Split This Rock, Part 8 — Saturday: Evening Reading, April 21

This was the final reading in this, again, fabulous festival of Poems of Provocation & Witness. Tonight’s hosts were Sarah Browning, who is stepping down as the Executive Director of Split This Rock, & Joseph Green, Director of Youth Programs, with Sarah doing a string of “thanks” & then paying tribute to the late Sam Hamill by playing a recording of him reading one of his poems (it was supposed to be “True Peace” but unexpectedly not, although that poem was read early in the festival at the tribute to the gone poets gathering).

The DC Youth Poet was Aniyah Smith who did a moving tribute to her Cuban grandmother, with some lines sung in Spanish, yet another stunning poem by a young poet in the DC Youth poetry program.

Keno Evol was the 2017 winner of the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest, & he read his winning poem “on meeting a brother for the first time” on police violence & shootings in Chicago.

The first of the 3 featured readers was Paul Tran, resplendent in a white gown, who began with a family memoir “Elegy with My Mother’s Lipstick,” then read from a new series titled “Chrome,” which Paul introduced by saying “these poems are trash but thank you for being here,” poems about his Viet Namese family, a father who had molested them, trying to find a language for what we can’t describe. A poem about being at the Viet Nam memorial, “Facing My Reflection…” was inspired by a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa. Paul also read again the poem printed in Poetry, “Scientific Method,” & ended with a poem using the myths of Eve & Philomena “Against Redemption.”

Not only did Ilya Kaminsky have handouts of the 2 poems he read but they were projected on a screen behind him which I preferred to read from so I could watch the poet at the same time. He explained that it was because of his heavy Russian accent. The first poem was “We Lived Happily During the War” the shorter of the two. Then on to “Music Humana” an elegy for the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, described as:

"A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in case they were found by Furies with a search warrant."

It is a long poem, the equivalent of 8 printed book pages, rich in images from history, Russian poets & politics, read in a singing/chant adding even more magic to the words.

To top off 10 years of Split This Rock, in a neat bit of symmetry, the last reader was Sister Sonia Sanchez, who had kicked off the 1st Split This Rock reading standing on a table at Bus Boys & Poets. She is a mesmerizing performer, not just of her poems but of her stories, fables, not a preacher, but an Elder sharing the wisdom of her lived-life, as she said as she began, “I put everything in our youth…” because they continue what we & others have done. Jazz infuses her work, as in the blues sermon “Belly, Buttocks, & Straight Spines” for the work of a New York City artist, & the scat singing of her “10 Haiku for Max Roach” (she takes Haiku to a new, urban level full of the history of Black America & nary a frog to be found). Then read from “Sister’s Voice,” a long poem in rime royale (of all possible forms) to tell the story of her family in the musical voice of ancestors, her brother’s voice, that of her father, her mother, filling in the narrative with summaries between sections of the poem.

D. Vera, R. Cabico, S. Scheid, S. Browning, J Green

But it was not quite over. At almost the moment I first arrived at this year’s Split This Rock I was accosted by Susan Scheid & was asked to write a short love letter to Sarah to present to her with others tonight. Sarah was surprised by not only some folks on the stage honoring her role in creating Split This Rock with Melissa Tuckey but others like myself leaping on stage from the audience to thank her. My poem was

Sarah, Sarah
you brought us
all together —
like words forever linked
in the silken weave
of poems.

After all this, all these days, there was a late-night 10th Anniversary Party, with DJ Mane Squeeze, & a cash bar, & I was still meeting new people I haven’t met before. But this old poet was so full of these 3 days I needed to get back to the streets of DC, let the memory of the words & spirit & images soak in.

It will be a long 2 years until the next Split This Rock!