By Sarah
Katz
During the dark years of the Iraq war, when the Bush Administration was in command, a cadre of 40 members of the D.C. Poets Against War movement began dreaming of a home for progressive poets.
That
dream was realized as the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of
Provocation & Witness, in March 2008. The response to the event was
“astonishing,” said Sarah Browning, former co-director and current executive
director of the festival. “We went to AWP [the Association of Writers &
Writing Programs Conference] in 2007, and put an ad in the [conference program for a reception],
and people mobbed us—people hungry for a home, for a meeting place, for a forum....
Somebody said to me, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.’”
I met
with Browning at the shiny, new, but still small office shared with the
Institute for Policy Studies on Connecticut Avenue, where I could see for
myself how Split This Rock—whose name is pulled from a line in “Big Buddy," a
poem by Langston Hughes—continues to grow in size. Although the political
climate has changed since 2008, the vision of Split This Rock remains the same.
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| Executive Director Sarah Browning Photo by Sarah Katz |
“Our
poetry can help draw the connections that are there and make them explicit,”
said Browning. “So we did have poets [in 2008] who were working in prisons,
talking about what wasn’t even then called the 'prison industrial complex,' but
is now, and of course about race, gender, the environment, as well as war and
peace, economic justice, and disability.”
“Poetry
is even more necessary these days,” Browning added. “Especially in light of the
hatred and fear mongering that’s going on, it can teach us about each other. It
can give politics a human face—something Martin Espada says. Most crucially, it
can imagine alternatives. So when we’re being told that we have to spend 59% of
our budget on 'defense' in order to be safe, poetry can help us imagine a world
that is radically different.”
Browning
reminded me that political poetry was once considered “unserious work” by what
she called the “literary establishment,” even after the civil rights movement. When
Browning attended college in the 1980s, she felt pressure from a creative
writing professor to uphold the status quo in poetry.
“He told
me ‘poets must love language above all else,’ as if somehow one area of my life
and concern could not be engaged by imaginative language. It’s an absurd
notion; anywhere else in the world poets have been a part of public life,
reading their poems at state events, running for office, being journalists,
writing columns. These have not been seen as separate spheres—it’s just that
poetry is where the most imaginative language can take place.”
She
added: “I always say a bad poem doesn’t make social change, it just shuts
people down, just like a boring speech does or the same chant for forty years.”
Split
This Rock, fortunately, has played a huge role in turning this notion on its
head. Now, for the third time, Poetry magazine is featuring Split This Rock poets in
their special issues. The first one was the March 2014 issue; the eco-justice issue was released in January; and this
April, Poetry will feature the
festival and its poets.
“So the
literary world is changing,” Browning said, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t
sill spaces that are still elitist and white and we’ve seen a lot of sexism
made public; it was always there, but it’s finally being made public and
exposed. So we know there’s still a lot of work to do. But that has been an
enormous change.”
Learn
more about Split This Rock on their website, and review their festival events.
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