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Kevin Spenst's Poem at Enpipe Line launch

Veterans Exposed to Asbestos Between the 1930s and 1980s Are At-Risk for Mesothelioma Development: by Doug Karr

Veterans Exposed to Asbestos Between the 1930s and 1980s Are At-Risk for Mesothelioma Development: a guest essay by Doug Karr for "Behind the Lines" blog

Veterans account for 30 percent of all mesothelioma patients. Navy veterans have the highest risk of asbestos exposure. The exposure is typically a result of working on the shipyards from the 1930s to the 1970s. These marine vessels were filled with asbestos-based products in an effort to reduce the risk of fire. The hazard of asbestos was discussed by the Surgeon General of the Navy in the late 1930s, but many of the warnings were ignored because the benefits of using the material were immense.

In the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to regulate and reduce the use of asbestos. This momentous change in policy marked the beginning of public responsibility regarding asbestos and its role in the development of mesothelioma cancer.

What is Pleural Mesothelioma?

Mesothelioma cancer is assigned a name based upon the area of the body afflicted by the cancer. Pleural mesothelioma affects the lungs and is one of the more common types of mesothelioma cancer. Mesothelioma has also been known to affect the heart and the stomach. Pleural mesothelioma occurs when asbestos is inhaled and becomes lodged in the patient’s lungs. The asbestos may lie dormant for 10 to 50 years before mesothelioma develops. It is often difficult to determine the date of exposure because the dormancy period is so long.

What is the Most Common Way a Person is Exposed to Mesothelioma?

When examining the medical records of most veterans, studies show that exposure occurred mostly in people who worked in engine rooms and storage rooms. Asbestos was used in cables, gaskets and valves. The deadly mineral was also commonly used in navigational rooms and mess halls.

All branches of the military used asbestos. Veterans who served between World War II and the Vietnam War were at the greatest risk of exposure to asbestos. Since the machinery using asbestos was not replaced until several years after the Vietnam War, the risk of exposure extended several years beyond wartime.

According to the War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, other vulnerable populations include:

. Navy veterans who served on ships with keels made before 1983
. Any Navy personnel who served and worked on below deck on a ship before the 1990s
. Navy veterans who served in shipyards any time between the 1930s and the 1990s
. Any Navy personnel in charge of removing asbestos in engine rooms or ask to rewrap pipes with asbestos
. Pipe fitters, boiler operators and welders who were tasked with renovation and demolition may have worked with asbestos paste to re-wrap pipes
. Military personnel who worked in Brooklyn Navy Yard, Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Hunters Point Long Beach Naval Shipyard and Norfolk Navy Shipyard and were exposed to exposed to asbestos through power plants, auto production facilities, steel mills, refineries and construction sites

Asbestos Exposed Veterans Should Seek Help.

Veterans exposed to asbestos during wartime and afterwards should seek help. Veterans exposed from 1930s to 1980s are at-risk of developing mesothelioma now. Resources are available to help people exposed to asbestos.

*abu ghraib arias* (2nd printing) is hereby released!

Available for purchase here.  Thanks to Sommer Browning and Tony Mancus (the Flying Guillotines who have pressed this into life again).  More on Flying Guillotine Press here. 

Zohra Saed's "Kandahar"

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Zohra Saed                                                                             Kandahar          Behave or the sleeping Alexander will reclaim your lungs. Kandahar - ............Was once a cube of sugar Refusing to dissolve in the sea. It became a city from sheer stubbornness. Alexander naively said, "This is my land!" causing the earth to giggle and birth him a wife Rukhshana. (Roxanna if you prefer). This wife refused to dissolve in his sea. We know how the bright sun found him The next day - snuffed by an ornate embroidered pillow - The pillow and the three drops of Alexandrian blood Have been preserved by the mountains. Kandahar could never be Alexandria after that delicious.....murder.   -Zohra Saed        Used by permission. Originally published in notebook #105 from documenta(13)       Zohra Saed is the co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature(University of Arkansas Press). Her poetry has appeared in:Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality Ed. Sarah Hussein (Seal Press); Speaking for Herself: Asian Women's Writings Ed. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh (Penguin India); Seven Leaves One Autumn Ed. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Savita Singh (Rajkamal Prakashan Publishing: New Delhi, India); and most recentlySahar Muradi & Zohra Saed: Misspelled Cities (Notebook #105, documenta 13).   Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

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.

Tom Healey: Protest as Conversation, Dissent as Dialogue

from Tom Healey's article, "What Will We Say to Each Other?"

True dissent doesn't lie in quotes or signs. It's not what true protest or where change happens.

Protest is a conversation. It's been a strange, often frustrating, sometimes easy to mock, but essential ethos of American protest movements like #OWS and the Tea Party. And if you think about it, true conversation is democracy. All sides get to speak. It continues to be such a radical idea.

And true conversation, the one that brings unheard voices to the table, emerges not from agreement, but from dissonance -- when we don't agree, when we've talked but haven't listened, when we've stood by and haven't stood up.

The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox said that to stand by when we should protest is "to sin by silence."

A few months ago, the great American poet Adrienne Rich died. There is so much I'd like to say about her, but I think it's best to close with a few of her words instead. Adrienne Rich was a brilliant, fearless writer -- a feminist, an activist, someone who truly spoke truth to power.

In keeping with Wheeler Wilcox's argument that we sin by silence, Rich wrote, "Yes, lying is done with words, but also with silence ... Telling the truth creates the possibility for more truth to be told around you."

 

Dial-a-Poem at MOMA

What a whimsical little project, Dial-a-Poem.  

For you snobs living in New York, you can see and hear this directly at MOMA.

Split This Rock poetry contest- 2012

Announcing the 6th Annual  Split This Rock   Poetry Contest   Judged by: Mark Doty     Benefits Split This Rock Poetry Festival March 27-30, 2014 $1,000 Awarded for poems of provocation and witness     Submit Online!  Prizes: First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on www.SplitThisRock.org, winners will receive free festival registration, and the 1st-place winner will be invited to read winning poem at Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2014. Deadline: November 1, 2012 Reading Fee: $20, which supports Split This Rock Poetry Festival, 2014.  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, economics, government, war, leadership; issues of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, body image, immigration, heritage, etc.); community, civic engagement, education, activism; and poems about history, Americana, cultural icons. Split This Rock subscribes to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Contest Code of Ethics. Read it online here. Submission guidelines: Submit up to 3 unpublished poems, no more than 6 pages total, in any style, in the spirit of Split This Rock (see above).  Submit Online! Simultaneous submissions OK, but please notify us immediately if the poem is accepted elsewhere. For more information:    info@splitthisrock.org  http://splitthisrock.submittable.com/submit

Judge's Bio Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He is the author of eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose including Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Doty's poems have appeared in many magazines includingThe Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books,Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.   Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and the Witter Byner Prize. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 Doty was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 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

30th Annual PAND Concert Remembers Hiroshima/Nagasaki 1945

30th Annual PAND Concert Remembers Hiroshima/Nagasaki 1945


All Bach Program August 6th at St. Paul's Episcopal Church

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament presents its 30th annual concert in observance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6 and August 9, 1945.

The concert is Monday, August 6 at 8 pm, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Coventry Road and Fairmount Boulevard, Cleveland Heights. Download event flyer

An all Bach program features:
Donna Jelen, conductor
Joela Jones, harpsichord
Kyra Kester, flute
Diane Mather, cello
Sally Sherwin, flute
Gary Tishkoff, violin

Free-will offering will benefit The Cleveland Peace Action Education Fund. Reception following the concert. For information call PAND, Gino Raffaelli at 216.991.4500 or Peace Action at 216.231.4245, email clevelandpeaceaction@gmail.com.

Lauryn Nesbitt's "Congo"

I'm about to start the second year of the John Carroll Young Writers Workshop, where we'll be working with high school writers, and came upon Lauryn Nesbitt's "Congo"--it will give me and my students some spark to widen our lens of concern.

Congo For those who have lost their lives during the ongoing genocide in the Congo, as well as the many lives lost in genocides all over the world. Your bloodshed shall and will not be in vain. We will find peace. As long as you wake up everyday you should have   no reason to complain, right i guess if i'm still breathing then i'm not really suffering Well if that's the case i'll give every other breath To the 6 million Congolese people who have died   fourteen out of my fifteen years of days i don't complain about Lived in fear their whole life only to die brutally and unjustly Because someone was following orders Being a law abiding citizen An unjust law is no law at all The next time i touch my screen i will say Madsi Pa Because someone died for this Not even given a proper burial Please do understand that a street corner or pot-holes in the road do not suffice as coffins Where is the tombstone 6 million beautiful African names all gone with the wind now Somewhere a little girl doesn't understand the meaning of You're named after your great great great grand-mother That the last time this name was written it was with an X Now with a signature she has been practicing since she was seven Quiet honestly i don't have to go through triangles or bloody current to see the redness in mother's eyes because she cried all night That monotone pitch her voice is now concealed in from screaming her child's name She didn't bother about putting makeup on today No queen collection can mask her wide-eyed ghost look See, i can close my eyes every night and act like it doesn't exist Turn my TV off right before the Yele infomercial Refuse to watch channel 5 because it's day twenty and there are sixteen bodies and counting Or hum to that sad music they play on the Food for America PSA i can even wish that i could give the little boy on that feed the children of Africa a tissue for his nose Missing the whole purpose of why i should call them and not my best friend because they're both asking me to spot them a twenty When you think about it Suffering is like god You may not always see it you may never see it but it is real and it's out there.               -Lauryn Nesbitt     Used by permission.      From Lauryn's chapbook, Disturbing the Piece, 2012.     Lauryn "Poetic Hyst" Nesbitt is a 17 year-old senior in the Literary Media and Communications department at Duke Ellington School for the Arts. She hopes to pursue a career in film production. She has bloomed into a powerful and inspiring slam poet, performing her work at venues such as the Kennedy Center Concert Hall and Millennium Stage, Busboys and Poets, Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, her high school's graduation ceremony for the class of 2011, and the Atlas Theater. Lauryn is a two year member of the DC Youth Slam Team and she recently placed 2nd in the 2012 Larry Neal Writers' Competition teen category. When she's not pressing pen to paper she's your average teenager juggling homework, friends, and family.    Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

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.