Craig Santos Perez, from "understory" (Split this Rock poem of the week)

Poem of the Week: Craig Santos Perez   from understory (to my wife, nālani and our 7-month old daughter, kai) kai cries from teething-- how do new parents comfort a child in pain, bullied in school, shot by a drunk APEC agent? #justicefor -kollinelderts-- nālani gently massages kai's gums with her fingers- how do we wipe away tear-- gas and blood? provide shelter from snipers? disarm occupying armies? #freepalestine-- nālani sings to kai a song about the Hawaiian alphabet-- what dreams will echo inside detention centers and cross teething borders to soothe the thousands of children atop la bestia? #unaccompanied-- nālani rubs kai's back warm with coconut oil-- how do we hold violence at arm's length when raising [our] hands up is no longer a universal sign of surrender? #black livesmatter-- kai finally falls asleep in nālani's cradling arms, skin to skin against the news-- when do we tell our daughter there's no safe place for us to breathe #...   *** From  Hawai'i Review special online issue, Write for Ferguson. With special thanks to editors Anjoli Roy and No'u Revilla.  Used with permission. *** Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa.  We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. Please, visit the poem at our site. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!   If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "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. Split This Rock www.SplitThisRock.org 202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org

abu ghraib arias: a reading (from Sand Opera)

The abu ghraib arias: a reading

With the release of the so-called “Torture Report” yesterday, I’ve been casting back to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. After the invasion of Iraq, from late 2003 to 2004, U.S. military police of the Army and Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of outrageous abuses of Iraqi detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, abuses that had been tried and exported from Guantanamo Bay prison and secret "black sites" around the world. Because of extensive photo and video documentation of the abuse by military police themselves, the scandal became an international embarrassment that led W.J.T. Mitchell to declare it, not without hyperbole, the moment that the U.S. lost the war in Iraq.

Sand Opera began out of the vertigo of feeling unheard as an Arab American, in the decade after the terrorist attacks of 2001. After 9/11, Americans turned an ear to the voices of Arabs and Muslims, though often it has been a fearful or selective listening. Even Errol Morris chose to interview only Americans for his Abu Ghraib film, “Standard Operating Procedure.” One centerpiece to Sand Opera is the “abu ghraib arias." It is a dialogue between Standard Operation Procedure for Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, the soldiers who served in Abu Ghraib, and the Abu Ghraib prisoners. I draw upon a number of sources: a Standard Operating Procedure manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (thanks to WikiLeaks); the testimony of Abu Ghraib torture victims found in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: America and the War on Terror; the words of U.S. soldiers and contractors as found in Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’s The Ballad of Abu Ghraib; the official reports on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (the Taguba Report, the Schlesinger Report, etc.); interviews with Joe Darby and Eric Fair (two whistle-blowers); the Bible; and the Code of Hammurabi. 

The following audio performance of the arias involved the piano work of Philip Fournier, and the voices of Danny Caine, Jackie Orchard, Paige Webb, and me (Philip Metres), and was engineered by Mike MacDonald.

http://philipmetres.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/abughraibarias-2-audio-2013.mp3

Mahmoud Darwish's "The Dice Player"

Split This Rock call for poems: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest

December 5, 2014   Updates Poetry and Action for Justice, Black Lives Matter National Action Network March Against Police Violence, Dec. 13, 10:30am Split This Rockin' Holiday & Birthday Bash: Poetry Tag, Dancing, S'moresDec. 13, 7pm Abortion Rights Poetry Contest Now Accepting Submissions: DueJan. 5, 2015 Quick Links       We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest -    Call for Poems that Resist Police Brutality  & Demand Racial Justice Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son-we who believe in freedom cannot rest.                      - Ella Baker Even as our hearts break in rage and anguish over the murder of Black and brown people throughout the land by police who are not held accountable, here at Split This Rock we are heartened by the powerful actions in the streets and the visionary leadership of mostly young people of color in this growing movement for justice. We are also moved by the poets, who continue to speak out, and especially by BlackPoetsSpeakOut and its manifesto: "I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry." Another powerful forum is VONA/Voices Against Racial Injustice. In solidarity, Split This Rock offers our blog as a Virtual Open Mic, open to all:  Send us your poems on the long history of the brutalization of Black and brown bodies and we will publish them on Split This Rock's blog, Blog This Rock, to create a running open mic. We welcome poems new and old, whether previously published or not. (Please include credit information for previously published.) Thematically we are wide open: resistance, mourning, rage, celebration. Send the poem(s) as email attachments (.doc or .docx only) with the subject line "We who believe in freedom" toinfo@splitthisrock.org. From the open mic collection, we will choose poems to run as Poem of the Week in the weeks ahead. We will contact you directly if we decide to use your poem for Poem of the Week. We are proud to begin this series today, with "bitter crop," as our Poem of the Week, by Kelli Stevens Kane. Please share her poem and this call widely. As the virtual open mic grows, we hope to print out and present all the poems to the U.S. Department of Justice, along with the national demands for police accountability and racial justice articulated by Ferguson Action. Stay tuned for details. In grief and resistance, Split This Rock Poem of the Week:  Kelli Stevens Kane      bitter crop  blueberry blackberry as always bleeding, back road or boulevard, our boy crowned with baton, breathing, barely, if you believe the breeze is just  air blowing through branches above the fruited plain have a seat. when our baby left we believed he'd come back in his body. we believed youngberries grew into elderberries. but now, when the wind blows against your necks, know it's him, you feel him now that he's up above the fruited plain don't you? I hate pavement, I hate summer, I hate yellow tape, I hate chokeberry, pokeberry, the way it'll always be too late to comfort him. the way I'll never dare to say I hate you back to our strange America that only protects the few above the fruited plain                                     -for Michael Brown and     *** Used with permission. Kane reads her poem in solidarity withBlackPoetsSpeakOut.  ***   Kelli Stevens Kane is a poet, playwright, and oral historian based in Pittsburgh, PA. She's a Cave Canem Fellow, an August Wilson Center Fellow, and a Flight School Fellow, and has twice received Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grants from The Pittsburgh Foundation. She's studied at VONA, Hurston/Wright, and Callaloo. She reads her poetry and oral history, and performs her one woman show, BIG GEORGE, nationally. For more information, please visit www.kellistevenskane.com and kskpoet.wordpress.com.      ***     We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. Please,visit the poem at our site. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!    If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "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. Split This Rock www.SplitThisRock.org 202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org

"Write It Down, I am an Arab": a documentary about Mahmoud Darwish

Women Speak Out for Peace and Justice 2014 Holiday Peace Bazaar

Women Speak Out for Peace and Justice

presents 

2014 Holiday Peace Bazaar and Festival

December 3rd - 10 am to 4 pm

Pilgrim Congregational Church, 2592 W. 14th St, Cleveland

• A gathering of peace and justice organizations

• Work of local artists

• Gifts items

• Plants

• Bake sale

• Le Petit Cafe

Call to volunteer - 216-231-4245             Come to shop!!

Cleveland Artists Bringing It

Philip Metres from CPAC on Vimeo.
Kevin Keating from CPAC on Vimeo.
Raymond Bobgan from CPAC on Vimeo.
George Bilgere from CPAC on Vimeo.
George Brant from CPAC on Vimeo.
Joshua Brown from CPAC on Vimeo.
Eric Coble from CPAC on Vimeo.
David Shimotakahara from CPAC on Vimeo.
Dan Rourke from CPAC on Vimeo.
Amanda Powell from CPAC on Vimeo.
Robin VanLear from CPAC on Vimeo.
Christine Howey from CPAC on Vimeo. Faye Hargate from CPAC on Vimeo.
Terence Greene from CPAC on Vimeo.
Christa Ebert from CPAC on Vimeo.

Juan Carlos Galeano's "History"

Poem of the Week:  Juan Carlos Galeano          History In the north we hunted many buffalo whose lard warmed us all winter. But in the jungle they told us that to bring more light we should throw more trees into the sun's furnace. One day our hand slipped and tossed in the entire jungle with its birds, fish, and rivers. Now we spend a lot of time gazing at the stars and our daily menu almost never changes. Today we hunted down a cloud that was going to become winter in New York City *** From The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura Gray Street. (Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas.) Used by permission. JUAN CARLOS GALEANO was born in the Colombian Amazon. He is the author of several books of poetry and translations of American poetry. His work inspired by Amazonian cosmologies has been published and anthologized internationally and widely translated. Magazines and journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly,and Antioch Review have published his poems. Other works include a collection of folktales Cuentos amazónicos (2014), Folktales of the Amazon (2009), as well as a film he co-directed and co-produced, The Trees Have a Mother (2008). He teaches Latin American poetry and cultures of the Amazon at Florida State University. ***     We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. View the poem on our site. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!    If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive. Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "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. Split This Rock www.SplitThisRock.org 202-787-5210 info@splitthisrock.org

"Happiness is God" by Ryan Pendell

Happiness Is God from Spark and Echo Arts on Vimeo.

What a beautiful poetic interaction with Lamentations, part of the Spark and Echo project!

Early Prophetic Opening by George Fox

"And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings." from Early Prophetic Openings by George Fox

Sergey Gandlevsky poem in audio

My translation of the untranslateable Russian poet Sergey Gandlevsky,Сергей Гандлевский, whose "All at once—things in the corridor" will be part of a future collection in English.
http://www.lyrikline.org/ru/stihotvoreniya/vsyo-razom-veshi-v-koridore-10818#

For more Gandlevsky (in bilingual edition):
To purchase directly from Zephyr Press, go here:
http://www.zephyrpress.org/books_europe.php#kindred
If you're interested in losing more bookstores, you can go here:
http://www.amazon.com/Kindred-Orphanhood-Selected-Gandlevsky-Thoughts/dp/0939010755

Deema Shehabi's "Of Harvest and Flight"

Deema Shehabi is the granddaughter of the former mayor of Gaza, though she grew up in exile and now lives in California. I can think of no other way to honor Palestinians from Gaza, and their predicament, than to quote one as eloquent as Deema.

OF HARVEST AND FLIGHT by Deema Shehabi


Beneath a wet harvest of stars in a Gaza sky,
my mother tells me how orchards
once hid the breach of fallen oranges,
and how during a glowing night

of beseeching God in prayer,
when the night nets every breath
of every prayer,
my uncle, a child then, took flight

from the roof of the house.
The vigilant earth had softened
just before his body fell to the ground,
but still there's no succumbing to flight's abandon;

our bodies keep falling on mattresses,
piles of them are laid out on living room floors
to sleep multitudes of wedding visitors:
the men in their gowns

taunt roosters until dusk,
while women taunt
with liquid harvest in their eyes,
and night spirits and soldiers

continue to search the house
between midnight and three in the morning.
On the night of my uncle's nuptial,
I watch my mother as she passes

a tray of cigarettes to rows of radiant guests
with a fuschia flower in her hair . . . .
Years before this, I found a photograph
of her sitting on my father's lap,

slender legs swept beneath her,
like willow filaments in river light.
His arm was firm around her waist;
his eyes bristled, as though the years of his youth

were borders holding him back
and waiting to be scattered.
Those were the years when my mother
drew curtains tightly over windows

to shut out the frost world of the Potomac;
she sifted through pieces of news
with her chest hunched over a radio,
as though each piece when found

became a story and within it
a space for holding our endless
debris.  But in truth,
it was only 1967, during the war,

three years before I was born . . . .
But tonight, in Gaza beneath the stars,
I turn towards my mother
and ask her how a daughter

can possibly grow beyond
her mother's flight.  There's no answer;
instead she leans over me
with unreadable long-ago eyes

and points to the old wall:
the unbolting of our roots there,
beside this bitter lemon tree,
and here was the crumbling

of the house of jasmine
arching over doorways,
the house of roosters
and child-flight legends,

this house of girls
with eyes like simmering seeds.


© by Deema K. Shehabi
http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/shehabiof.html
http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/features/deema-shehabi-poet-in-exile/
http://www.press53.com/BioShehabi.html

Gaza Names Project

On the Attitude Toward Children in Times of War, by Dahlia Ravikovitch (translated by Chana Bloch)

This is from Chana Bloch, in response to the deaths in Gaza:

I have no words. This is by Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005), one of the great Hebrew poets of our time, acclaimed for her poetry, admired and vilified for her political activism...Chana Bloch

On the Attitude toward Children in Times of War

He who destroys thirty babies  

it is as if he'd destroyed three hundred babies,

and toddlers too,    

or even eight-and-a-half year olds;

in a year, God willing, they'd be soldiers

in the Palestine Liberation Army.  

Benighted children,     

at their age

they don't even have a real world view.

And their future is shrouded, too:       

refugee shacks, unwashed faces,

sewage flowing in the streets,

infected eyes,

a negative outlook on life.

And thus began the flight from city to village,

from village to burrows in the hills.

As when a man did flee from a lion,

as when he did flee from a bear,

as when he did flee from a cannon,

from an airplane, from our own troops.  

He who destroys thirty babies,

it is as if he'd destroyed one thousand and thirty,

or one thousand and seventy,

thousand upon thousand.

And for that alone shall he find  

no peace.

from Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

trans. Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld (Norton 2009).

     Author's note: This is a variation on a poem by Natan Zach that deals [satirically] with the question of whether there were exaggerations in the number of children reported killed in the [1982] Lebanon War. 

     Lines 1-2, He who destroys: cf. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5: "He who destroys a single human soul . . . , it is as if he had destroyed an entire world." 

     Lines 16-17, As when a man: Amos 5:19, about the danger of apocalyptic yearnings. 

Lily Shehady's "Third Language"

new Split This Rock poem: Nicholas Samaras' "Anxiety Attack at 27,000 Feet"

May 23, 2014    Latest Updates Blog         Poem of the Week: Gretchen Primack 05-16-2014 3:18 PM Twitter   "You are the conscience of this world."  -- Wang Ping on Split This Rock 05-15-2014 9:04 AM  Quick Links     Poem of the Week:    Nicholas Samaras                     Anxiety Attack at 27,000 Feet What is that red throbbing over the sound of engines? Why is a distant war still being talked about in the media? I can't see my home or Iraq or the Middle East outside this bowed rectangle of blue altitude. Who brought these children here? How will this raven-haired girl grow into her life? There is no way I can die with this room full of Bostonians. Why is the serrated coast of New York approaching so.....rapidly? How many of these faces will separate before the plane.....lands? We go blind in this whiteness as my stomach descends and, somewhere far in the back, I can hear an animal.....wailing. Why am I wearing this black suit of my comfortable life? Into what country will we even touch down? What if we.....splinter and explode upon landing, the moment of our most hope and .....relief? How will my body feel enjoined to metal, shrouded in.....upholstery? I wish everyone peace, as we slam into the earth of our.....making. But what is that red throbbing and these murmurs building? What are all these stern looks of kindness and concern as hands hold my hands and place the mask over my.....breathing face?      -Nicholas Samaras        Used by permission.       Nicholas Samaras won The Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for his first book, Hands of the Saddlemaker. His new book, American Psalm, World Psalm, is now out withAshland Poetry Press (2014). He lives in West Nyack, New York.     ***    We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over e-mail, but certain e-mail programs may distort how characters, fonts, indents, and line wraps appear. View the poem on our site.   Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!    If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.   Poem of the Week Open Call Closed  Split This Rock's Poem of the Week series is currently closed. We will be re-opening submissions later this spring. Keep an eye out. Thanks for understanding! Support Split This Rock  Be part of Split This Rock's new vision in American letters-- Donate Today!   Our goal is to raise $10,000 by the end of our fiscal year,June 30th. Be one of the first 11 to give a gift of $250 or more and we'll send you a copy of the March issue of Poetrymagazine, which includes a special portfolio of the 2014 festival featured poets, signed by all 16 poets. A collectors' item!   Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor. Split This Rock  www.SplitThisRock.org  202-787-5210  info@splitthisrock.org