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Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness
to injustice and provokes social change.
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19 October 2018
Poem of the Week is "ARS POLITICA: HOW TO MAKE ART" by Laurie Ann Guerrero.
This poem is available in audio and text format at
Split This Rock's website.
Many thanks to all who spread the word (and applied for) the Interim Executive Director position. We're really excited by the applications we received, as well as the enthusiasm for and commitment to Split This Rock's future we heard through the recruitment process. Stay tuned for more news soon!
Less than two weeks left to submit your social justice poems to the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest -- judged by Franny Choi! In an era when political leaders are advancing oppressive measures that put civil rights, the environment, and lives at risk, Split This Rock invites poets to respond with the power of their words. Entries will be accepted until November 1, midnight EST. More details
below
, at Split This Rock's website, and on the contest
Submittable page
.
Help Split This Rock continue to amplify voices of poets of all ages calling forth a world in which we all thrive.
Visit the website to donate.
Monthly donations especially help to sustain the work.
Scroll down for more info on upcoming poetry events and submission opportunities in the Updates section. Learn how to have your announcement included in future Split This Rock emails below as well.
With poetry on our lips and our fists in the air,
Split This Rock
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Poem of the Week
Laurie Ann Guerrero
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ARS POLITICA: HOW TO MAKE ART
--an ode to the artists of San Antonio, Tejas
You must start small as our mothers were small,
our fathers, too, small.
In a pillowcase whip-stitched with roses
or in an old coffee can, collect your abuelos'
teeth; assure them you will not bury them
near the bones of the dog that froze
the winter that dogs froze.
Carry the teeth under your tongue.
Let them root there.
This is how you will learn to speak.
Be ready to cough up songs, corridos plucked first
by a revolutionary whose gunsmoke you wear in your hair.
The songs will be new in your throat. We are always
beginning. We are always beginning again.
You cannot be afraid to unhinge the jaw-
let the sun blister your mouth. Know thirst.
Cast you own eyes from their sockets like a confettied April
that you will know the bloom and battle of flowers.
Let your ribs draw across the ribs of another: el canto de violín.
Let your fingers dance: el guitarrón.
Needle or pen, brushed oil, machete or drum, leather,
cilantro, stomp--be patient in the tooling,
the weaving of experience one hundred, five hundred,
ten thousand years to here: love-making in the cotton and nopal,
battlelines and colorlines, birthing in the huts, in the casitas
under a grove of mesquite and huizache,
and, too, lynchings and genocide in the feathery strands
of our DNA that move our hands to do the work.
Trust your hands know the work
even if you do not know the work.
You do not speak for the dead.
The dead speak for you.
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Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the southside of San Antonio. Winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, her first full-length collection, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, was released by University of Notre Dame Press in 2013. Her latest collection, A Crown for Gumecindo, a collaboration with visual artist Maceo Montoya, was released by Aztlan Libre Press in the spring of 2015. It received the 2016 Helen C. Smith Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Guerrero has held consecutive positions of Poet Laureate of the city of San Antonio (2014-2016) and the State of Texas (2016-2017). She holds a BA in English Language & Literature from Smith College, an MFA in poetry from Drew University, and is the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M-San Antonio.
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Please feel free to share Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask that you include all of the information in this post, including this request and a link to the poem at Split This Rock's website. Thanks!
* * *
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.
If you have difficulty accessing this poem,
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PRIZES: First place $500; 2nd and 3rd place, $250 each. Winning poems will be published on Split This Rock's website and in
The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. All prize winners will receive free festival registration to
Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2020 and the 1st place recipient will be invited to read the winning poem on the main stage at the festival.
READING FEE: $20. Benefits Split This Rock, helping to sustain its work to bring poetry to the center of public life.
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, resistance, leadership; issues of identity (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, socioeconomic class, body image, immigration, heritage, etc.); community, civic engagement, education, activism; and poems about history, Americana, cultural icons. Past winning poems are available in
The Quarry and at Split This Rock's
website.
Split This Rock subscribes to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Contest Code of Ethics. Read it at
Split This Rock's website.
Submission guidelines: Submit up to 3 unpublished poems, no more than 6 pages total, no more than 1 poem appearing on each page, in any style, in the spirit of Split This Rock (see above) by
11:59 pm EST
on
November 1, 2018. NOTE: Entries longer than 6 pages will not be read.
Unless it is inaccessible to you, all entries must be sent in via
Submittable. Full list of guidelines are available at
Submittable and Split This Rock's
website.
We encourage you to submit before the November 1 deadline so that we can assist you if you encounter problems.
Simultaneous submissions are okay, but please notify us immediately if the poem is accepted elsewhere.
ACCESSIBLE SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: If Submittable is not accessible to you, you are welcomed to submit your poem(s) using the
accessible Word version of the submission instructions available at
Split This Rock's website. After submitting your poem(s), if you have not received an email confirmation of receipt within a week's time, please contact us at [email protected] or (202) 787-5210.
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If you have events, a call for submissions, or other opportunities
Visit Split This Rock's
website
for upcoming events in DC!
_____________________
Ghost Fishing: An Eco Justice Anthology Public Exhibition | September 10-November 1
For those in the NYC area: Excerpts of the newly released anthology
Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology are on display at Kimmel Windows Galleries
alongside living plants native to Puerto Rico for 24-hour public viewing until
November 1, 2018. The exhibition is at the corner of LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street. More info on the
NYU Tisch website.
Charlene Kushner Wicked Woman Poetry Prize | Deadline: January 4
Brickhouse Books announces the
Charlene Kushner Wicked Woman Poetry Prize.
The prize will award publication and $250 for a full length
(42-64 pp.) manuscript about a woman (or women) who challenged expectations or broke the mold
. Contest Judge:
Rose Solari. Entries accepted until
January 4, 2019 via Submittable. Accommodations available for members of the disability community. Learn more on the
Brickhouse Books website.
Latinx Poetry Anthology: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4 Call for Submissions | Deadline: January 15
Latinx poets and MCs, submit your work to
The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4, an anthology that celebrates artists across the diaspora. Submissions in English, Spanish, Indigenous languages, or una mezcla are accepted. Submit up to 5 poems, lyrics, and/or translations in one Word document, along with your name, contact info, and 50 word bio. Entries accepted until
January 15, 2019. T
o submit or learn more, email
[email protected].
SWWIM Every Day holding submissions | No Deadline
SWWIM Every Day is back from their summer hiatus and is now accepting submissions.
SWWIM Every Day publishes poems by women, women-identifying, and femme-presenting writers.
Women of all ages, races, ethnicities, cultures, orientations, and expressions are encouraged to submit poems on a variety of themes and subjects in a variety of poetic forms. There is no deadline. Submit your poems through Submittable. For further details, go to SWWIM Every Day's website.
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Support Split This Rock
With your support, Split This Rock can raise the platform for
poetry of provocation and witness and amplify the voices of poets of all ages who write and perform this vital work. Donations are fully tax-deductible.
Split This Rock engages poetry as an agent for change: to answer hate, reach across differences, assert the centrality of the right to free speech, bear witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience, imagine and build a better world.
Here are a few ways your donation makes a difference:
- $25 provides refreshments for a FREE bi-monthly writing workshop or youth event
- $50 invests in our efforts to provide free poetry lesson plans to DC educators
- $100 provides an ASL interpreter for 1 hour, helping to make a poetry event accessible to the D/deaf & hard of hearing community
- $250 sends a dynamic Teaching Artist into a DC area school for two weeks at no cost to the school
- $500 sends one member of the DC Youth Slam Team to Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, helping defray the cost of registration, travel, lodging, and food
CONSIDER A ONE-TIME OR MONTHLY GIFT
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