Split This Rock, Part 5 — Friday Featured Reading, April 20

Back in the National Housing Center Auditorium for the night’s featured reading, with the co-hosts Sarah Browning & Katie Richey who is the host of the Split This Rock regular series Sunday Kind of Love. The reading began with a recording of gone poet Galway Kinnell reading his poem “St. Francis & the Sow.” & again a one of the DC Youth Poets set the fire under the audience, Mary Camara with an autobiographical “History Thru the Grades.” What a thrill it must be for these young poets to have their moment on the stage with this audience of activists & poets.

Again, all the featured poets were featured in the April Poetry magazine special section on Split This Rock. The first to read was Solmaz Sharif who began with the title poem from her 2016 Greywolf Press book LOOK, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, on military drones & naming, then another on war & death “Defender’s Immediate Family.” My favorite one she read was titled “Social Skills Training” which dealt with how we modify our behavior in the face of power, a similar poem was a conversation with a psychologist on violence & our reactions to it, & her poem from Poetry, “The Master’s House,” was another on the theme of power & violence.

Sherwin Bitsui had read at the NYS Writers Institute back in February 2016, where I was first introduced to his work.  He writes long poems, steeped in his native culture (he is Diné of the Tódi’chii’nii clan & is born for the Tlizillani’ clan). He began with an introduction in his native language, then a long, descriptive section from Flood Song (Copper Canyon). Then he read from a new work, Dissolve, coming out in October, another long piece, richly descriptive, with vivid, sometimes surreal images, including the marvelous phrase “to window the past … to door the future.” The poems were deeply connected to his family, his ancestors & the land upon which they live(d).

Elizabeth Avecedo, from NYC, had been the coach of the Split This Rock DC Youth Slam team in the past, & a National Slam Champion. As a result she was the most performative of the night’s readers. Her pieces were fiercely political, often drawing inspiration from pop culture, such as the poem titled “Self-Portrait of Eve as Cardi B.” or “One-Sided Conversation with Sosa” (as in the major league right fielder Sammy Sosa). Other social-justice themed poems were “Rat Ode,” “Iron” (on the bullet in a shooting), & a poem about teaching creative writing at a detention center. She is also the author of a young adult novel in verse The Poet X (Harper Collins, 2018) from which she read excerpts.

Kwame Dawes was the senior member of tonight’s reading, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, editor at Prairie Schooner, author of over 30 books. He read in his marvelous deep, accented voice, a series of poems with similar titles, “Sometimes…” as in “Sometimes Prophesy,” “Sometimes a Poem,” (the one exception being “Crossroads” which was a response to August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Fences).  He continued with “Sometimes Death,” “Sometimes Reparations” (violence), “What God Says Sometimes Mercy” in the wife’s voice), “Sometimes Revelation” (a lynching), & for his wife “Sometimes Love.”

While these readings are part of the Festival, they are also free & open to the public -- what a great gift of poetry to the DC community from Split This Rock.