If you need a more accessible or web version of this email, click here. A text & audio version of this poem is
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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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Poem of the Week
Tamiko Beyer
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Dear child of the near future,
here is what I know—hawks
soar on the updraft and sparrows always
return to the seed source until they spot
the circling hawk. Then they disappear
for days and return, a full flock,
ready. I think we all have the power
to do what we must to survive.
One day, I hope to set a table, invite you
to draw up a chair. Greens steaming garlic.
Slices of bread, still warm. Honey flecked with wax,
and a pitcher of clear water. Sustenance for acts
of survival, for incantations
stirring across our tongues. Can we climb
out of this greedy mouth,
disappear, and then return in force?
My stars are tucked in my pocket,
ready for battle. If we flood
the streets with salt water, we can
flood the sky with wings.
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Listen as Tamiko Beyer reads " Equinox."
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Tamiko Beyer is the author of Last Days and We Come Elemental (Alice James Books). Her poetry and articles have been published widely, including by Denver Quarterly, Idaho Review (forthcoming), Dusie, Black Warrior Review, Georgia Review, Lit Hub, and The Rumpus. She has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, VONA, and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, among others. She publishes Starlight and Strategy, a monthly newsletter for living life wide awake and shaping change. She is a queer, mixed race (Japanese and white), cisgender woman and femme, living on Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Pawtucket land. A social justice communications writer and strategist, she spends her days writing truth to power. You can find more at her website. |
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Tamiko Beyer invites people to support Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. Soul Fire Farm raises and distributes life-giving food as a means to end food apartheid. With deep reverence for the land and wisdom of ancestors, it works to reclaim the collective right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system. It brings diverse communities together on its healing land to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health, and environmental justice. Soul Fire Farm is training the next generation of activist-farmers and strengthening the movements for food sovereignty and community self-determination. Learn more at Soul Fire Farm’s website. |
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Share Widely, But Please Give Credit! |
Please feel free to share Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask that you include all of the information in the newsletter, including this request and a link to the poem at Split This Rock's website. Thanks!
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Poem used with permission. This poem was first featured in print in Foglifter Journal, Vol 5, Issue 1, 2020. Photo above of Tamiko Beyer by Susi Franco.
Photo Description: Tamiko Beyer smiling and looking at the camera. She is sitting on a rock with bare feet in a garden with yellow and purple flowers behind her. She has on a silver necklace and earrings and is wearing a black top and multi-colored long skirt.
Please note: 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.
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This March: Environmental Justice Programming with Poetry Coalition |
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Split This Rock is proud to be a member of The Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of more than 25 independent poetry organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. The Poetry Coalition will devote March 2021 to exploring the theme "It is burning./ It is dreaming./ It is waking up.: Poetry & Environmental Justice" in a series of programs in eleven cities that will reach an anticipated audience of more than 300,000 individuals nationwide. The line "It is burning./ It is dreaming./ It is waking up." is from the poem "Map" by Linda Hogan. The Poetry Coalition and its programmatic efforts are supported by the Academy of American Poets with funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Split This Rock Offerings:
Curated Poems: The Poem of the Week Series will include poems in support of the Poetry Coalition theme. Today's poem is part of those offerings. Visit Split This Rock's 2021 Poetry Coalition web page to check out all of this month's poems.
Gratitude to Naomi Ortiz for her virtual writing workshop, "Digesting What's in the Way"
On Wednesday, March 17, attendees gathered for a virtual workshop focused on expanding and complicating the dialogue between the disability justice and eco-justice. Big thanks to everyone who attended and provided access support! We are deeply grateful to Naomi Ortiz for lending her wisdom, rootedness, and facilitation. Learn more about Naomi and read her work at Split This Rock's website or her website.
Gratitude to Kimberly Blaeser for her virtual writing workshop, "Of Science and Kinship: Indigenous Geopoetics"
On Wednesday, March 3, workshop attendees gathered virtually for a free writing workshop with Kimberly Blaeser that drew upon Indigenous teachings to consider the animate world and the elemental interdependence of humans and the planets. Thank you to all who attended and provided access support! We are so grateful to Kimberly Blaeser for lending her expertise, generous spirit, and facilitation. Learn more about Blaeser and read her work at The Quarry.
Image Description: The header image for this section is a light green rectangle with white text that says Poetry Coalition, and a black centered line underneath.
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Celebrating 3 Years of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology
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...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.
-- Juan Carlos Galeano, from " History," Published in Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology
Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology turns 3 this year! Published in March 2018 by University of Georgia Press, the anthology was created through a Split This Rock project led by the organization's co-founder and the book's editor Melissa Tuckey.
"Ghost Fishing is the first anthology to focus solely on poetry with an eco-justice bent. A culturally diverse collection entering a field where nature poetry anthologies have historically lacked diversity, this book presents a rich terrain of contemporary environmental poetry with roots in many cultural traditions."
Contributors include Homero Aridjis, Brenda Cárdenas, Natalie Diaz, Camille T. Dungy, Martín Espada, Ross Gay, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Linda Hogan, Philip Metres, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tolu Ogunlesi, Wang Ping, Patrick Rosal, Tim Seibles, Danez Smith, Arthur Sze, Eleanor Wilner, and Javier Zamora.
Learn more at University of Georgia Press's website.
Now Available: A selection of poems featured in the anthology at The Quarry as a special collection!
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Image Description: The header image for this section is a rectangle, its left half is light green with text that says Poetry Coalition, and its right half is a photo of the cover of the eco-justice anthology "Ghost Fishing."
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Poems & Resources in Support of Shared Action |
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She holds my hand and wants to run past the bouncy castles, the face painting, the pony rides—all things she loves, all things that cost money. Sitting alone in our seats, waiting, I ask her why she doesn’t want to be where everyone else is. Because I don’t know if you can afford it, she whispers, then leans her head into my chest, and I am glad she can’t see my face. |
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Split This Rock staff offer poem categories in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database in support of public action, grieving, organizing, teaching, or words to start a meeting. In The Quarry, Split This Rock's social justice poetry database, you can find poems by content and author identity, including:
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Join us in Safety Planning to Read, Act, & Connect |
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A compilation of readings, tools, and resources collected from social movements and communities is available at Spit This Rock's website. These resources can be used by individuals, friends, pods, families, organizations, classrooms, or communities. Read the full list of resources on Split This Rock's website. |
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If you have events, a call for submissions, or other opportunities you'd like to share with the Split This Rock network, send us the information via our Newsletter Updates Request Form. If the online form is not accessible to you, please contact us at [email protected] for an alternate method of submission. |
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The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant
The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) has created a temporary fund to meet the needs of experimental artists who have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through FCA's Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund, we are offering one-time $2,000 grants to eligible artists who have lost income from an engagement that has been canceled or postponed due to the pandemic. This fund is focused on providing support to composers, choreographers, playwrights, directors, visual artists, and poets, and cannot support artists who were working on a canceled or postponed project of work that is not their own. Our panelists have been prioritizing losses from non-commercial opportunities, rather than losses from potential sales opportunities. We encourage artists who are interested in applying to read our eligibility guidelines at FCA's website.
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Virtual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference | March 20
The Bay To Ocean Writers Conference will take place on Zoom on March 20, 2021. There will be 30 speakers and six different tracks. Registration is $70. The event is run by the Eastern Shore Writers Association and is rated as one of the top one-day conferences in the country. For more information, including a lineup of speakers and registration form, visit the Eastern Shore Writers Association webpage.
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Now Hiring: George Mason University Associate Director Position for Watershed Lit | Apply by March 29
George Mason University's English Department is seeking to hire an Associate Director for Watershed Lit, a new literary center on campus. The Associate Director would work with the centers and programs that are affiliated with Mason's Creative Writing Program and English Department. Learn more at George Mason University's website.
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OutWrite 2021 Seeks Proposals for Readings & Panels by April 15
OutWrite is Washington, D.C.'s annual LGBTQ literary festival. OutWrite 2021 will be August 6-8, 2021. Want to have a reading or panel at OutWrite 2021? Send your ideas by April 15 by completing the online form. Even though this summer's festival will likely be virtual again, don't hold your creativity back! OutWrite has compiled a resource, courtesy of Jacob Budenz, to help you develop events, with a focus on interactivity, engaging audiences, and alternative reading formats. You can find the resource online as a Google Doc.
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Disabilities in Africa Anthology of Writing Call for Submissions | Due May 15
Seeking submissions from Disabled African Writers. Open to all genres. Prose pieces should not exceed 5000 words. Contributors may submit work in more than one genre. Please do not submit more than 5 pieces. All material must be original and previously unpublished. The anthology will be published in English, but translations from other languages will be accepted. This anthology is open to all writers from Africa whether in the continent, or in the diaspora. Deadline is 15 May 2021. Submissions should be sent to Professor Kobus Moolman at [email protected]. For more information or queries, contact either Prof Moolman or Dr. Charlotte Baker at [email protected]. |
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Registration is Open for Kundiman's Spring Online Classes
Kundiman's Spring Online Classes include a roster of 8-week workshops and 3-hour craft classes. Classes are open to either Asian American writers or all writers of color from February-May. Scholarships are available. Learn more and sign up at Kundiman's website.
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Help Us Sustain Split This Rock |
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Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
-- June Jordan
Help us keep Split This Rock community-funded so we can keep centering poets and poetry that speak truth to power. Split This Rock's Board has set a bold challenge to replace this lost funding. If 1,000 people contribute $5 per month, we can replace the lost $55k in one year. If 11,000 people contribute $5 per month, we can replace the lost funding in one month, hire more staff, and fully fund Split This Rock to sustain the work long term, ensuring year-round stipends for Teaching Artists and Featured Poets, honorariums for the Poem of the Week Series, accessibility services for events, and equitable pay to honor the tremendous work of our small staff.
Please consider becoming a sustaining donor for as little as $5 per month. A monthly donation at any level increases stability as we face an uncertain funding landscape. If you aren't able to donate right now but this work means something to you, please help us share the poetry, the resources, and this call for support.
To mail your gift:
Send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, 1301 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite 600, Washington DC 20036
We are grateful for the steadfast support of our audiences and communities and look forward to more brave work with you in the weeks, months, and years to come.
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