As “hoodie” photos flood the internet from known and unknown individuals around the country, it’s no surprise that the attorneys for George Zimmerman have done what defense attorneys do — “muddy the waters” of the story of their 28 year old Hispanic/White client who, on February 26, 2012, shot an unarmed 17 year old African American teen named Treyvon Martin in the “duty” of his “neighborhood watch” patrol in the already racially charged Sanford, Florida. The media is in that lockstep as well. George Zimmerman is just one face in the crowd with a little Photoshop curving to punch up or down the color. Two weeks ago his single image was up for interpretation. Was he white? Was this a police photo? The only constant was that he shot Treyvon Martin. Only two people know the complete story. His word against a dead teen. Treyvon Martin has taken 3 faces leading into the classic single story line — the evolution of the menacing Black man. Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law that protects persons from prosecution who think you may be a threat after shooting and/or killing you in self-defense is just words on paper. Nothing visually compelling to share on FB; too long to tweet. Does this look suspicious? I’m just sayin’.
Zimmerman/Martin approx. 1 – 2 weeks ago
Zimmerman/Martin approx. 1 week ago (at the beginning of symbolic “hoodie” demonstrations protesting no arrests in the shooting death of Treyvon Martin)
Today – Huffington Post (a Twitter pic of Treyvon as the George Zimmerman side-of-the-story spin picks up steam)
It’s been awhile since the last Eclectique Interview. This will be the second interview with a poet. That’s Sarah Browning, director of D.C. Poets Against the War and Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Sarah is also author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007), and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2004). She’s an active community organizer and poet (often at the same time). The Split This Rock Poetry Festival is coming up March 22-25, 2012. For 4 days the festival engages poetry as activism in community building, justice and social change. Yes, Virginia, and Maryland and all the states that surround the monumental colony we call, Washington, D.C. – the city is a poetry capital.
SPLIT THIS ROCK POETRY FESTIVAL: POEMS OF PROVOCATION & WITNESS WHAT: Four days of readings, workshops, panels, open mics, youth programs, and activism, bringing poetry into public life and exploring the role of poetry in social change.
WHEN: March 22-25, 2012
WHERE: Washington, DC – Multiple venues in the U Street Corridor and Columbia Heights. Visit the website at www.SplitThisRock.org for details.
E916: What inspired Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
SB: Split This Rock emerged from DC Poets Against the War, part of a national movement founded in response to President Bush’s drive to war with Iraq in 2003. Our local group united poets working in a variety of styles – across differences of race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual orientation – to speak out for alternatives to war and for a radical reorganization of our nation’s priorities.
As I discovered when I moved here, DC poets had always written with this clear-eyed. But they did not always have a platform from which to speak these truths. There were few institutions supporting and promoting this kind of poetry, poetry that bears witness to the injustices of the world and, through compelling and powerful language, provokes change.
We designed the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq in March, 2008, and put out the call nationwide for poets and activists and dreamers to join us.
The response was so phenomenal. Hundreds of people from our city, our region, and throughout the country found the festival so necessary, that we went to work building a permanent home for socially engaged poets. In addition to presenting a biennial national festival (which is equal parts festival, conference, and political action), Split This Rock now also presents readings, workshops, and discussion series year-round, publishes poetry of provocation and witness in electronic forums, sponsors an extensive program for youth, including the DC Youth Slam Team, and spearheads campaigns to integrate poetry into public life.
E916: How did poetry become so popular in Washington, DC? What makes DC a poetry or a poetic city?
SB: DC has a long and rich poetic tradition, to which we are all the lucky heirs. Walt Whitman spent the Civil War years in the city and the Harlem Renaissance poetry movement was launched here by Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, and others. DC was home to influential Black Arts Movement poets Larry Neal, Gaston Neal, and Amos Zu-Bolton, among many others. Essex Hemphill was the best known Black gay poet of that gorgeous generation tragically lost to AIDS, those who came of age in the 1980s.
It’s no coincidence that most of these poets are African American, of course. Our city’s Black writers and artists have always nurtured and supported one another, developing a strong cultural voice that has been critical to the survival of the District’s Black community.
Today is no different. Older poets mentor younger ones, communities of poetry form and dissolve and re-form. DC becomes a living center for oral poetry – the oldest of poetic forms – newly named “Spoken Word.”
The District of course is also home to the federal government, an institution endlessly dissected and analyzed by the press and the popular imagination. Those of us who live here, in contrast, are often forgotten. We claim our place in the world, therefore, with poetry. Here is our story, our poems declare. Pay attention.
E916: When did you become a poet?
SB: I come from a family of poets and English professors, so it took awhile for me to accept that I had no alternative but to be a poet. I was busy differentiating myself by becoming a community organizer. But I discovered that I couldn’t do one without the other. I needed a creative life, a language with which to explore the complexities of the world, my relationship to the society in which I found myself, all the ways that history shapes us and frees us. I was almost 30 before I began calling myself a poet and found a way to put poetry at the center of my life.
With first DC Poets Against the War and now Split This Rock, I have found a way to unite these two commitments, to be a poet and an activist, to be undivided.
E916: Who are you looking forward to seeing at the festival? Give us a few highlights. Who’s coming to the event?
SB: Split This Rock 2012 features a spectacular line-up of poets! DC favorites Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Kim Roberts, Venus Thrash, and Naomi Shihab Nye will be joined by poets new to most of us: Homero Aridjis, a leader of Mexico’s environmental movement; Sherwin Bitsui, a Navajo poet devoted to keeping Navajo language alive among the next generation; spoken word superstars Carlos Andrés Gómez and Rachel McKibbens; Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan who lived in exile in the United States for decades and now divides his time between his home country and the country that gave him asylum for so many years; Douglas Kearney, who’s both a hip hop head and an opera librettist; and more.
We’re also paying tribute to the life and work of poet-activist-essayist-teacher June Jordan during the festival, as 2012 will mark the 10th anniversary of her death. Several sessions will reflect on Jordan’s legacy, focusing on her writings on environmental justice, sexual violence, and creative resistance.
E916: How do we appreciate poem? Does a poem make its best impression when read on the page or read aloud?
SB: When we attend a live reading, we hope that several of our senses will be excited: the language will delight our ear (even if the topic is a difficult one); the music of the poem will tickle our rhythmic sense; and the eye will receive gifts from the poet himself. We also have the pleasure of a live, communal experience, the kind whose magic we know from musical and theatrical performances. We are both alone and in a crowd as we listen and watch.
When reading poetry on the page, on the other hand, we have the pleasure of solitary communion with the poem. We can take all the time we want with it, reread it, read it aloud, yell at it. The eye is the most essential organ to this experience: The poem’s form should inform its meaning. Every mark on the page asks a question, suggests a possible reading. Which is why poets are so meticulous, can struggle for years with a single poem. The possibilities are endless; English in particular has a huge vocabulary compared to many other languages. And so the poet seeks and keeps seeking the language, the form, to carry her vision into the world.
This year’s festival’s tag line is “Poetry by and for the 99%.” When and where does poetry occupy public space?
Poetry is everywhere! Poets have been occupying and occupiers have been writing poetry. A new anthology, Liberty’s Vigil: 99 Poets Among the 99%, has just been published by Michael Czarnecki’s FootHills Publishing. Split This Rock poets have led open mics and given workshops and slept out and marched alongside and been beaten alongside as well. We carry lines of poetry through the streets during demonstrations, we hand out poems, we recite poems into mics.
Yesterday, the cashier at the grocery store was moved to tears when I told him of reading poems in front of his country’s embassy, drawing attention to its repression of poets and activists. I cannot help him go home. I cannot help his family join him here. But on a busy day at Trader Joe’s, we will shake hands, and our tears will tell of the power of words, the essential place of poetry in making a better world.
Douglass Dilman is “The Man” and the first Black President in the 1972 drama based on the novel by Irving Wallace and staring James Earl Jones. The film is back in limited distribution through independent collaborative efforts and coming to National Geographic (Grosvenor Auditorium – 1600 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036) Tuesday, February 7 to kick off Nat Geo’s “Tuesdays at Noon” Black History Month events.
In “The Man,” Senator Douglass Dilman (James Earl Jones) through the law of succession suddenly becomes the first black man to occupy the Oval Office. “The Man” remains unique in that the film presents the black president as the central dramatic character confronting the political and social weights of his position. Sound familiar? In addition to Jones, the film features actors from television and film’s “Golden Age”: Burgess Meredith, Jack Benny (in a cameo), Janet MacLachlan as Dilman’s activist daughter, George Stanford Brown, Martin Balsam, Barbara Rush, and William Windom. The screenplay for “The Man” was written by Rod Serling (“The Twilight Zone,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight”) and directed by Joseph Sargent (“Something the Lord Made,” “A Lesson Before Dying”).
Eclectique916 continues to campaign for “The Man,” a film that is less than 50 years old and yet practically obscure. According to the documentary film “These Amazing Shadows” about the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, 50% of films produced are lost. This spans from the silent film era at the top of the 20th century to the present. Feature films produced in the last 50 years are also vanishing. “The Man” is considered one of them. To date, only three 16 mm copies of “The Man” have been identified/found. It is highly likely the original film is 35 mm. To date, the location of that 35 mm reel is a mystery.
The book was taken out of print then re-released in 1999, the year after President Bill Clinton’s “impeachment” by the House of Representatives prompted by the “Monica Lewinsky scandal.” The Senate acquitted President Clinton. In the book, but not so much in the film, Dilman also faces impeachment.
James Earl Jones wrote the introduction to the 1999 version of “The Man.”
His [Dilman] intention is to be president of all the people. He has no axes to grind, even racial axes. He simply cares for the national good.
James Earl Jones
The book went back out of print but recently re-emerged as a Kindle edition. The film is not available on DVD, Blueray or streamed. Thanks to the efforts of persons like Clayton LeBouef (“Something the Lord Made,” “Homicide: Life On the Street,” “The Wire”), who will talk about preservation of films like “The Man” February 7, the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation and this blog, “The Man” is back. It’s the beginning of a project to bring attention to significant films (many recent) that deserve extended distribution. If not for an informed and conscious audience, these films will be lost forever.
Vote for “The Man.” See “The Man” for yourself February 7 at National Geographic “Tuesdays at Noon.” Additional screenings (including outside DC) are TBA.
Sometimes I have to remind myself of the power of thinking different for the common good, and some of us designed our lives around it.
Steve Jobs
1955 – 2011
“Think Different” was one of my favorite Apple campaigns. I didn’t follow Steve Jobs as a personality like some people follow George Clooney. Or maybe I followed Jobs the way Clooney fans follow his latest arm candy; in Job’s case, it was the latest Apple gadget. I’m typing this on my iMac now. Jobs’s set the bar not for computers but for his product. Apple became it’s own opponent, and a worthy one at that. I’ve had discussions about artists who reach a point where the only person they have to top is him/herself. There’s no looking in the rearview mirror anymore. It can be scary place when it comes to product, but Jobs made that theory work. And the world was never the same.
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth
1922 – 2011
Some people are determined to live to see specific outcomes. In 2008 I remember overhearing elders say they were holding on to vote in an historic election. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth took the beatings, the bombings, and the blows until the perpetrator, legal segregation, finally fell to its knees. One thing they don’t teach about the civil rights movement is how subversive people like Shuttleworth were in the eyes of both white and black people of the times. Why stir the pot? But these were different kind of “Mad Men.” And the saga continues.
Wangari Maathai
1940 – 2011
Yes, I did hear a tree fall in the forest when news came that Wangari Maathai had died from cancer. Who would’ve thought planting trees was subversive, protest, liberating. Wangari Maathai thought different. We’ll all breath better for it.
Derrick Bell
1930 – 2011
Years ago I read Derrick Bell’s Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth. Something was definitely on this legal mind at the time.
If our goal is greater than ourselves, our own comfort or gain, and we continue to strive for it, then as feminist leaders proclaimed, failure becomes impossible. Even the end of an individual life is no proof of failure, if others share your goals and continue to work toward them.
The budget has been so distracting to me, that it’s difficult to concentrate on President Obama having another Lee Iacocca moment this time inside the Intel campus in Oregon. This is not a resurrection story for Intel but a message for the future of American jobs. The path, as this administration sees it, is “innovation” through advanced education. Once upon a time a high school diploma could get you on an assembly line in Detroit, a decent wage, pension. What are the business models for the future? It seemed when everyone and anyone was going to college, tuition skyrocketed. Admission criteria got more competitive. Many college graduates are looking at mounting student loans.
Nevertheless, the Washington Post reported today that those most adversely affected by the economic downturn, African Americans and Hispanic Americans, feel hopeful based on a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll. White Americans were found to be less optimistic. News media likes a race story, and I try not to indulge them much, but the article is worth the read. Check it out here. The economy poll is in someways a snapshot of what’s coming down the road in 2012. E-bert and I had a talk about this earlier today. You can read the poll results here. I try not to indulge polls either, but the findings confirm some observations outside the bubble.