Processed Army Meat, Salted Pork And More, Super Pink Artificial Meat, Squirrel Possum And Mouse, or Some People Are Missing. My uncle is the reigning Guam SPAM® king. He won the last SPAM® cook-off with his Spicy SPAM® meatballs. I will never forget the two-pound SPAM® bust of George Washington he made for Liberation Day, toasted crispy on the outside with raw egg yolk in the hollow center. The kids loved it! Only a fool would start a company in Guam that provides SPAM® protection. We don't want to be protected from SPAM® bots. For Xmas, I bought a SPAM® snow-globe featuring a can of SPAM® sitting on an island; turn it over and a typhoon swirls madly, unable to unseat SPAM® from its place of honor. I have a souvenir can I bought after seeing Monty Python's SPAM®ALOT on Broadway. It cost me $10 and is the most expensive SPAM® I've ever bought. I will never eat it.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Where Do I Find Hope?

Poet Joseph Ross, guestblogging at The Basin Blog, invited a number of poets (Naomi Shihab Nye, Naomi Ayala, and others to come) to answer the question: Where do I find hope?

Here's mine, posted today.  The first paragraph:

Where do I find hope? My father is wont to quote endlessly Khalil Gibran, his family’s kinsman: “your children are not your children. They are life’s longing for itself.” In my own children, in their shining eyes and longing selves bounding into this world; in the work of poets and activists and workers who toil in darkness, in obscurity, in the pity or judgment of others; in the cycles of death and rebirth in the seasons; I see glimmers of a kind of vital perpetuity that all my apocalyptic nightmares, all of my pessimism about the human soul, all of my darkness and pain, cannot overwhelm....


Any comments welcome.  Where do you find hope?

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Philip Metres/Jason Dodge Collaboration: Weathering the Weather

H.L. Hix's blog, IN QUIRE, is conducting artistic-poetic dialogues, setting up poets to respond to works of art.  Today, Hix published my poetic response "The Weather" to Jason Dodge's piece, "Above The Weather."  Check it out.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

"Oubliette" by Angele Ellis

I discovered this intriguing poem from Angele Ellis' forthcoming chapbook, Spared, her second collection (the first being Arab on RadarYou can find an earlier post about her here.   There are some dazzling pieces; in one poem, a sonnet called "First Dawn in Costa Rica," she writes about her beloved's guilt over missing mass:

You could atone by climbing the steps of St. Ladislaus
on your knees--but now you are a communicant
of flesh, receiving benediction when you kneel over me.

Last week, I said to someone that "Christian sexuality" could be an oxymoron, but this poem proves otherwise.

The poem "Oubliette" struck me in part because of its formal structure, a stricture of metaphorical impact and force.  An "oubliette" is a dungeon whose only escape is from above--but the imagery of the poem also suggests the womb and religious transcendence. 

"Oubliette" by Angele Ellis

Before my eyes had sight, I felt a wall,
damp as a cheek, its tears all wept.
My cracking voice brought back no call
into the iron darkness where I slept.
But towards the roof, a rim of light,
bright outline of the eclipsed moon.
I traced this circle on the penciled night,
bracing myself against another moan.
And then--the sudden breaking blue
of freedom, and I climbed to you.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

"Lyric on the Inside" by Alex Chambers

Guest to the blog, Alex Chambers meditates on teaching poetry (particularly documentary poetry) in the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Program. Just when we think we know what poetry is for, it flees our (prisoning) visions of it. His experience reminds us that poetry may be different from what we supposed (pace Whitman). It may also end up being what we feared it would be.


"Lyric on the Inside" by Alex Chambers (fachambers@gmail.com)

When you walk into a prison—but already the description is a problem. You don’t just walk into a prison. You park in the visitor lot that the director of the prison education program has warned you might be bugged, and, if you’re at the oldest still-running prison in Alabama, shout up to the guard in the tower (the guard in the tower, as if you’re in a fairy tale and the princess has been locked in the dungeon for a hundred years), then wait for the guard to motion you to the heavy entrance gate, where the next guard will buzz you into the waiting area. When you walk into the prison proper, after a few more gates and a search of your books and handouts, you are surrounded by men in white watching you from behind their bars or their bunks or as they pass you in the hall. By the end of the semester, you notice a word passing among them as you walk, and the word is poetry, and it’s not often you hear the word spoken outside the English Department with such significance, and it feels good. You’ve brought something.

The position of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Program was that we could not be activists in our teaching. Our activism was the teaching and writing itself, sharing literature with people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to encounter it. I sympathize with program’s reasoning. Its presence in the prisons depends on positive relations with the overworked and only sometimes sympathetic prison administrations. Also, most other prison programs, at least in Alabama, proselytized, and the APAEP wants to be an antidote to such position-taking rather than another instance.

And yet, as a teacher, I want to create in my students a sense of political possibility. Meaningful change only happens when people realize—imagine—they can do it themselves. Another way of saying this is that the only people who change an element of society, who shift power toward the powerless, are the ones who realize they can make things happen. Therefore as activists (as teachers) we must help people realize they can come together and make a stand. It’s dangerous idea in a prison, taking a stand, and I never actively encouraged it. I only approached the idea indirectly.

Rereading the previous paragraph, I ask myself, Is this an essay about poetry or teaching?

Then I ask, Is poetry about poetry or teaching?, and remind myself no, it’s not about teaching, not exactly.

I am trying to think about poetry, especially documentary poetry, and its political possibilities. This is about text. It is a question of what a poetic text is, or what makes a poem, and why that might matter politically. Or not. Inevitably, it is also about teaching, because teaching and poetry are both shapers of culture.

I thought one way to marry the poem with the politics would be to assign a documentary poem. In the week preceding, we read some of the documentary poems Phil discusses in his Poetry Foundation article on the subject. I encouraged my students to look around them and record conversations they heard, to appropriate text from the prison walls or (anonymously) from their own or others’ court proceedings (as in Reznikoff), to write the histories of their places (as in Rukeyser), to note as many realities of language they could. I could have asked them to note where the power was. Notice the people and places who are underrepresented, I suggested, and represent them. “Give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media tend to ignore or misrepresent,” I wrote in their assignment, after Phil’s article. At least tell a story from your own life.

When I came back the next week they shared what they had written. The poems were surprisingly conventional. One talked about his small hometown in abstract terms, with sentiments about everybody knowing your name. He didn’t refer to any individuals, and even the town remained nameless, somewhere (maybe) in the South. Another student, a man who each week showed me one of his chapbooks, recited, from memory, a verse he’d written about love, already printed in the chapbook, as he did every week. One student came closer, by recording, in a rhyming list, the major stories from the year in sports. That was one way of thinking about historical memory.

And then the oldest student, had buzzed hair and the gaunt face of man who had been homeless when not in prison, read his poem. He had, over his many years in and out of prison, been talking to convicted killers, asking them to tell their stories and why they had done what they’d done. His poem was a simple list of quotations from his interviews. Its juxtapositions of horror and numbness were a shock. I didn’t keep the poem—the APAEP’s policy is that all materials stay with them—but I remember lines like “All those flies. / I walked up to my ex-wife’s car window and shot her in the face. / There were bodies all over the house. / All those flies. / I looked in the fridge to see what was to eat.” The banality of hunger surpasses our human cruelty.

It was the most memorable single piece of writing I experienced there. Why did I have so much trouble getting more tense, raw writing like that?

Because “poetry” signifies, as Phil pointed out in suggesting I do this post. I think both the program and my students had an idea that the goal was to write traditional lyric poems, poems about their families, fresh air, green grass, the ocean, and birds. Good things.

I failed. I wanted poetry to help my students look at language differently; they wanted to make beautiful objects. For me, as a reader and writer, poetry is a way to examine assumptions and, out of that examination, create a new thought. I see it even as a way to record and think about power, instances of power that would otherwise go unsaid. To embody linguistic possibility. To remind us what we hope for. Maybe what we hope for is as simple as the clichés.

I wanted poetry to give my students a way to speak truth to institutions.
I wanted them to look around and report. My students, for the most part, wanted poetry to let them escape, at least for the moment of the writing and the reading of the poem. Clouds, open fields, birds. The men in the prison didn’t have a single tree to touch or see in their daily lives; can I blame them for insisting on traditional (Hallmark) lyric?

What I hope for, still, is that writing poetry can give us ways to think beyond dichotomy. That probably means breaching the false wall I’ve created between documentary-linguistic experimentation and romantic-lyric verse. It also means, though, that we keep pushing to see the whole world, the razor wire, the posters about the reentry program, the language of institutional power, as strange and interesting, and worthy of thinking about in the poem.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Countries of Our Skulls, and the Myths We Use to Bury Them

In addition to The Country of My Skull, a brilliant and terrifying exploration of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I've been reading Tiffany Higgins' And Aeneas stares into her helmet (Carolina Wren Press Press (2008), a book-length meditation on the wars of our recent age.  Higgins does a remarkable discipline by staying with the war, measuring the extent of its merging in us, its emergence from us.  Neither expose nor diatribe, Higgins stays with it, dances in time with it, in its time. 

Since the recent imperial wars seem not to require anything more than our silence, such a poetic perserverance is itself an achievement; whatever the gain of having a professional army (and not a volunteer one), we collectively have lost by our greater distance from the brutalities of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.  We need to stop burying that brutality.  The truths will out, Wikileaks or no Wikileaks, Assange or no Assange.

Here's a video I featured before, from Higgins, which explores the way the war is both with us and invisible to us.



Here's a post from Split This Rock featuring one of Higgins' poems; Split This Rock is an organization devoted to such poetic tasks.  If you can support them in some way, please do so.

Split This Rock began the 'Poem of the Week' program in October 2009 as a way of publicizing the poets who were to be featured in the 2010 festival. We are now pleased to be continuing Poem of the Week by featuring poems by poets who were registered participants in either (or both!) Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, in 2008 and/or 2010.

This week, we feature Tiffany Higgins and her poem "Aeneas & the pilgrim child set out into the city."
If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit our blog archive.

In peace and poetry,
Split This Rock

Tiffany Higgins
"Aeneas & the pilgrim child set out into the city"

I shall build a city upon a hill
and upon a hill and upon a hill and upon a hill

--------I am a little shepherd piping low
--------through the valleys of Babylon

I shall build a city upon a hill
and it shall be as a light unto-

-------and upon a hill and upon a hill and upon a hill a citadel-
--------the world  aaaaI shall build

through the valleys of Babylon
I lay down and weep

--------I lay down and weep
---------And weep for thee, Babylon

but then I, I recall I-
I am aloft in my omnipotence

and so there is no problem


-Tiffany Higgins
From And Aeneas stares into her helmet (Carolina Wren Press Press 2008). Used by permission.

Tiffany Higgins is the author of And Aeneas Stares into her Helmet, a book of poems which asks where our wars live in us. Evie Shockley selected it as winner of the 2008 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Prize. Critic Michael Parker chose it as his Best Book of Poetry 2009. Tiffany has performed her poems with music by Moisés Nascimento at various venues, including DC's Busboys and Poets. Tiffany is currently cowriting and helping to produce a documentary set in Brazil and the U.S., Duas Américas. Tiffany grew up in Massachusetts and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching English at several community colleges. See video of performances at tifhiggins.blogspot.com, where she blogs on environmental topics. Contact the poet to book readings / multimedia performances.

Higgins attended Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!


Split This Rock
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