Poetry Deadlines for Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Read, Write, Resist! In Washington, D.C. in March 2008, the Split This Rock Poetry Festival will celebrate our great tradition of poetry of witness and resistance. The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, walking tours, and activism—a unique opportunity to hone our activist skills while we assess and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in this time of crisis. As citizens and artists, our obligation has never been greater. We call on poets of conscience to move to the center of public life as we forge a visionary new arts movement for peace and justice.

There are 3 upcoming deadlines related to the festival: 1) A poetry contest with significant cash prizes 2) A call for panel proposals 3) A call for film and video submissions.

Please go to http://www.splitthisrock.org/ for more information and to REGISTER for the festival. It's going to rock!

Book Release Party Rocks the House

How strange is it to read poems about your family in front of your family? Well, no one ran screaming out of the room so I guess it all worked out. My mother actually said she liked them! Wow, go figure! Many friends and family from far and wide came to celebrate my first book and our new house in Front Royal. Publisher Scott Douglass from Main Street Rag came with the copies and enjoyed a Guinness on our front porch. He did a beautiful job with the printing. Check out his website and other books at www.mainstreetrag.com.

My brother-in-law Pat Padua provided the photos for the covers. Check out his flicker site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ppad/

A great little bluegrass trio came to play in our living room and our street--Blue Ridge Avenue--rocked out to the sounds of guitar and mandolin that drifted from our windows. To book these guys, check out this Shenandoah Music page: http://www.shenandoahmusic.com/houseconcerts.htm

My next reading will be at Busboys and Poets on Sunday, December 16 at 4 PM at 2021 14th Street, NW as part of the Sunday Kind of Love Series. Come on out and see me and fellow Poet Against the War Mike Maggio!

Book Release Party and Reading for The Lost Tribe of Us

Main Street Rag Publishing Company will host a book release party and reading on Saturday, October 13 in Front Royal, Virginia for The Lost Tribe of Us, which won the 2007 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. The Lost Tribe of Us is the first book by poet Heather Davis. Of her work, Stephen Dobyns says, “Heather Davis has a fine lyric voice that rests upon an incredible sense of syntax, pacing and rhythm. The result is a seamlessness that any other poet might envy. Her poems have a clarity, intelligence and deep emotional centers that make them a pleasure to read and re-read.” Heather has work forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and has been published by Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Slipstream, Word Wrights, and others. The event begins at 4:00 pm in Front Royal. For more information or for directions, please email hdavis@jsi.com or call 703-593-0241. Read excerpts from the book here: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/H_Davis.html.

My Book of Poems Now Available!

My first book of poems, The Lost Tribe of Us, is available for pre-ordering from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Go to http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/ComingSoon.php to read more about it. If you order online now, you can get the book for $8.00.

The book is scheduled for release on October 22. Details about the release party will be posted here soon!

Here are some comments about the book and a few samples:

"Heather's poems skewer the soft white underbelly of America's walking dead. She protects her own, but rips the skin off their enemies and turns it inside out--and all this in words that are not cliches. Think of how impossible that feat is in these replicating times. "

--Ron Kolm, author of the Plastic Factory

"In The Lost Tribe of Us, Heather Davis offers her readers vivid, occasionally comic, more often gut-wrenching poems that, in the first part of the book, engage with the lives of members of a large family-all the vulnerabilities and pathos of poverty: repossessed cars, joblessness, leaky roofs, too small houses, second-hand clothing and teen-age pregnancy. Later, the scope of the poems widens to include aspects of the world at large: war, terrorism, rape, imprisonment, incest, mental illness, much of what troubled flesh is heir to. But to say simply that the poems are about big subjects that really matter is not to do them justice. They are invariably characterized by exquisite formal control, the always lovely deployment of language that is a delight to the eye and ear. The Lost Tribe of Us is a wonderful first book by an exceptionally gifted poet."

--Eric Trethewey

A few poems from the book:

Architecture

Mother, on the news of your pregnancy,
I thought of one thing:
how the pleasure my lover and I build barehanded
is nothing compared to your architecture,
the house of your body renovated,
full again after seven children;
and I remembered how, before I left home,
every detail of the place looked back at me,
foreign as an ocean floor,
the shadows of pines delicate as coral
against white clapboard,
the foundation settled like a sunken ship,
steeped in unnatural, seeping light.
I wondered how long old timbers can stand
secure in their sockets of earth.


Family Members

are like phantom arms or legs.
They fool you into thinking
your body is bigger than your body.
They are the ghosts you carry, so real
you could use your sister's arm
to lift a bowl of cherries,
your brother's leg to bound up stairs.
Even your organs throb in duplicate
and your voice unrolls in tones
you know as yours, but not yours.
For better or worse, these parts are
the mother and father who get cut off,
but do not leave you, the siblings
you must leave behind, but who
refuse to stay put, all of us attached
for longer than we realize,
and at the most embarrassing places.


Showing Scars

Stand at the jukebox, contraposto,
shoving warm coins into a slot.
Some man will wobble close,
stomach protruding smooth as an egg
from his untucked workshirt.
In a hazy room lined with breasts
and yeasty breath he will want
to tell you about his wife, his life,
the scar on his arm. Sit down
with a cough, thoughts scattered
like pool balls. His eyes will be
glazed and thick-lashed, beautiful
as a woodland animal's. Ten
years in the pen for assault
with a deadly weapon and
he would do it again. Where the bullet
entered his own flesh, where he
accidentally shot himself, will be
a hole, the mark of his misdirection.
Where his beer spills will spread
a dark stain. Touch a finger
to the hardened wound. His buddies
will turn toward your corner,
then sidle over from their stools
with nudges and laughter.
Lean in slowly, whisper oh, my God
while each in his turn shows off
a limb and what it's missing.

Great Reading Last Night

Last night I read some poems at the Arlington Arts Center with the other winners of the Moving Words Series. We were supposed to read inside the building in a room with huge stained glass windows, but the power was out for some reason. So we moved the reading outside and sat under the trees--it was much nicer that way!

Thanks to the Arlington Cultural Affairs Division for organizing the Moving Words program. It puts poems on every bus in northern VA all year round--we all need more poetry these days especially in the most mundane of settings!

Here is my poem that appears on the buses in northern VA through June:

Folk Art

Because the reeds have to be soaked first,
because she'll weave them
in and out for hours, because the tips of the fingers,
exposed to water and reed,
dry out, the skin's oils going into the basket,
what they call folk art, we call
heart's blood, eagle-eye, compass and clock.
In our house, because of this,
we can say our mother's knowledge of making
sits on the table, full of fruit.

My Book of Poems To Be Published!

My first book of poems, The Goodbye You Dream Of, has won the 2007 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. It will be published in October/November of this year. Look here in the future for more news about where it will be available.

Here is a link to Main Street Rag in Charlotte, North Carolina:

http://www.mainstreetrag.com/PoBkCont.html

Listen to a Poem

Click on the link below to hear me read my poem "The Good Science Experiment" about the strangeness of pregnancy and procreation.

http://www.arlingtonva.us/Departments/Topics/Documents/7614The_Good_Science_Experiment.mp3

This poem was a finalist in an Arlington READS competition about identity. Ten finalists, whose work was selected in a juried competition, read their work at a community poetry reading at the Shirlington library, on October 1, 2006.

Next Reading

Come see me read on Tuesday, April 24 at 7:30 PM:

Moving Words Poetry Reading : Winners of the 2007 Moving Words Poetry Competition for adults will read from their works at a poetry reading and reception at the Arlington Arts Center. Winners are Heather Davius, Bernadette Geyer, Jacqueline Jules, Miles David Moore, David Moss and Judith Turner-Yamamoto. Their poems will be displayed on Northern Virginia Metrobuses from April - September, 2007. Moving Words is sponsored by the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority, Metro and the Arlington Department of Environmental Services Commuter Assistance Program. 7:30 p.m. Free. Arlington Arts Center 703-228-1841 http://www.arlingtonarts.org/cultural_affairs/movingwords.htm

Poem About Spit Up

Brooch

Mothers, wear it proudly, that splotch of spit-up
on your collar, shaped like nothing in particular. Pretend
it’s the most finely crafted brooch, concocted by a wild
artist from New Orleans who works in a dank swamp
beside her dogs and dark lover. All snakey hair
and languid eyes, she is outrageously beautiful, chock
full of voodoo. Did she call to you, voice like a river, then
point with her tick-tock hands till you had to have every
otherworldly piece of hers, no matter what the cost? She’s
terribly dangerous and every day you thank her.

--Heather Davis