Poets’ Peace Breakfast: Invocations

 

The 2019 Asian American Literature Festival—a partnership between the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Poetry Foundation, and the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center, with help from Eaton Workshop DC and Kundiman—is a community-generated cooperative space for sharing and growing Asian American literature. The festival imagines literature as a space of exchange and therefore opens with food and poems as invocations of peace, which is not the absence or opposite of war, but the unending work of understanding one another’s well-being as our own.

The Poetry Foundation recently displayed prints by Daniela del Mar in the exhibition The Lushness of Print: Samiya Bashir & Letra Chueca Press. A large piece depicting wheat and roses read, “queremos rosas igual que pan.” This phrase originated from a speech by Helen M. Todd: “bread for all, and roses too.” She said:

Woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.
—From Getting Out the Vote

Todd’s phrase became a slogan for women’s suffrage, and also inspired James Oppenheim’s poem “Bread and Roses”:

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

Founding editor of this magazine, Harriet Monroe, was a contemporary of Todd’s in Chicago; she stridently fought for both bread and roses, and created a home for poets that nourishes their work and pays them in full. A rose may be a rose, but dough is dough and we need them both.

We open the 2019 Asian American Literature Festival with the Poets’ Peace Breakfast in Franklin Square Park, long the site of encampments for Washington, DC-area houseless folks, to welcome festival attendees and DC residents—those with and without houses—alike. We are proudly working with local DC community organizations to honor this place where we are guests, and those people who call it home.