East Baltimore Muse

That Summer in New Hampshire

2012-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

That Summer in New Hampshire

Water Song Part II

When my ship comes in is a phrase we all know, or a certain generation knows, and it's about the thing hoped for but not quite seen. The poet's success is some ship out in the bay for many of us, and maybe it's when we realize it's better for the ship to stay out on the water that we come to understand the real prize of this thing called being a poet.

I left Baltimore and drove up to Indian Pond, New Hampshire, without a clue as to how long it would take. I had been on the road for eight hours and realized it would be a few more before I got to the turn I was supposed to take to get to Catrina's house. There was supposedly a mailbox there at the road just past the junction where New Hampshire met Vermont, but it was dark. There were no lights on the road, just the road itself and the way it revealed it's curves and dips to my Datsun 510.

Recently, I had to explain to my students just what a Datsun was. "It was what Nissan was before it became Nissan," I told them. "Oh really," they said, "Professor Weaver, you are old."

But there I was in the dark with my five speed hatchback. I had most of what I owned in and on it, including my Schwinn High Sierra bicycle. My buddy Duck, a man I worked with in the warehouse for years had explained to me that a bike was the emblem of freedom, that and staying out of debt. Before I left the warehouse he gave me the precepts of a black man's wisdom. "Keep your bike, Mike. Pay your bills, and guard your affections. You know how easy you are to fall in love."

That last precept took a few years to sink in, and when I finally saw that mailbox I took the turn onto the dirt road leading up a steep hill. There were no lights anywhere, but I could make out the grove of trees Catrina had drawn on the map she mailed to me with a letter explaining my station as her artist helper for the summer. I went just past the grove and took a right turn, and it wase the right turn. When I eased onto her grass just outside the kitchen door near her well, she threw open the door and stood there as vampish as she could for all of her maturity. She was eighty-three years old, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who had known the entire Calder family of American sculptors as well as Madam Soon Qing Ling, one of the last female aristocrats of Old China.

"You look like a man without a home," she said, standing there smiling. Her hair was neat. She looked as if she had been prepping for my arrival all day. I was glad to turn off my engine and leave the car. She had some snack prepared for me in the kitchen, which was the heart of the house when it was built before the American revolution. The furniture was all Shaker. When daybreak came the next day, I saw the militia certificate on the wall for the man who built the house. It certified that he fought the British.

There was a big field of wild blueberries in front of the house, and now and then a deer would poke across, taking its time to feel each blade of grass on its hooves. There was indeed a pond nearby where the locals and vacationers came to swim and sunbathe. When my son came to visit me, we went slipping out into the water like two bears, the only black people on the beach. I took him mountain climbing on the smaller mountains nearby. We made it halfway up one of them. Beneath us we could see the plastic tubes connecting the trees and sending maple syrup down to the store by the road.

It was an idyllic summer, one that gave me a place to rest after being in Europe for two months and before going into Brown that fall. It was my year of fellowships. I had won my NEA earlier that year, and when Brown accepted me they gave me a full university fellowship. I was riding high. I had copies of my book Water Song in a box in my room upstairs where I listened to French radio from Montreal.

Catrina invited Jay and Lois Wright to come visit and I said I would cook and make tea. True to my Baltimorean form I made fried chicken wings and served a generic tea from the store. Catrina looked on in amusement. I did my best, and I was absolutely stunned by Jay's presence. Charles Rowell had described him as the most learned of all American poets of any race, and I do believe he was right. He made such an impression on me that I have always striven to "know" as well as to "write." Jay and Lois were kind enough not to speak disparagingly about my fried chicken wings.

Catrina picked her times to give me instruction and comeuppance. I was at the kitchen table putting together a scrap book of photos and favorite things from my trip to Europe as she stood by in one of her humorless moods. After a few seconds she could not contain herself.

"When you have been to Europe as many times as I have you won't need a scrapbook! I went to Europe on a steamer after I finished my degree at Radcliffe. There were no transatlantic flights. As for tea, had you read your Victorian fiction you would know the proper time for tea."

Well, that did not help my general lack of interest in Victorian fiction. I made myself read Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, but Trollope was no match for Melville. I chewed whole chunks of Moby Dick and loved teaching Billy Budd years later at Rutgers, but in this summer in the mountains of New Hampshire Catrina had near bout killed my desire to read fiction by the later 19th c. British scribblers. They can all thank her. Her spirit persists, despite the fact that it has flown. She and her sister Betty lived past 100 years of age and carried whole histories with them. Their father was the first accounting professor at Harvard, a man who thought DuBois was a rabble rouser.

The summer was about class distinctions and the mountains of things I had to learn as well as about the White Mountains that people the area like resolute saints. I can see my son sitting with me now near the top of that smaller mountain, looking down and around at creation. Time was suspended for us. Troubles and doubts were at bay. I had managed to tear off a chunk of freedom from life in a place where the night sky seemed nearly white with stars and I could see the infrequent traffic lights of cars peeking around the highways of distant mountains at night while animals I could not see made music I did not know in trees waiting for me to name them. I call them memories. I call them the gateways to the next phase of life, the sentinels that watched me as I slept those nights in New Hampshire.

As for falling in love, I was in love with a woman whom I would later marry, Ms Aissatou, but that summer I fell headlong into a loving friendship with Catrina, a woman fifty years my senior who loved sipping her brandy while watching Tom Brokaw and picking at me as I cut the lawn or trimmed the lilacs in front of the door. I think of Catrina and the lilacs in this line from Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" as what is love if it is not sometimes careless and inexplicable?

"You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart, )

Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me."

It was what Charles Rowell thought I needed, that summer with Catrina, who knew so much about me the minute she saw me. About that much, he was certainly right, right about the right turn from the mailbox onto that steep hill leading up to parts of me that I had yet to "know" and to "write."

2011-12-07T08:39:00.001-08:00

Water Song

It was heartbreaking. I had hoped to win the Walt Whitman Award in 1983, but my manuscript, something entitled "City Folk," had only been selected as one of forty finalists out of a field of twelve hundred manuscripts. I have only rarely submitted manuscripts to contests and have not done even that in many years, but at this point in my life I can say that was not a bad showing. I was still in factory, working as a janitor in the warehouse at Baltimore's Procter & Gamble plant, and I wanted to escape. I had a plan, but the best laid plans are only plans. The imponderable civic of human activity and the intelligence that governs it have other plans.

In 1975 I wrote the first version of what became "City Folk," and that became "Water Song" in 1985, a sojourn of ten years between first draft of a manuscript and a published book. In 1975, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" was a box office favorite, and ten years later it was "The Last Dragon," and arguably postmodern look at identity and hybridity around the theme of the interface between African American and Asian cultures. If the warehouse was my own cuckoo's nest, I "sure nough" wanted to fly, and I was more the "Leroy" character, utterly naive but hopeful, than the power wielding "Sho Nuff" Shogun in "The Last Dragon." Those were ten years of trying to know myself and the world through my writing while stacking boxes, loading trucks, cleaning bathrooms, and scrubbing floors.

"City Folk" was written on a portable electric typewriter I bought while living in a garden apartment in East Baltimore. In 1980 my wife and I moved to a house near the old stadium in Baltimore where the Colts and Orioles played. I could hear the crowds cheering, and I could feel the stomach ache of a lull when things weren't going so well. It was a two story house where I used the third bedroom as my study. A few months after my rejection/congratulations letter from the Academy of American Poets, I received a phone call from Charles H. Rowell, editor of Callaloo magazine and the Callaloo series of books of poetry by such notables as Jay Wright.

It was 1984, a Sunday morning in spring, my reflection time. The phone rang, and Charles announced himself. Before long he asked if I had a manuscript. My breathing stopped. My heart skipped a few beats. This was a moment I had been waiting for, a chance to publish. I was so excited, and I immediately said that I had two manuscripts, as I tended then, as I do now, to write in at least two streams when I am actively writing. I had other irons in the works. I had enrolled in a non-resident university program in New York to finish my bachelor's degree. I had been applying for a NEA fellowship in poetry. I was preparing to apply to the writing program at Brown. But this seemed golden. I was so excited. Then another shoe dropped.

"How tall are you?" Charles asked.

I was caught and suddenly fearful where I had been so excited, but I gave my height. It seemed so awkward, and Charles replied, "Oh, and so sensitive."

Charles is an exceptionally intelligent man, well read and, quietly enough, perhaps one of the more

knowledgable persons in the field of African American literature. He is also well versed in the dynamics of how people move in the literary world. At the time I knew nothing of such things, but my exit from the factory seemed more plausible now. I did not want to jeopardize this opportunity.

Fall approached and Charles began writing to me, letters I have since misplaced. He wanted me to come and spend a weekend with him in Charlottesville, so we could take rides in the mountains and talk about my poetry. Call it a misunderstanding, but I was only comfortable with a visit where I could get a hotel room nearby. Things fell apart and we did not communicate much until earlier the following year, after much had happened for me.

I had applied for the NEA again, and this time I won. It was January, 1985, and I was able to leave Procter & Gamble. I left friends behind, and I carried with me what I still have, a penchant for habits such as stopping by the 7 Eleven for a coffee in the evenings, or taking long walks away from my office at Simmons to remember some of what it was to spend a whole day on my feet. I left, and some of my black coworkers gave me a dinner at a posh restaurant on Falls Road. I left and moved out into the world half expecting people to know who I was, which was so naive. I had no sense of the competitiveness in American poetry, the way people guard their territories. My own sense of propriety would take years to cultivate. But there I was, out of factory life. I had applied to Brown before I left and that acceptance would come in April with a full university fellowship.

Water Song was in limbo. My personal life was in flux. I had left my second wife and was dating the lady who would become my third wife. I was a celeb in Baltimore, an ignorable fact in New York, but in B'more I was everywhere, and I did the best I could with handling the success. There are quite a few poet workers in America, but among black poets I was rare, and I was more rarer for having made my exit from blue collar life with an NEA. It was a singular accomplishment, more so than I understood at the time. Water Song would follow later in the year, but there were hurdles. Charles and I had another misunderstanding.

I called him from my fiancee's apartment and announced, somewhere in the conversation, that I was remarrying. Charles was less than happy to hear this news. In fact, he was furious. He thought that I was not taking my talent seriously. Charles assessed my gift as a poet to be distinctive. His wish for me was that I live a more monastic life, monastic except that I should make my romantic liaisons with men. He thought women would take my essential energy away from me.

"I don't know if I will be able to do your book! I might do a small book, but I don't know when that will happen." The call ended abruptly. We communicated infrequently by mail after that, and it was agreed that I would ask David Driskell for a cover image. Professor Driskell is one of the giants among African American painters, and I was thrilled. My fiancee and I went to his studio in College Park, Maryland, and Driskell told me to choose whatever I liked. I chose a beautiful painting of his depicting a minister with wings around him, and I choose woodcuts of nude figures for the two sections of the book. Water Song treats the southern roots of my family and black culture in the first section, and in the second section there are poems about the industrial north. It is thoroughly working class.

Other people tried to give me advice about how to navigate this new space in my life, and when I chose to take some of my NEA money for my first trip to Europe, some thought it unwise because I should have been attending to my book. But I wanted a touch of class, insecure as I was about having been a laborer for so long, insecure and afraid of people's judgments. I had done all I could do for my book, I thought, and I trusted Charles to look after the proofreading.

In late June I returned to the States after wandering in Europe, and the box containing the first copies of Water Song arrived, and it was full of surprises. The cover was not the one I chose, and the woodcuts were not inside because Charles said there would be no naked people in his books. Finally, there were typos and lines had been arbitrarily broken in a few poems. I felt like I had been throughly whooped, allowed a measure of success with my first book but only after being picked up like a puppy, prodded and smacked around the ears. In any event, there I was, with first book in hand.

Call it a shared southern sense of communication, or call it the persistence of my own false humility, but Charles took it upon himself to recommend that I go spend the summer with Mrs. Catrina White in Indian Pond, New Hampshire, because Jay Wright lived nearby and I could get a chance to get to know him. Charles explained that he thought Wright and I have something in common, a metaphysical centering, among other things. Mrs. White, an elderly woman, was in the habit of keeping an artist as a summer helper, and I became that artist helper, and I started to get to know Jay Wright. That summer changed the course of my writing and my life.

When I work with young poets nowadays, I do so only if asked. Once I decide to work with them, I try to be as judicious as possible. They are a vulnerable lot, the necessary keepers of our cultural consciousness, vulnerable as they may or may not be. When I sit in places where decisions are made, I remember all of what I have seen, the politics and betrayals as well as the unabashed displays of compassion, and I try to do the right thing.

I go forward trying to remember what things cost, as in James Baldwin's trope "The Price of the Ticket."

2011-06-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

Meet Me at the Old Chuckwagon

Milton Avenue

I was raised on westerns, and my first sight of real horses was when the "Arabbers" came through the alleys selling topsoil and fresh produce. They sang out street vendor songs and walked beside horses that were either ponies or slightly larger. Often they would be pintos or piebalds. Once in awhile I saw a palomino, but chestnut came to be my favorite color in horses, so when I watched the westerns I learned to distinguish the colors somewhat. With a black and white television in the early sixties, it was not so easy to see anything other than the limited chiaroscuro of our 19 inch RCA.

My uncle Ronnie was a self-made film expert, and he helped bolster my early accumulation of westerns watched, if I can take the time to name a category. My father's favorite was "Shane," and I have it on DVD in my collection. Every now and then I pull it from the shelf to try to figure why my father called it his favorite. I have my own reasons for liking the film. There is a simple beauty to it, something unpretentious compared to some others.

When I think of westerns and cowboys, I think of how black urban notions of masculinity in Baltimore might have been affected by what men and boys saw in these movies. I think first of the way we walked down the street. Learning to negotiate the urban landscape was a matter of knowing how to walk with confidence. Men who were up to no good had a predatory way of moving, and it was important for nerdier young men such as myself to know them and know how to respond, if necessary.

When I was working in Procter & Gamble's warehouse, we all walked like characters out of westerns, men and women alike. At least that's the way I remember the folks I worked with. We didn't carry guns in the warehouse, of course, but many of the men I worked with had revolvers, semi-automatics, and shotguns in their trucks and cars. However, inside the warehouse we had only buck knives, and we wore them on our belts, as if to be ready for an assault from a coworker.

We were white and black, and there was one truckdriver who came in regularly and described himself as a "hillbilly" with no fondness for white people. He was probably one of the toughest of all of us, but we all swore machismo and proved it on the parking lot by calling each other out to settle scores with fistfights. We walked to the lot like the characters in the films, steadying from one foot to other while keeping an eye on the target, another man, another human being with whom we had a beef.

The "cow" of cowboys came to me on my first horseback ride. I was riding a mare named Tilly that belonged to another uncle of mine. We were on a farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and unbeknownst to me my trusty steed was a Quarter horse. She was bred for "cutting" or separating individual cows from the herd. We headed down the field toward a barrel at a slow gallop, and when we got to the barrel I eased against her neck with the right rein to signal her for a left turn, and she "cut" so fast I nearly fell out of the saddle.

I continued to ride now and then over the years, getting beyond just watching the first horse handlers I saw, the "Arabbers" of Baltimore. But it's been years since I've been in the saddle, so long that I miss it now. It would probably be wise not to let nostalgia relieve me of a healthy awareness of bones that are forty plus years older than the ones that made it around that barrel with Tilly.

When things went wrong in East Baltimore between men, it was usually a matter of taking risks with one another for the sake of pride or out of some serious dysfunction, some craziness.

The Chuck Wagon was a restaurant that opened a side panel onto the sidewalk for sales in a way that mimicked the chuck wagons in TV and film westerns. One night in the summer of 1969 a friend and neighbor by the name of Oscar was shot to death in the street directly in front of the place. He was taunting another young black man who was not known as a trouble maker, and neither was my neighbor for that matter. He had been drinking. It was the improper alignment of the forces affecting the development of black men in the sixties, a decade when major American cities were war zones between blacks and whites. When Oscar reached into the other young man's car, he was met with a revolver and received a fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen.

It was the summer men landed on the moon. It was the summer of a race riot in York, Pennsylvania. It was the summer I went to the race track for the first time with another uncle and learned the basics of gambling, the merits of "win, place, or show." In the streets black men often lost without placing or showing.

When the Arabbers came through the alleys in the heat of summer, my mother would sometimes take cold water to them. They were always grateful and responded with a series of genuine "Yes mam's and thank you's." The horses stood there obediently, decorated as they usually were with some kind of headdress and then the bells in the harness that let you know they were coming. As a child I wanted to be able to sit on the wagon and pretend it was a stage coach and we were rumbling along somewhere in Arizona and New Mexico. Or I imagined I could take one of spotted ponies and avenge Native Americans.

I often rooted for the underdog without full recognition that I was one of them. After all, I had access to horses beyond the street vendors in the alleys and beyond the dangers of the streets because I had survived the turning of a barrel, and so falling down seemed like something I could avoid--if not all the time maybe in matters of life and death.

So I walk a little like a cowboy at times, or at least the way I think a cowboy walks, especially when I am climbing into my version of a truck, a SUV that is dwarfed alongside a Chevy Suburban the way a pony is dwarfed by a Clydesdale.

Black Urban Cowboys

2011-02-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

MARYLAND PENITENTIARY

"Central Booking"

East Baltimore

February 11, 2011

Central Booking is what the Maryland Penitentiary has come to be known, and it is the oldest prison in the western hemisphere still in daily operation. You can reach it by driving west on Madison Street from Johns Hopkins hospital, which sits in the middle of an old black neighborhood and up the street, so to speak, from Dunbar High School, named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African American poet who wrote the line "I know why the caged bird sings..." which inspired the title of Maya Angelou's incredible autobiography.

Jail, as we call Central Booking or any of the other "correctional" institutions in Baltimore, is full of black men, and in my sixtieth birthday year I am given to looking back over my life from this point to the black men I have known. I am not alone among black men from poor and working class urban backgrounds who can say they are survivors. In Baltimore beginning in the seventies the homicide rate began to rise to 200 or 300 a year, black men killed mostly by black men.

However, I am given now to looking back at my childhood and adolescence, the period from 1951 to 1971, a time that coincides with the national violence that marked integration, the end of the old world of segregation and the beginning of new patterns. The aftermath is what the journalist Eugene Robinson calls the "disintegration" of black America in his new book by the same title.

But when I look back at my own life in Baltimore I see that there was, in that traumatic shift, a troubling undoing of black models for masculinity. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1940's and continued into the 60's, black men in Baltimore worked and lived in the context of a world of working class jobs and a black community with institutions built out of the immense contradictions and dangers forged in the reality of racial oppression in the world's largest democracy. Assertion of black humanity by black men and women has always been a matter of questioning de jure legislation, and the sustenance of black culture has often been a matter of ignoring or going beyond laws designed to confine and contain black life through various strategies of dehumanization. Black entrepreneurs who could not secure loans from racist bankers had gentleman gangsters as a recourse.

In the 1960's the context of all this changed. Integration created a space where black men struggled to know how to be. It was a space of anxiety, fear, and tremendous courage exerted in the face of a complex of dangers. It was the time of a war in Southeast Asia that was unlike any other war, a war with racial dimensions that were new. Men moved from combat to be returned to urban environments in a matter of days with no treatment. The journalist Wallace Terry interviewed several of these men in his book "Bloods."

As teenagers in the sixties we had to forge our way as young men against the dangers that existed in our own neighborhoods as well as the racial dangers of white hostility that surrounded us. We lived in communities under siege in ways that make current tensions in other parts of the world entirely understandable. Growing up with helicopters circling over your house and the military occupying your neighborhood amounts to a "state of siege."

Violence took on newer and more menacing aspects. Neighborhood confrontations that were settled with the loss of a fistfight were now more often settled by gunplay and knife fights. The guns that were turned on police and soldiers during the riots fed into the battles black men had with each other.

At the same time this was happening the rug was pulled from under the black community with the loss of working class jobs. The jobs that allowed our parents to send their boys and girls to college gave way to service jobs like McDonald's in the seventies and eighties. At the same time drugs flooded Baltimore as international drug lords saw America's cities as an open market with both clients and workers. The stage was set for disaster.

Parallel to Madison Street running east and west there is Monument Street. When I was a child my parents bought furniture for our home and clothes for us on layaway plans. It was also the border between black and white. My parents dressed up to go to Union Savings Bank or Levenson and Klein furniture store. Milton Avenue runs north and south and the part of it in my neighborhood had a five and dime as well as a movie house when we moved there in 1957, both of which were burned when Dr. King was killed. I watched the flames from my grandmother's bedroom window and heard gunshots echoing through the smoke. In the evenings there were soldiers patrolling the neighborhood.

I was sixteen years old with my brand new driver's license. In the summer I hung out with friends and relatives in the neighborhood. We taught ourselves courage while trying to understand the world of sex, sexuality, drinking and drugs, and we fought the white boys around us. Many of those friends and relatives are dead. A few are in prison. The little boys who were eight or ten years behind us grew up to call each other "G" for gangster, and when they were little they thought we were gangsters.

But we were kids ourselves. Riding around in our parents' cars and cars we were able to buy because we lived with our parents, we were in a world we understood but the walls of which were crumbling so that those behind us would have to struggle to know how to be men in what arose from the rubble of the past. This past was built partly with the courage of men who praised Jack Johnson and listened to Joe Louis on the radio, breathing when they breathed, punching when they punched, all in an air they could name as their own, and it was built with the courage of the women who knew the substance of that air.

Note:

In this 2006 article in the Baltimore Sun another part of the penitentiary is discussed, a unit in the old Maryland Penitentiary is called "Metropolitan Transition Center":

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-md.rodricks.11may11,0,1951340.column

2010-12-17T15:06:00.000-08:00

photo by Bill Larson

taken at Austin Peay University

Clarksville, Tennessee 2010

To the Heart of Things

When I listen to people with terminal illnesses talk about the time they have left, it often takes me awhile to remember that I have had to deal with that, too. Maybe it's because I am fifteen years away from the diagnosis. I was forty-three years old, too young to expire according to many, not the least of whom was myself. However, people have died soon after they were born. People die at all ages, but I was busy doing stuff, as they say, when the diagnosis came and along with it the only solution, according to the doctors. They wanted to give me a new heart. I refused to be put on the waiting list. I wanted to try exercise, change of lifestyle, the geographic cure, and most of all, a return to my Taiji and all the related aspects of what we call Chinese medicine.

But all that seems like chit chat. I think now of the place where I lived, an apartment on Philly's West Side, near University of Pennsylvania. It was a short walk from my house to the offices of African American studies. There are the trees that lined Locust Street, my street, where the Victorian house I lived in was kept in meticulous order by the landlord and landlady, a precious black couple who had known each other since elementary school down South. I want to say South Carolina, and that's what I will say. Their last name was Butler, and they were a holdover from the time of strong enduring marriages. We were out in the yard together one day when the subject of religion came up.

Mr. Butler said, "My wife is religious. I am spiritual."

She looked at him and gave him that "look" that black women give which lets the world know it's time to hush.

When I came down with congestive heart failure, any little sensation that came into my chest was cause for concern if it was a "new" sensation. My doctors had told me to be aware and to come into the hospital if need be. One night I had a "new" sensation, and Mr. Butler came up and sat with me. There I was, a grown ass man, as they say, needed the comfort of a father figure. The state of my heart put me in the position of having to think about death. I had been given five years of being barely able to walk with all the medications I was taking. So when I felt that feeling in my chest I heeded Mr. Butler's words. A few days earlier he had spoken to me like a father.

"Now Mr. Weaver, don't you sit up there and suffer. You call downstairs and let us know when you're not feeling right. You hear?"

I heard, and so there he was. The sensation in my chest did not go away, so he drove me to the hospital, which was the Hospital University of Pennsylvania or HUP, as Philadelphians call it. It turned out to be nothing, and so later in the morning Mr. Butler came to retrieve me from the hospital, and we rode back to that three story house with one glad passenger sitting up there alongside Mr. Butler.

My buddy Roger Allen Jones was my helpmate and nurse. He was a poet who had spent a few years selling used books on the sidewalks of the university. Students knew him, and the first time I remember having a conversation with him was when he was walking down the street to where I sat on the steps in front of the house. I had elected to live alone after several years of marriage, alone again, and my heart had not yet failed. But it was lumbering in my chest. I had put too much pressure on the pump, high blood pressure, medications for depression that were not good for the heart, a huge transition from working class life to academia, and always the search for love, that deadly addiction. Roger always wore too big shoes, and that day he had on a seasonal outfit, his jeans and an old blazer.

"Michael S. Weaver, " he called out in his lion voice. He was a tiny man who talked in a megaphone voice. He got closer and said, "I read your first book, Water Song. I like your poetry. Have you written your deathbed poems?"

Roger was nothing if not the purest devotee to poetry that I have ever known. He loved the word more than I did and could supply me with research info for class prep at times. Roger taught me about friendship, and he taught me about living. He even critiqued my love poems.

"Those ain't love poems, Boss. You just writing about love. I have yet to see you write a poem about the desire and the craving." Then he went back into his meditative space, gnawing his lips and looking at the sky.

What is it to be alive? Well, you breathe and you think and you feel, but the feeling is something I have come to place on a much higher plane than thinking. Thinking has always come easier to me, but feeling has taken me a lifetime. What has taken longer is to honor those feelings, to be brave enough to act on the basis of my feelings. You don't have to always say what you feel because that is often not appropriate. But you have to have an honest connection to your emotional reality when you speak and act, when you move in life. Most of my life I have not been able to do that, and I hope the people who have noticed this and been annoyed have forgiven me. I can blame it on my childhood, as all of us can, but what good is that at this point? It's good in the therapist's office for your own head straightening, but I believe compassion has to come from understanding we all have some hardness in life.

In the past couple of years I have been going to a barber by the name of Benny. His shop is close to my Cave. I was telling Benny the other day that I am writing a memoir about my hard life, and he said he had one, too. For a moment I felt annoyed, but I made myself listen. He went on to tell me about having to live on salt water as a child in Haiti, and it made me a little ashamed of myself but glad that I took the time to listen. It reminds me that if I finish this memoir I want it to be of help to people.

Walt was my barber here from the time I landed in the Boston area until 2007, a long time. Life got busy, or so I thought, and the subway ride to Magic Shears, the shop where he worked, seemed so long. I went down to Dorchester, where Magic Shears sits, to get my hair put in proper order. I had not been in awhile so I called the other day to see if I could catch him before he left for the day. Clyde owns the shop, and he answered as he always does. I asked for Walt.

"Mike, are you sitting down." That's all he had to say. I was glad I was sitting in my truck, looking out at the morning sky. Walt was gone. Clyde and I talked our way to being able to laugh about something Walt said. Clyde owned the shop, but Walt always said he kept the customers coming. Walt and Clyde were my working class touchstone. They were the men I grew up with and worked with for many years. They were the norm for a huge chunk of this six foot three working class piece of walking flesh I call me. We always had a ritual at holiday time, Walt with his glass of Christmas cheer.

So we breathe, and we stop breathing. Roger is gone, too. He passed away in his apartment just two years after I came home from the cardiac unit. When I came home the doctors had advised me against walking and driving. I broke both rules.

Roger and I went to Cape May, just over the bridge from Philly in Jersey. I drove a rental car, and when we got there Roger sat on the beach watching the gulls and what we thought were dolphins in the distance. It is a beach full of little stones. Roger was born and raised in Philly but had never been to Cape May. He sat there rocking back and forth. I asked him how he liked it.

"It sure beats television. That's all I can say."

I should be writing a letter in Chinese to my teacher in Taiwan, and I should be grading my students' papers. I guess I can get to those things now that I have let whoever reads this know how I feel about having time to live.

2010-11-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

This was once the corner store across from

Fort Worthington Elementary School

East Baltimore

circa 1957

I loved arithmetic so much that when the teacher announced it in the 4th grade I hollered out "Yippee!" Call me the king of nerds. My classmates helped me understand that it was inappropriate expression in the context of their ideas of classroom decorum. Mrs. Miller was our teacher, and she thought it was rather cute of me to express my enthusiasm for math class. She was a stern woman, and I only remember her as being tall and beautiful, a dark brown-skinned woman with a stately demeanor. She was a little mean, too. Many a knuckle got cracked with that wooden ruler she kept ready on her desk.

Mrs. Miller was taken away unexpectedly, murdered by a man. I don't remember if it was her husband or boyfriend. I've always thought it was her boyfriend. Maybe so.

With the exception of Mrs. Tang, a longterm substitute, all of our teachers were black. I remember Mrs. Tang because her name was like the breakfast drink the astronauts took with them into outer space, the outer space beyond the concentric circles on the wall chart showing how far the Cuban missiles could reach. But that was after Mrs. Tang. The missiles came in the 6th grade. Mrs. Lewis was our teacher. She was a woman who seemed to be the embodiment of jazz. She had a way of easing around the class that reminds me now of the sound of vibraphones from Milt Jackson.

Mrs. Lewis told us to write something about our lives one day. I came in with twelve pages in longhand. What else but longhand? We didn't get a typewriter until I got to junior high school. I write "we," but I don't remember allowing my little sisters to play with it. All they could do was play. They were only nine and five respectively. No way they were going to mess up my typewriter.

Although she was impressed, when I brought my twelve pages to class, Mrs. Lewis said, "Michael, I didn't tell you to write all of this."

I had a lot to say.

There was a Mr. Lewis, too. He was a corpulent man who dressed as nicely as the ladies did, a semi-formal presentation. We were playing in the schoolyard one day, duck duck goose, I believe, and I remember Mr. Lewis's bald head shining in the sun. It was amazing, a clean, smooth black mirror under the sun. The sun, of course, was in outer space, the safety zone above the reach of the Cuban missiles.

Mrs. Lewis and Mr. Lewis were not related.

The principal was a white man with what must have been some severe kind of arthritis. His fingers curled a bit. He was a kind man with a name something like Mr. Galeprin. I don't remember the spelling.

My parents went to the office one day to discuss me with Mr. Galeprin. I was terrified. I couldn't imagine what a perfect nerd like me could have done wrong. They came home and gave me the news. I was going to skip the eighth grade. There was no vote taken. It was a parental edict, and so I tried to imagine skipping non-stop for two years. What kind of sneakers would I wear? That was the sillier part of me. I knew I would be working like a nuclear power plant for the rest of my life, and I would always be with older kids.

It was a predominantly white school, and so I left the black world of elementary school life and took the bus to the larger space that, unlike outer space, did not seem nearly as safe as the concentric circles emanating from the black center of my black world.

We were children. We did what children should do. We obeyed.

2010-11-08T06:15:00.000-08:00

When We Tap “The Wire”

A RESPONSE TO "OBAMA IN THE AGE OF THE WIRE"

THE HARVARD PROJECT

by Afaa Michael Weaver

The Wire/Urban Decay and American Television edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall is the first published collection of critical essays on the HBO program “The Wire.” The book includes an essay of mine entitled “Baltimore Before the Wire.” What follows here is my response to the project at Harvard University.

In The Wire Collington Square Park is used to portray Marlo, an ambitious young drug dealer, in meetings with his guards and assassins. They stand on a knoll where Johns Hopkins hospital stands in the background. I know the park as the one adjacent to the school where my son and two youngest siblings attended the Head Start program in the seventies. As a poet who did his literary apprenticeship as a Baltimore factory worker, my life has taken me across the spectrum of the city covered in this television series that has garnered the attention of Harvard educators and community leaders and activists in Boston’s black community. It has also gathered its share of controversy. I think Reverend Rivers and his colleagues at Harvard have rightfully claimed the program as a teaching tool, and I understand the concerns of Ishmael Reed, whom I know and whose work I have always appreciated, just as he has explained in conversation that he appreciates mine.

However, Reed is no fan of The Wire and has said it is full of cliches. My concerns go to both sides of this controversy.

As to the matter of cliches, I would go so far as to say the characters in The Wire are perhaps the catalytic summation and potential antidote to the cliches Reed cites. Simon’s characters are rooted in the active space in the consciousness of lived experience. Granted, European tourists cruising the city looking for action is not something I find comforting. As a native son of Baltimore, I believe the folks at Harvard could have strengthened their offering to the students there and to the black community had they sought more input from folks who actually grew up in Baltimore. There are a few of us in the Boston area.

My family home is on Federal Street in East Baltimore, a few blocks away from the rim shop that is used in The Wire as a meeting place for drug dealers. Four blocks from my parents’ home is the intersection of Federal Street and Milton Avenue, the northern end of a stretch that is a major artery in what we call “street life.” In the late fifties my parents obtained a mortgage during the period of block busting when rental agents across the country were making fortunes by using scare tactics to move white owners out and resell to blacks at inflated prices. Milton Avenue had a five and dime and a movie theater that were destroyed in the riots following Dr. King’s assassination. As heroin and then crack flooded our neighborhood immediately after the sixties, Milton Avenue fell apart and down to what it is now, a no man’s land in the world of illegal drugs and poverty.

I know and have known people whose lives and personalities fit aspects of the characters in The Wire, and each time I watch the program I see them anew, in dimensions that speak honestly to their intelligence and own sense of integrity, as poorly constructed and misshapen as they might be in real life when human failings meet systemic social dysfunction and deliberate plans for destroying a community.

In applying The Wire to Boston I would expect these educators and activists to know Boston is not Baltimore. The black community here is not the more “like member” kind of community in Baltimore, where black folks from the same areas in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia and elsewhere in the South moved in groups to the same neighborhoods in Baltimore. Boston is one of the America’s internationally black cities where you do not have to go too far back in the family to know someone who speaks or spoke Jamaican patois or Haitian creole. Boston is a city with a black diversity that is something of a marvel but a mystery to many whites and an untapped discussion for many black folks. However, it is another marker of significant difference in applying The Wire to Boston, a very northern city.

Still The Wire should be applied. It should be applied to our collective consciousness as a well-told tale of what has happened to one of America’s great cities, a tale where the historic trends and development, the tragic flow of its hustle, invites us all to be more human.

____________________________________________________________________________

2010-07-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

Paul Robeson

1993

The Year of the Rooster

My 42nd Birthday Year

Afaa Michael Weaver

蔚雅風

Wednesday July 14, 2010

Entering the place, it has the appearance of catacombs, the underground tombs constructed by ancient Romans. Each storage locker has a sliding aluminum door, either vertically or horizontally hinged. I have one of the largest. It's where I have kept and managed the accumulation of memories, bricks that assemble the past.

When I lived in West Philadelphia, I had a locker in a company that was not as nearly well-kept as the one I have here in Somerville. Inspired by a colleague at Rutgers, I put all that I had accumulated up to that point in there for safekeeping. When I came out from the cardiac unit where I was treated for congestive heart failure in the summer of 1995, I returned to teaching at the Camden campus of Rutgers that fall. Walking was a precarious thing, and I was making my way up the hallway when a colleague urged me to take care of my things.

"Make sure you put everything in boxes where we can find it easily," he said as he walked behind me. "Scholars will need to be able to find your things."

The doctors were not hopeful about my recovery. I was taking a whole cafeteria of meds just to be able to do this wobbly walk down the hallway, and I was advised to go home and get my papers together, to be sure of designated beneficiaries, to make whatever plans I might want for my funeral services--all the things you do for the end of the grand show we call life. This all happened in 1995, but two years earlier I had begun what seemed like a launching into wide recognition that would not end.

Playing around in my storage locker a few weeks ago, I stumbled onto a number of things from 1993, some publications, theater programs, photographs, correspondence, all the goodies I am glad I put aside in boxes and stuffed inside books over the years. It's been seventeen years, the space of a literary generation. I put the things together in a small pile and brought them back to my Somerville Cave. I was not sure of exactly what I wanted to do with all of it, except to sit it all in a stack across the room here so I can reflect.

MY FATHER'S GEOGRAPHY had come out the year before, in the fall of 1992, and one of the poems had been republished in the Los Angeles Times. I have forgotten which poem it was and do not know where I put the clipping, but I think it was "Luxembourg Garden." MY FATHER'S GEOGRAPHY was my third book, and the fourth came in 1993, STATIONS IN A DREAM. The poetry was humming along nicely, and the theater made the humming more like the roar of a small nuclear engine. I was on my way, it seemed. I was forty-one years old. Nineteen ninety-three was the year of my forty second birthday.

ROSA was produced in Philadelphia at Venture Theater in May of that year, and there was all the drama of the production you might expect with a first professional production. If you want to know what it was like go and watch Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway, and you will know the basic plot. It was an incredible experience. Then in the summer I got word that another play of mine had won something called the PDI Award in Chicago, and so I would have two professional theater productions in one year. Life was so heady I could not catch my breath, and I did not know where it was all going. Doors seemed to be opening everywhere.

Doors had opened this way for me before. In 1985, I got the NEA, had my first book published in the Callaloo series under Charles Rowell, and was admitted into Brown's graduate writing program on a full university fellowship. I spent two months in Europe and traveled to London, where I read in Brixton for Linton Kwesi Johnson and his journal "Race Today."

Eight years later it was 1993, a year that seemed like an entry into an even larger place, a new plateau, and when I think of how that registered for me I think of how I commuted to Chicago from Philadelphia that fall to work on that second theater production, to develop the play. I had my schedule at Rutgers arranged so that I only had to be there on Mondays, and from October thru to the end of the semester I flew back and forth between Philly and Chicago nearly every week. I was coming to understand what it means to refer to a plane as an airbus.

ETA theater was the sponsor of the PDI Award, and part of my arrangement was that I had an apartment in a luxury building on the South Side owned by a well to do African American woman. From O'Hare airport to the apartment and then to the theater to work on the play with my director, the late Jaye T. Stewart.

It seemed as if everything was on the incline, but things were falling apart, too. My health and my marriage were crumbling as I was moving ahead. I was working on another Pitt book, TIMBER AND PRAYER, and in the fall of 1994, I went up for tenure as an early candidate. My department chair, a sweet man by the name of Bob Ryan, said I should have gotten tenure based on tonnage. I had two boxes loaded with documents and evidence of publication. I did receive tenure in the spring of 1995, and I received it with distinction. I was given a plaque and a research fellowship of $2000 to be used toward my writing in any way I chose.

TIMBER AND PRAYER was published just as I was receiving news of my tenure, and I gave a reading at a cafe in Baltimore to a standing room only crowd. People stood outside on the sidewalk and peered into the windows to hear me. One face was immediately recognizable. It was my son standing outside watching me.

The buttresses of ambition were holding up the walls of whatever it was I was building, and then the hand of some greater force began to pull the buttresses away, and there I was in the apartment where I lived alone in West Philly with a gazillion bottles of medicine for my heart and its vessels, wondering what it would be like to be out of my body and out of my life.

In The Catacombs I go through the stuff of over thirty years of this, of writing, publishing, and getting produced, and I am happy for the journey to this storage locker of mine. I drive most times, taking whatever rental car I have because you need the pressure of a car on the plate to open the garage door when the office is closed. When the office is open I sometimes walk down the hill from my Cave, past the Brazilian restaurant and the Judo Club to where these things from my writing life wait to be unpacked from the corners of boxes.

The Howard Gotlieb Archives at Boston University now has the greater portion of what was once in my Catacombs, some forty or so boxes of my papers, documents, and other things, including the prints of my feet taken by a nurse in 1951, right after I was born. They have my military records and the gold, silver, and bronze medals I have won in martial arts competitions. I was there the other day on business when something peculiar happened.

The Gotlieb is located in the library of Boston University, and there was a group of people being led among the glass cases containing a few items from some of the collectees. One of the more famous persons in the collection is Dr. Martin Luther King. There is also a set of glass cases for myself, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Franz Wright. We are all there together, entombed in glass, and the tour was standing there with the guide talking. A couple sighted me walking past to the exit door. They looked at my things in glass and looked at me, and then they began to point and whisper, making a little bit of a spectacle.

I waved politely, smiled and kept on walking, still in my body and in this life...with a deeper gratitude for the ability, the enhanced ability to walk and to breathe.

2010-06-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

THE WHITMAN THING

(1819-1892)

Afaa Michael Weaver

蔚雅風

June 8, 2010

Memorial Day on www.democracynow. org was celebrated with the posting of a video of a speech Noam Chomsky gave several weeks earlier on the subject of the need to revitalize radical reform energies in this country, and he made a comment that crystalized a few things I often toss around. For the last few years I have been working on a scholarly article about cultural intersections in the blues poetry of Marilyn Chin, and so I have been focusing on the latter nineteenth century, a fascinating and important time in American history. Chomsky said the deliberate criminalization of African Americans at that time was central to the rise in the American industrial revolution.

Leaves of Grass appeared in its first edition in 1855, and ninety-nine years later, the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision, the most far-reaching and effective civil rights legislation in a history of the same going back into the nineteenth century. Slavery was the law when Whitman self-published the first edition of his classic, and when he passed away in 1892, it was just four years before the Supreme Court decision supporting racial segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson, approaching the close of a century of outrageously violent and systematic assaults on the lives of African Americans.

This time in American history that produced the works of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, whose works I deeply admire and appreciate, was not a time when black Americans had the freedom and resources to broadly pursue lives as poets. Frances Harper wrote and Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote his way into the twentieth century, but with plantation poetry, which was not his choice.

It is the mid-twentieth century, the time of the 1950's and 60's Civil Rights Movement that breaks open the literary gates and creates the space for a broad production of works by African American poets. In his introduction to the Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, Arnold Rampersad wrote:

"Despite the popularity of black novelists, as the new century (21st) began black American poetry had perhaps a broader base than ever before, and a more settled sense of achievement."

It is as if there is a space, both chronological and psychic, between the histories of African American and American poetry that is approximately one hundred years long, noting now the distance in the times in which Ann Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley lived and wrote, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Langston Hughes. There is no simple comparison to be made, but there is a need, I think, to look critically at a paradigm of literary production that may very well be related to the paradigm and paradox of the history of enslaved Africans in the world's great democracy. I think the need for this critical view is supported by such things as the disparity in wealth between blacks and whites that has deepened despite the Civil Rights Movement, a fact made very real by such things as the lack of access to inherited wealth among black Americans.

The accomplishments of poets like Whitman and Dickinson with respect to American culture were not possible for African Americans until the 1950's Civil Rights Movement, which is roughly one hundred years after Whitman began his career as a journalist, fiction writer, and poet and when he and Dickinson set the foundation of modern American poetry, mostly for mainstream America.

The paradigm and paradox of America's history of slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, and other complex realities is of critical importance in looking at the history of African American poetry. Whites and blacks both live with and apart from one another, bound and separated by the denial of black humanity, and I believe that denial also defines the larger whole. This mechanism of denial and definition extends to the indigenous peoples who lived here when Europeans arrived and later brought Africans as slaves as well as those who came later, both white and non-white.

The genuine character of America's democracy depends on black people asserting their claims to fuller realization of humanity, and I maintain that the deeper establishment of American poetry is fulfilled only as African American poetry is given the space to be. That emergence extends to the other so-called marginalized communities of poets.

Whitman and Dickinson began a process that continues. They held open the doors for hopefulness that Hughes stepped into as an Emersonian visionary of things to come. Though sympathetic perhaps to what blacks endured, Whitman and Dickinson had no way of knowing the angst of black people issuing from the all too real threats to their lives that they had to endure in a time in America when the blues were born.

Justin Kaplan opens his biography of Whitman with a look at the end of the poet's life. He bought his first house in 1884, just eight years before he passed away. It was on Mickle Street, a short walk from my office at Rutgers University in Camden, and in the days when I served on the board of the Walt Whitman Association, I looked around inside the house there and thought how quaint it was, although I could only imagine him sitting in a chair poking around in the huge piles of papers with his walking cane, unmindful of the rough floors in the log cabin of my great grandparents, who were sharecroppers, a lifestyle they bequeathed to my father's father and to my father.

In developing as a young poet, my love went first to the black poets I knew and whom I knew could have known me and from there to the rest of the world of poetry, in a manner that follows my sense of how the community of my birth and upbringing is the vessel I use in order that I might come to know all communities. I believe each of these communities and worlds of ours has its own complex and singular interior, which we would do well to respect. From there we can approach a deeper and more genuine compassion.

In closing, I hold out hope that the deepening of the genuine character of democracy will follow the brave accomplishments of African American poets, most of whom write without the luxury of wealth-based privilege. however relative that wealth may be.

2010-05-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Abena Joan Brown, Founder and Producer

ETA Creative Arts Foundation Chicago, Illinois

Curtains Rise in the Ramada at Lake Shore

Afaa M. Weaver

May 20, 2010

I sat on the edge of the bed in my room at the Lake Shore Ramada as I waited for the meeting to begin. My play "Elvira and the Lost Prince" had won the Playwrights Discovery and Development Initiative, or the PDI Award. It was a few months before my 42nd birthday, and I had just had my first professional production a few months earlier in Philadelphia of a full length play of mine, a two act I named "Rosa." It seemed I had officially entered the world of professional theater after six years of trying.

As I sat there peeping out the curtains at the parking lot, I saw two figures walk out of the pages of black theater history, Woodie King and Ron Milner. It was a stunning moment for me. I had read Woodie's well known "Black Drama Anthology" years before, and Ron's play "What the Winesellers Buy" was one of my first theater going experiences. I was dating a woman by the name of "Liz," a lady from East Baltimore, and we drove to Washington to see his play. It was the mid-seventies, and although the sixties theater movement was done in a chronological way it was very alive for me, and now here they were in the flesh, on the parking lot.

We were all brought to Chicago by Abena Joan Brown, founder and producer of ETA theater on the South Side. My play had been chosen with several others to be produced with the help of a grant she secured for the project. The panel of people who presided over the project was a Who's Who of the sixties period of black drama, including Vantile Whitfield, Eleanor Traylor, and Rob Penny. Rob had been one of a group of men who mentored August Wilson when he was just a boy growing up in Pittsburgh without his father. I was a younger member of the PDI group, and although I had my own accomplishments as a poet I saw these people from the pages of history and respected them. I had heard of them when I was working in the factory and writing. I read their work on the evening and night shifts when bosses were not around. The sixties was a beacon for me.

It seemed like theater itself, the moment I saw Woodie and Ron on the parking lot. Later Ron would become my mentor along with Rob Penny, and I would take a place beside them and the other panel of advisors as we chose winners for later rounds in successive years and traveled to Chicago twice or so a year to see these plays staged and discuss in them in the most minute details over the course of long weekends.

PDI is a think tank for black theater. We wanted to formulate a dramaturgy for the future of black theater. Graduate school at Brown was my theoretical experience, and I got my practicum in the production in Philadelphia, which was at Venture theater, and in my long running association with PDI in Chicago.

You have not experienced theater until you watch a director pull a character out of an actor struggling with your words, or until you feel you have to rein in the costume designer who is not to be reined in, or when you and the director are at odds over the fog machine. Better still, you have not experienced theater until you hear the early reviews in the restroom during intermission and return to your seat still loving your play despite the remarks or hating it because people love it for the wrong reasons. You have not experienced theater until you fall for the leading lady. You have to smell the theater. It has to make you ache.

Poets working in theater have their own problems, as Paula Vogel and the late George H. Bass explained to me during my graduate studies. Metaphor is fine, but in playwriting it can become meta-stasis. The play has no motion despite the lovely riffs and runs in the language. Plot becomes a monster guarding the door to your finished play, and when someone like Ms. Brown asks "What is this play about?" your head scratching and staring at the floor will not suffice. You have to have an answer. You have to know.

Theater is a practical application of language to the ethereal end of something that is different each night it is produced. It is a social art, one where community and the attempt to work with other people is not an option. It is the core of the art. It is an art that gauges the health of a culture. A culture without drama is one that will soon segue into acting out instead of the fine art of acting on stage.

Woodie and Ron were kids in New York in the sixties. Ron told me once that they were standing on a corner in the Village with pockets full of money from their work, two young black men, both of them raised in the urban vernacular of Detroit. Woodie worked for a while in Ford Motor Company, and Ron told me his father was an old world hustler much like the main character in his play "What the Winesellers Buy."

We went into our first meeting, and I began two months of weekly commutes from Philadelphia to Chicago as my teaching responsibilities that fall were such that I could leave on Tuesdays. The airplane was truly an airbus, and my director Jaye T. Stewart worked with me and taught me. We rode together in his old BMW to rehearsals. He picked me up in the apartment building where I had a place as part of my residency. It was near Jackson Park, just below Hyde Park.

The curtain rises and it falls. We fade to blackout, and then it starts all over again when someone gets a new script together, goes out to gather a bunch of actors for a script in hand reading, and the drama of a production begins. Something is born.

Theater is life.

2009-12-28T05:38:00.000-08:00

To Write a Poem in Chinese and Bid It Sing:

The Translatable Spaces of Creativity

Afaa Michael Weaver

蔚雅風

A condensed version of this essay was delivered as

a lecture at Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China, in October 2008

for the World Literature Today conference co-sponsored with the University

of Oklahoma.

”Yet do I marvel at this curious thing…”
--Countee Cullen

Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child

spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction,…”

--Steven Pinker

In early autumn in Boston, I use the rearmost door of the subway car at the Museum stop so I can walk the longer way to my office. Simmons College sits on the edge of Fenway Park, and in early fall the changing colors of the trees are mesmerizing. I ease along, allowing the power of the season to distract me from turning on my computer, answering email, making final preparations for classes--all the matters of being a professor. Canada geese waddle along and sometimes stop the traffic there on Louis Pasteur Boulevard as they slowly cross the street en masse. Tourists come from other parts of the world to see New England’s autumnal splendor. In autumn of 2004, I traded this deciduous shifting of green, to yellow, red, orange, and gold for the eternal green of Taiwan with its tropical autumn. I moved into a sixteenth floor apartment in Taipei, the country’s northernmost capitol, where I lived with my landlord, his family, and a few other tenants in Taipei’s commercial district, across the street from a giant department store called Sogo’s. The nearest sizable park was the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, where there is a handsome statue of Confucius. When it rains in Taiwan the green looks luscious and edible, as if the water slides seductively over the skin of each leaf and renders it vulnerable to the eye, tempting to the tongue. My language school was in the Shi Da University neighborhood, where there is one of the more enjoyable of the city’s night markets where you can stroll and enjoy adding inches to your waist.

It was to be my immersion experience. I had lived in Taiwan before but not as a student of the language. Immersion is just as it implies, swimming in deep water as opposed to cooling your heels in the ocean while you sit on the beach in a lawn chair with a chilled fruit juice. Caught on the crest of a wave, you can look back at the beach, at your empty chair, at the waving hands of those who would rather play with language study on their own terms and not the terms of the new language. The wave flattens out, and you fight the urge to panic when you realize you must learn not only to swim but to breathe in synch with your movements as you would in your own ocean, but this is ocean is new. The surface can be likened to the first level of sentence diagrams that Noam Chomsky took to task as he named the space beneath and within as deep surface.

Our various oceans are connected by the commonality of the deep. In language acquisition there is the question of how far Universal Grammar may influence acquisition. In my case there are the factors of age and the numbering of the acquisition, as Chinese is my fourth language after English, French, and Spanish. In French and Spanish I have always sat on the beach, tickling my feet in the water, but in Chinese I have gone out into the vastness of the ocean of immersion, which has no detectable bottom, looking for the space in which not only to learn but to create as a poet.

The Challenge of Chinese

The epigraph to this essay from Countee Cullen’s poem “Yet Do I Marvel” where he invokes the sense of wonder at the idea that a black person can produce creative literature and fly in the face of racist assumptions by thinkers such as Hume, Locke, and Jefferson, who tried to justify slavery by maintaining that black people are incapable of creative literature because they are not human beings. I am appropriating Cullen’s tongue in cheek idea in his poem to apply it to the widely held idea among non-Chinese people that Chinese is an impossible language, one where only the genius dare tread, and in doing so I am employing the Chinese emphasis on humility, however false it may be.

Chinese culture has the longest ongoing recorded history, and a good deal of that is due to the written language, which has undergone a great deal of evolution and change through several simplifications. Currently, there are two writing systems, one of which is the simplified or modern version in use in Mainland China and throughout much of the world insofar as Chinese relations. The other is the traditional writing system in use in Taiwan and parts of Hong Kong. Below is an example of the same written word or hanzi in the two systems of characters or graphemes, which is the term in use by linguists.

发發

The character or grapheme on the left is in the simplified style, and the one on the right is in the traditional style. There is the obvious challenge of recognizing which is which, and the difference here is radical. In other characters the change is not so great. The meaning is the same. However, the meaning changes depending on the tone. Tones are degrees of pitch and not volume. An inexperienced speaker will substitute volume changes for tone changes. But back to the meaning, which is “to make” or “to issue forth” if you use the first tone, which is a level tone, meaning the pitch does not rise or fall. In order to learn the tones you must recite them, and a student will only make progress when he/she learns self-study, which is to be able to detect your own mistakes in speaking and to discern the tones of another speaker with accuracy.

Learning to speak is a bit complex as there are two phonetic systems, the pinyin was adopted in Mainland China. Pinyin uses the roman alphabet to give the phonetic sound, and it is convenient for foreigners. Pinyin gives recognizable hints as to how to pronounce the characters. In 1956 the government began simplifying the characters in stages. There are 56,000 characters in the Chinese language. That count may vary according to which source you refer as some contend that certain characters are no longer in use or should not be counted. The Chinese written language has been simplified at other times in China’s history. Simplification is not new, but this most recent set of changes is the most radical. At the same time that pinyin was developed the zhuyin system was also developed in Mainland. In Taiwan they continue to use the zhuyin system, often referred to as bo po mo fo. The pronunciation for the character for “to make” is as follows in each system, with pinyin on the left and bo po mo fo on the right:

fa 匚 Y

It should be clear that pinyin has been a help to foreign students. For example, the pinyin system can easily be typed into a computer using Chinese software. Bo po mo fo has computer entry systems, too, but they require the memorization of those phonetic symbols, which is difficult for foreigners. In Mainland there are many people who have no knowledge of this old phonetic system, although it was developed in China and maintained in Taiwan. For native speakers learning the language as children or adults, the bo po mo fo is an advantage as the elements of those signs are similar to parts of the characters and thus aids recognition.

Now that we are onto recognition, let me say that in order to recognize the characters you must learn to write them, and in order to write you must learn the strokes. In order to learn the strokes you must learn the order in which they are written. If you do not do these things, you will not be able to use a Chinese-English or Chinese dictionary because you must be able to count the strokes in a character in order to find it in the dictionary. Counting the strokes involves learning the radicals. You must know the modular components of the characters, or the radicals, which will enable you to both read and use the dictionaries in faster and more efficient ways. The radicals for the traditional writing system and for simplified are not the same. There are a few hundred radicals in each system.

Finally, the Taiwanese accents in Mandarin Chinese are different from those on the Mainland. There are varieties of accents in each place, and one should know the differences so as not to inadvertently insult anyone in either place. The issue of which Chinese is correct can be an emotional one, and the matter of correctness presents another challenge when looking for teachers and tutors in the United States. Some tutors from Mainland will not consider using a textbook purchased in Taiwan and vice-versa. So diplomacy is yet another challenge in your studies, an extremely important challenge.

Those are basic issues for any student, and one should do something in the way of review or study every day. In the Boston area Zhong Tian cable television from Taiwan is available, featuring both programs made in Taiwan and Mainland. I spend time watching programs every day, even if only for a few minutes or to turn it on as I am doing other things in my home. Chinese television always has subtitles because there are so many varieties of the spoken language, all of which are connected by the characters. However, some are in simplified and some are in traditional. If you only know one system, you will have trouble with the other. In my first two years of formal study, I used the faculty audit at Simmons and studied alongside Simmons undergraduates. We used textbooks in simplified Chinese that offered the traditional Chinese at the back of each lesson for those who wanted to learn. I kept up with both as much as possible, but after two years my tutors advised me to switch to traditional. The rationale is that it is much easier to study simplified “after” the traditional. So I moved to Taiwan.

Cross-straits relations are too large a topic for this essay, but it is important to note that it reveals itself in the tension between the two written forms of Chinese, simplified and traditional. Feelings run deep on the subject of whether or nor to use the traditional or “old” style of writing, which is mostly used in Taiwan. When the United Nations abandoned the traditional writing system in favor of the simplified, which is the official system of Mainland, the gesture was taken as an insult by many people in Taiwan and further evidence of America’s gradual but steady abandonment of any hope for Taiwan’s independence. Mainland China’s simplification of the language is certainly not the first such move in China’s history, but it is perhaps the most extensive restructuring of the writing system.

The Creative Process in Chinese

Had I been born Chinese in the U.S. and moved to the U.S. as a child born in China or Taiwan, I would more memories of speaking with my family from an early age, and several of my classmates at Simmons were Chinese-American and at least had some familiarity with pronunciation. In October 1984 I began six months of lessons in Baltimore in the Chinese Community Association under the late Lillian Kim, the director. My teacher was a classical pianist from Taiwan who was rather vigilant about pronunciation. I was in the adult class in Grace and St. Peter’s church, part of the Sunday Chinese school for children that is common in Chinese communities. However, I came to serious study of Mandarin Chinese when I turned fifty and am therefore making memories, tapping a latent language instinct in an older brain, my anti-senility project. So in early November, 2004, twenty years after I began those Sunday lessons in Baltimore, I found myself in Taiwan for the duration of my sabbatical year.

In the Zhong Xiao Fu Xing commercial area, I found a flat on the top floor of a sixteen story apartment building. I lived with my landlord and his family, along with a few other tenants. Zhong Xiao Fu Xing is an important part of central Taipei, and the name of the junction refers to the eight virtues in Chinese culture.

My language school was not far away. In Taiwan the traditional writing system is everywhere and English is scarce. Sometimes the Chinese characters or graphemes are written from right to left and top to bottom on signs and in newspapers, which is the old way of writing. At other times the characters are written from left to right, in Western style. As you become more literate in the written language, you cannot ignore it. Some English speakers live in Taiwan and never learn Chinese, so they live in a bubble, unmoved by the visual and verbal promptings that surround them.

In the two years before moving to Taiwan, I had studied the Beijing dialect, and my first teacher at Simmons was from Beijing. But in Taiwan the rolling r’s of Mainland speech give way to the Taiwanese “lee” sound as in the word for “here.”

In Taipei, the capitol city on the northern tip of the island, you begin to revel in the cold gusts of air-conditioned coolness that come from the businesses and restaurants. At night you can still feel it, as the heat lingers. The rain comes and makes the tongue want to taste the wetness. I had two hour tutorials with two different teachers each day for five days per week, which meant homework for two to three hours a night, as I had to write in Chinese. Writing by hand fixes the characters more firmly in the memory but is a slow process for foreign students. My grand plans for studying Chinese and continuing my writing projects in English soon collapsed under the reality of being a student in his fifties with a bald spot that was forming corporate mergers in the areas around my ears.

I enrolled at the Taipei Language Institute (TLI), where the director, Ms. Eleanor Chang, assigned me to two teachers, one for each of my two hours of daily tutorials. Teacher Lai was a short woman with a stentorian voice who kept all kinds of snacks in her tiny office. The two of us could be heard all over the school when we began laughing. She was not especially interested in poetry. Her interest lay in managing my personal affairs and pushing me to find a Chinese wife. The other teacher was Teacher Fang, with whom I studied for the first hour.

Teacher Fang was a bit taller than Teacher Lai, and Teacher Fang is also a distinctive woman because her ancestors include a man from Portugal. One of the TLI teaching methods is for the teacher to lead the student through the text by reading it aloud first and then listening to the student as he reads the same passage. Students are also encourage to buy tape recorders to tape the sessions so as to be able to go home and listen to the day’s lesson. The primary objective here is to get the student to do self-study, and self-study is one of the pillars of Chinese teaching. I first encountered it when I began to study Taijiquan in 1978, again in Baltimore.

Teacher Fang and I read together, and sometimes we struck a lovely harmony. She would say in English, “That was beautiful.” All of the TLI teachers are college educated, and Teacher Fang has a B.A. in international studies. As a child she lived in Africa. He father was an engineer. One day I came to Teacher Fang distressed.

“Afaa, what’s wrong?”

“I have too much to do and no time for my poetry in English.”

“Afaa, you have written something very poetic in your journal in that section about the rain we have been having. Why don’t you write poems in Chinese?”

Teacher Fang is the person who carried me along into the real transition into Chinese, with the compassionate love of teacher and student. So that was my beginning, sitting there looking helplessly into my teacher’s eyes, feeling all the anxiety of dependency as an older man negotiating with a strong-willed and determined Chinese feminist. The director of the school gave me her two most aggressive teachers as she was determined to make this the best learning experience for me and in the Chinese way. One does not question the teacher. I submitted to my teacher and to the rain, the notorious Taiwanese rainfall which comes almost daily in late winter as we prepare for spring. The spring rain is sometimes called mei yu or plum rain.

For me, I take the Keatsian description of the act of writing poetry as a greater intuitive way and a lesser intuitive way. The greater intuitive way is waiting for the poem to emerge, sometimes from an emotional moment different from the other currents of any given day, and this is more the vatic way of eros and divine madness. The lesser way is that of a more deliberate and conscious sculpting, not so much affected by eros and the Dionysian swirling. The two ways feel like writing on water and carving in stone. The space of creativity is filled with the languages we know, if I may extend this now outward from myself and make polite presumptions onto the spaces of other poets, and the sounds and images evoked by these spaces for me becomes the associational mix, the palette from which the poem emerges at times and at other times from which I pull the poem. The creative act itself is a translatability of experience and ideas, from what they are, as such, to the form of poetry, of literary art. I do believe that poetry is thought, and, thinking now of Pinker’s phrase “mentalese” for the language of thought, poetry exists in these fragments or bits, floating as they do in images. This is the sea of creativity as I see it, and this thought or mentalese is what led to my first successful poem in Chinese. I was writing to the subject of language with the view of the Pacific from Taiwan’s eastern coast in mind.

He Nan Temple, the setting for “Sea Shore,” is in Hualien, on Taiwan’s eastern coast. The gate to the temple is approximately 100 yards from the Pacific shoreline.

Testing the water meant questioning my ability to think in Chinese, challenging my fears. In terms of fluency, that means not just the sounds but the characters, the writing system. So fluency taken to another level became the challenge of acquiring a level of comfort in the language such that I could create a field of association.. It takes some degree of formal study and interaction with native speakers to begin to create a field of associations, which is to say enough of a vocabulary and idiomatic awareness to be able to move creatively. After five years of study, my textbooks indicate that I have learned 5,000 characters, but that is usually not enough to begin a field of associations without the aid of a dictionary and to move in the creative process to a place in Chinese that does not sound so much like English in its associations.

To internalize the characters means to spend time writing them by hand, the old process which has yet to be surpassed by computer assisted learning. There is something about the physicality of taking an hour or so a day to sit and write characters repeatedly, say ten repetitions per character. The formation of the characters in the correct order of the strokes with attention to the radicals, or smaller components that go into each character, places them more firmly in the mind. Perhaps because I am a foreign student of the language the visualization of the characters is part of the process of imagining the poem, and this does not happen for me in English. In English I only do image and sound association, and the imagery is of places, people, and things. But in Chinese to all that is added the visual imagery of the word itself, and I am not sure if this is true for native speakers, although learning the characters is as difficult for them as children as they are for me as an older foreign student.

The retention of Chinese characters is dependent upon their usage. In studying Chinese I have found I retain the characters to the extent to which I practice writing them by hand. Recognition of the characters is obviously essential to being able to read Chinese, but this level of retention in no way guarantees the ability to reconstruct them in writing by hand as opposed to copying them from a text. This is the higher level of fluency, where one can write exactly what one says in conversation or compose a letter without the aid of dictionaries. Chinese software makes it easier to write in Chinese, but the ease that it offers with online dictionaries and other aids does not aid full retention. Computers erase the physicality of studying Chinese, which has been ingrained in the culture over the centuries.

In conversations with Chinese academic friends, they have told me that as a result of using computers to do work in Chinese and/or English they are forgetting the characters. So in writing my first Chinese poem I employed the greater intuitive process, waiting for the correct mix of mentalese to emerge in a matrix I could then recognize as a poem’s beginnings.

I composed it over the course of a few days, drafting and redrafting as I went along, and through all of it I searched for words whose sound I found pleasing and which I thought followed the mental image of the Pacific ocean as it lies just outside the gates of the He Nan Temple in Hualien. The central idea of the poem as it occurred to me is that language is an ocean whose consciousness is greater than our own, and that idea existed simultaneously in my mind with a rendering of the Daoist perception of the internal body as a natural world, complete with mountains, rivers, buildings, wheels, and other things contained in the world outside us.

The water imagery in the poem I further associated with Daoism as it pertains to the creation of saliva in the process of doing Taijiquan. Taijiquan is one of the oldest physical expressions of Daoism and can be seen as one of the treasures of Chinese culture. While doing the exercise, one must push the front part of the tongue up behind the upper palate so that the tongue takes the shape of a fountain, and this positioning increases the flow of saliva or “water.” The movement through the form physically along with the concentrated thought fills the mouth with saliva which must then be swallowed as the Daoist regimen of cultivating the Qi (pronounced chee) depends of mixing the saliva with the flow of breath and blood as the breathing must be from the diaphragm in the manner of opera singers and babies. In this way two Daoist principles emerge, that of becoming as a child and the notion that in moving a Taiji player is like a rushing river. In stillness one is like a mountain. In other words, the mentalese preceding the creation of the poem is stillness, or the mountain, and creation of the poem is the rushing river.

Sound emerges in the poem in the form of the song heard in the ocean, the sound of language. I depict this song as one which is most audible when one is in tune with nature’s harmony in the way animals can sense vibrations and disturbances in normal circumstances long before most human beings.

This is the final draft of the poem in Chinese with a literal translation:

海邊 Sea Shore

我想的時候 1 When I think

下雨了 2 it rains

什麼都是說話 3 everything is speech

一种語言好像海 4 Language is like the sea

在海邊我站著 5 I stand at the sea shore

看看中文的海裡 6 and look at the sea of Chinese

天空有一首歌 7 The sky has a song

這是誰的聲音﹖ 8 Whose voice is it?

在世界上 9 In the world

大家覺得海總是 10 everyone feels the sea always

唱了。我們不認識 11 sings. We do not know

海﹐可是海認識 12 the sea, but the sea knows

我們。為什麼﹖ 13 us. Why?

我想的時候 14 When I think

下雨了 15 it rains.

That is with the traditional graphemes, which I used in composing the poem. What follows is the poem in simplified characters. I hope to show some of the visual impact of reading the two different systems while suggesting some consideration of what this might mean in the creative process. With a more recondite memory of a large number of graphemes it is easier to compose without the aid of dictionaries, and I am suggesting here that the greater fascination with the appearance of the character is for the foreign student of the language, although one certainly should not dismiss the emphasis in Chinese culture traditionally on studying calligraphy by rewriting ancient poems. In a calligraphy class today one would typically spend many hours practicing writing Tang or Song dynasty classics with meticulous attention given to each character.

海边 Sea Shore

我想的时候 1 When I think

下雨了 2 it rains

什么都是说话 3 everything is speech

一种语言好像海 4 Language is like the sea

在海边我站著 5 I stand at the sea shore

看看中文的海里 6 and look at the sea of Chinese

天空有一首歌 7 The sky has a song

这是谁的声音？ 8 Whose voice is it?

在世界上 9 In the world

大家觉得海总是 10 everyone feels the sea always

唱了。我们不认识 11 sings. We do not know

海，可是海认识 12 the sea, but the sea knows

我们。为什么？ 13 us. Why?

我想的时候 14 When I think

下雨了 15 it rains.

Translation and Identity

It would seem that integration and wholeness of the experiential self requires me to give up the idea that poems I write in English are Chinese enough to warrant translation and are therefore not poems but extensions of my method of studying the language, and there might be some evidence of that if we reread my entry into writing poems in Chinese as an assignment from my teacher. It is in this “doubting space” that notions of culture and race enter and I am reminded of Countee Cullen’s observation that it is indeed a marvel that even a black person can write poetry in English, that first language. The doubting space is also a “troubling space” as it has to be deprogrammed in order to continue my studies because to go forward with racially tinged presumptions would make the project one of disproving false notions. So it occurs to me to further edit Cullen and note that it is a curious thing indeed to emerge from the deep structure to the surface and see that one has maintained one’s identity and is indeed a poet again. It is imperative to move forward with a firm notion of how language works inside me, which is to say my function in any language, which is to say that I am a poet first and foremost.

So the questions remain. Am I writing poems in Chinese or just translating my English mentalese into Chinese? If so I have to challenge the idea of mentalese. Or am I writing poems in Chinese and therefore bypassing the English and moving from the language of thought to Chinese? If so, the extent to which I am doing so should be gauged by my increasing inability to translate my own original poems in Chinese. What am I saying and to whom am I speaking? If I take Benjamin’s idea that an adequate translation of the original comes in its afterlife, then my movements into English from the Chinese are complete and not simply an extension of the creative process, the exercising of the brain’s instinct for language. 1

Rendering the English version of this poem proved to be quite difficult. In writing the Chinese there was a definite space in consciousness, the “feeling” of creative inspiration that was impossible to capture in English. Of course, the sound was not to be had in English. It seemed I was having all the problems we know of in translation except that the author of the text in the original language was myself. In choosing words in the original version, I often made sonic choices just as I do in English, and the verbal play or “babbling to myself mentally” that I do in both languages was impossible to recreate in English. So I settled for trying to bring into English the meaning of the poem. I thought I had made a successful walk into acquiring Chinese, and my Chinese readers were impressed, I think.

I have yet to get beyond some responses of Chinese readers to my work as it being “Englishy,” and truthfully, I am a bit afraid of getting beyond that test. There are parts of English Me, the prejudices of being born into a language, which I am unwilling to abandon, as if that is really possible. Inherent in all of this is the question of what it means to be Chinese, whether there is such a thing as cultural membership through participation or whether membership can only be the generosity of an honorary title.

However, “Sea Shore” is less Englishy than some later poems I wrote during that time in Taiwan when I used dictionaries to search for words that matched the poetic inspiration. It seems that “Sea Shore” was close enough to an experience I have in other places in gazing at oceans and seas and had enough accessible vocabulary and theoretical references that I could launch my imagination into the poem without the limiting and awkward steps of a student of the language. The translation that occurs no matter what language a poet uses is the translation form the creative moment into language. It is as if one is a child again truly, which is to say you move back as far as you can to the place where you are beginning to negotiate with the world outside you, taking on the painful lesson that you are not the world, that there is a boundary at the edges of your skin that require the establishment and assertion of an ego force so that you can get the things you want and need. So this negotiation requires learning the language of the world beyond your infantile skin. Octavio Paz wrote “When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate…”

Chomsky’s deep surface emerges as the full and wet tongue of the sea with the air of the roof of the mouth above it, and the whole thing the seat of consciousness, the mind as it were, of a language and a culture, and I stand gazing at it as one who is looking to learn what is perhaps new, or as one looking to see his own self reflected in the moweving waters and echoed in the song in the air above. To learn I have to find the beginnings of the sea inside myself so as to connect like entities and begin the pulsating rhythm of informing my own consciousness with its latent ability to function in Chinese, the new language. Taking language as instinct in accordance with computational theories of language, I have to attune the mentalese that some think is the language of all thought so that it manifests as a language that, at times, seems to be the opposite of English, which is to say learning Chinese feels like a massive rewiring of the brain. In the times that I have felt this rewiring to be discovery I have wondered “how” identity matters.

In Chinese the poem arises to the surface from the deep, and in translation the question becomes “Where is the origin of the translation?” In a poem by a native speaker it is understood that the translation into English is best done by a native speaker in English, so must I become alienated from my English self in order to write in Chinese? Then the great monolith of an unanswerable question arises. "What is the self?" It is easier to query the sound of one hand clapping.

The translation of the poem presents the more intriguing and challenging aspects of this project of bilingual writing as it pertains to rewiring and identity. There is the fundamental question of whether this project actually can be called bilingual writing, as to be bilingual is a matter of acquiring a certain fluency in the acquired language, and as I discovered during the process of attempting to translate this poem, fluency is an ongoing project. Each grapheme presents difficult choices, but there are certain difficult spaces in the poem that present questions ranging from the origin of language to questions of cultural identity. What it means to be Chinese is a larger question, one beyond any level of pretension I would dare muster, but it does arise alongside the search for fluency.

However, it is important to note how it felt to write the poem, the emotional content of this creative and perhaps translatable space. There is the sense of attempting to grasp an other inside oneself while simultaneously acknowledging that the investment of a lifetime in English will not be erased by the new language. Yet there the difference between the two languages, the move to another writing system and to a language that is tonal, is a difference that can make the distances between languages a more palpable thing. One must travel a great distance to Chinese from English, a distance greater than that from English to French, for example. Chinese and English are more unlike each other, connected as they are by the language of thought and universal grammar, if we accept computational theories of language. For example, Chaofen Sun notes that in Chinese there is no word for word. The closest grapheme is ci: 2

词詞

The process of studying Chinese begins with the rudimentary acts of learning what something in English means in Chinese, and it progresses to where one must take on, as it were, words, phrasings, and expressions that have no translation into English. To know these untranslatable aspects of Chinese, you must know the contexts in which they are use and accept that there is no way to know these varieties of meaning outside Chinese culture. Learning the language is to envision a stranger inside yourself who emerges from your own ego, and to write poetry in Chinese is to breathe that stranger’s breath, and this idea of strangeness is related, I think, to the impact of anthropology and sociology in conjunction with theory, all of which have helped us accept the notions of cultural difference. Paz put it eloquently when he wrote, “Translation had once served to reveal the preponderance of similarities over differences; from this time (the modern age) forward translation would serve to illustrate the irreconcilability of differences, whether these stem from the foreignness of the savage or of our neighbor.”

We recognize the foreignness of our neighbors when we hear them speak, and I would like to end this section of the essay with a visual representation of the word for speak, for speak as in ‘to talk or speak word,” and the word for language. Again, the simplified characters are on the left, and the traditional characters are on the right. The Chinese word for speak is shuo, while talk or speak word is shuo hua, and language is yu yan:

说說

Speak shuo shuo

说话說話

Speak Word shuo hua shuo hua

语言語言

Language yu yan yu yan

As a foreign student of the language, the Chinese characters or graphemes themselves exert a certain allure to me. At times I feel the study of the writing system is similar to studying art, especially in calligraphy where one can spend hours writing and rewriting a short ancient poem in squares on the practice page, looking to have the correct proportional relationships between the different parts of the characters. It is this calling, this speaking that the written language has for many foreign students that brings the poet with his license into the dance of whatever it is that connects all languages, the language of thought or some as yet undiscovered entity inside what we call reality. Most importantly, I think, is the truth of the poet’s work in language, which is that he, more so than other literary workers, is closest to thought, to the dance of mentalese as it is configured by poetic inspiration.

Parsing an Ending

“Baby born talking describes heaven…”

氣 is Qi...

Pinker quotes the Sun tabloid in noting the child prodigy, and his quote on communication comes from his explanation of the science of “pragmatics” or how “sentences are woven into a discourse and interpreted in context” in English, but I would like to appropriate it here as the beginning of an ending. Babbling in infants, according to Pinker, is the method by which they teach themselves the physiognomy of speech as well as the patterns for forming grammatical structures, and for me this babbling is the verbal play in a field of association that I mentioned above as part of the process of composing a poem. It is something I try to do only in private, as I would not want to end up in a tabloid described as Old man babbling describes heaven. However, writing poems in Chinese sometimes feels like grasping for the starry heavens. 3

Perhaps the babbling is that of a bubbling brook, an earthly version of the river of forgetfulness that washes the memories away as we enter a new incarnation, and in that way perhaps it is possible to imagine oneself as walking into the clothing of a new identity in studying Chinese. However, in Chinese culture especially, it seems that the culture goes to the marrow of the bone. Aspects of the culture form an intricate weaving of a complex assemblage held together in concentric fashion by a powerful electromagnetic core. Confucian ideas of centering in the culture were brought home to me in my first visit to Beijing. On a tour to ancient sites, we were taken to the Temple of God and shown a stone that one emperor said it is the center of the earth. Indeed, it seems that Chinese thinking asserts that all things come to China, as in all roads lead to Rome. However, China is vastly different from the ancient western mecca. Values and perceptions do seem opposite at times, and the more I learn about the culture the more I come to question Americans’ understanding of it. Also, I fear the misunderstandings.

It is as if the concentric reality of Chinese culture and language defy the grafting that happens when Americans borrow from other cultures. It could be said that America itself is a borrowing, but the degree of difference between American and Chinese culture is made more intense by the complex way things are layered around central ideas in Chinese. For example, Daoism (Taoism) is a popular subject in American and other western cultures, but I doubt if many people would accept that simply reading Laozi can not lead one to anything other than a superficial understanding and not a realization of the Dao. Daoism is a hotly contested subjected in Chinese culture, as one poet in Beijing told me that Daoism is fantasy. Still another maintained that it is natural perception. In Taiwan the ideas are just as varied or perhaps more so. While studying Taijiquan with Master Xiong Hui in Taiwan at the behest of the Taiwan Fulbright office. Xiong Hui is the Taiji teacher for Cloud Gate, Taiwan’s premier dance company. He explained to the class the essential quality of氣 (Qi) as it relates to Taijiquan, the crown jewel of Chinese culture.

“If you understand Qi 氣, you understand Chinese culture.”

Calligraphy in Chinese requires the breath and is thus the stream of life. A calligrapher who knows Qigong, the art of cultivating the Qi, will know an aspect of the culture that is addressed as far back as Confucius and beyond to an unknown point in antiquity. The act of belonging in Chinese culture is more an embodiment than an act. So, on one hand, it is quite ridiculous to think one may become Chinese, but, on the other hand, for me the thrill of dancing in the language is made more exciting and fulfilling by an involvement in the culture that goes back thirty-four years to the moment a friend gave me the invaluable gift of a copy of the Dao de Jing by Laozi, or Laozi, as the book is sometimes referred to in Chinese. For me the study of the language is a process moving toward an imagined act of completion. The process is the speaker, and the destination is the beckoning listener standing at the edge of the deepness of deep structure, the alluring worlds of oceans and seas of language.

Notes

1. This is from the Harry Zohn’s translation of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator.”

2. Chaofen Sun notes that in Chinese “…the notion of ‘word’…is neither a particularly intuitive concept nor easily defined.” P. 46

3. Pinker writes “There is more going on in children’s minds than what comes out of their mouths.” He further notes, the odds against an older person acquiring another language are part of “senescence,” the inevitable frailty of old age. P. 272

Bibliography

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind.

Fairbank, John King and Goldman, Merle. China/ A New History.

Cambridge: Harvard UP. 2001.

Loewen, James W. The Mississippi Chinese. Long Grove: Waveland Press.

1971.

Packard, Jerome L. The morphology of Chinese: a linguistic and cognitive

approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct/ How the Mind Creates Language.

New York: Harper Perennial. 1994.

Pinker, Steven. Words and Rules/ The Ingredients of Language. New

York: Harper Perennial. 1999.

Schulte, Rainer and John Biguenet. Theories of Translation. Chicago:

Chicago UP. 1992.

Sun, Chaofen. Chinese/ A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. 2006.

Timoczko, Maria and Edwin Gentzler. Translation and Power. Boston: U

of Massachusetts Press. 2002.

2009-11-14T18:42:00.000-08:00

Meditations on Michael S. Harper’s Use Trouble

Use Trouble by Michael S. Harper

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Afaa Michael Weaver

November 14, 2009

Michael S. Harper’s most recent collection of poetry is Use Trouble, a glance over many years, a peering into the spaces between chance and opposition, between no way out and the promise of change.

When he told me about his new book about it in an email exchange, I ordered it immediately. I was in Taiwan and had it shipped to my office in Boston. Later I settled back into my apartment here in Somerville and sat at my kitchen table holding it in my hands the way I do when a friend puts a gift into the world this way, a new book. I mark the time that I have known Harper as beginning in the fall semester of 1986, when I sat in his Volvo with him and his daughter Rachel as he lectured me on the need to know metrics, as meter is to poetry what the notation of sound is to music. He later told me that I would find the assignments for his graduate poetry workshop in my mailbox. He put trouble in my line that evening. He launched me into his rigorous pedagogy... the metric exercises , the lectures, the meditations on craft and form.

So I sat at my kitchen table and felt the inspiration to write about the man I have known for twenty-three years, the poet, the teacher the mentor, the friend.

That night we sat in the Volvo we were on Thayer Street, Brown University’s main campus drag for hanging out. On that same street a few weeks later, I stood one morning waiting in line in a convenience store to pay for a snack. It was just a five minute walk from the graduate dormitory where I lived in my second year in the writing program. In Baltimore I had made history, graduating from years of factory work with a dual diploma, one a book in Charles Rowell’s Callaloo series and the other a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It had not been done before, at least not in Baltimore where I had a acquired a certain fame, so much so that one friend questioned why I even wanted to go to graduate school. Jonetta Barras, now a Washington journalist, believed I had already acquired, at the tender age of thirty-three, enough skills and way with the hand--creative mojo in poetry--to be able to go out into the world. I thought otherwise. I felt I needed time to read, think, and get a set of licenses, some high powered backing before heading into academia. As Bob Greene, a Baltimore journalist, said to me, “A nickel and talent won’t get you into the circus.”

It was a bright morning in early fall of 1986, some twenty-three years ago, and I turned around to see Michael S. Harper standing behind me. He is a good two inches taller and a good deal heavier, but there he was, as silent as a cat, and when I turned around he smiled that smile that is mostly mischief and which those of us who have studied with him know very well. It is also the smile of the little boy who hooked school to ride the subways of New York alone in the forties, worrying his mother and striking out in a bold way into the world in the way black poets have had to do for so long. It is also the smile of a father.

Three years earlier, in 1983, the original manuscript of my first book of poetry had been chosen as a finalist by Harper for the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American poets. There were forty finalists out of over a thousand applicants, and the poet who won was my age and has since passed away. His name was Christopher Gilbert. Gilbert was a fine poet, and I regret never having had the chance to meet him. The notice of my finalist ranking came when I was living in a house that I rented with the option to buy. My wife loved the house and wanted to buy it, but the marriage did not have enough collateral. It had instead accrued excessive damage, or trouble. I made note of Harper’s name in the letter announcing my finalist standing, as I had read his work in journals, and I thought it might be good to go where he was teaching. When I saw that George Bass was also at Brown, I began assembling my application materials. In the warehouse where I worked, my coworkers laughed themselves silly when I told them I had applied to Brown University. I had been in factory work for fourteen years and was the janitor in the place.

Harper walked with me outside that morning at the store, and on our way up the street he talked about his struggle with bourgeois opposition in academia. His way of teaching is his way of being. If you listen and watch, you will see and understand what is otherwise too often indecipherable. He loves metaphors and signs, pieces of things, suggestions of what can be real. He is a lover of history, and if you enter that stream with him in conversation, you can walk with him along important paths, paths whose importance are known to many poets. At the Cave Canem retreat in the old monastery, its first meeting ground before moving to Pennsylvania, Harper relayed a conversation he had at Tuskegee with an elderly man who was a disciple of Booker T. Washington. Harper recounted the man’s reverence for Washington, who has beend dead for nearly a century. The message there was about historical continuity...and trouble.

When I read at the 92nd Street Y in New York for Karl Kirchwey some years ago, it was with Elizabeth Alexander, and it was around the time of the publication of her first book. Harper introduced us. Later in an outer room, a young white woman poet posed an academic question in a gesture suggesting an invitation to intellectual sparring, and I responded quickly with a reference to a Yoruba entity, something she did not know. Harper said as he as said to me on other occasions, “Well done, Michael.”

The man had already reinforced in me something I had suspected for many years, namely the political nature of the power of knowledge. What is important to other people may not be important or useful to me. The reverence given to a body of knowledge is one thing. My need to know a certain set of knowledge in order to pursue my writing is quite another cause for reverence.

In speaking of trouble, we can say the configuration of the relative power of knowledge can constitute trouble. There are all kinds of trouble.

There is age, life’s dwindling away.

At the Dodge festival at Waterloo in 1994, Harper and Lucille Clifton were in the hotel with me, and I had already known Lucille for nearly twenty years. Now I was chauffeur for both of them. One morning I drove us to the site of the festival, where I would keep Harper company. At one point we sat in the car and listened to the radio, a piece by Coltrane. It was 1994, and I had never taken the time to be very literate in music, literate enough to name the piece I am listening to in most cases, but Harper knew, of course.

“That’s Naima,” he said.

In the spring of my first year at Brown I took Piano and Theory with Nancy Rosenberg as an audit and preparation for research project in the blues and black theater history. So when I met Harper I had learned to read and write music, although my compositions were simplistic and in no way memorable. With Harper I began to think of prosody’s “significance” as comparable to that of music theory, but I discovered it as a process that I am still engaged in, still meditating on improvisation and abstractions in language. When it comes to naming the composition I am listening to, I am still not literate enough to name the tune.

The visual analogue of the melodic phrase of my time at the Dodge festival was a video clip of me walking behind Harper, a video that was part of Bill Moyer’s special on the festival. A student of mine from Rutgers was beside me, a woman who decided to study with me after reading a poem I wrote about Pearl Bailey. Her name was Karen, and there the two of us were, trailing behind Harper in the way of lineage, walking along as if on the rim of some mountain range or the edge of a perfect triad before it diminishes itself and becomes a blue note.

Poets gather and we are often glad to see one another, a joy that grows as I age, as I realize ambition is more trouble than I want these days. But the word is no good if it just sits in my home. I have to get up and get engaged. The world needs me to be who we are, all of us, wherever we are in meter or the way we make note of sound and its regular or irregular life, its consonance and its dissonance.

The morning in the store on Thayer Street is one I treasure. I say “thank goodness” because it allows me to enjoy the man’s presence. If we have ever disagreed or argued or not spoken, it has been because I wanted his attention, and it has been because it is the way men like us communicate, black men who have had to stare down death in dangerous places. We are much as we were in that store on Thayer Street as poets, here today and for certain not here at some unforeseeable point in the future, although these heavy footsteps we make as two big black men are also the heavy steps we make as wordsmiths, beating out these things called poems in blacksmith shops of the mind that are hot and dangerous with the melting of life and worlds in life so that we can hammer them out on anvils. We name these anvils creativity and courage.

2009-08-28T06:04:00.000-07:00

O Black and Unknown Bards, How Do We Love Thee?

Let Us Count the Ways...

“I am writing by the pound...”

Langston Hughes to Arna Bontemps

September 27, 1952

-- Afaa Michael Weaver

“I am writing by the pound,” Hughes wrote to his longtime friend Arna Bontemps. Hughes was in his 50th year of life, with fifteen more active years before his death, and I was not quite one year old. Now at 57, I sense a need to once again take a cue from the old master and be busier at my work. In that same letter Hughes told Bontemps he had shipped some twenty pounds of manuscripts, including all five drafts of his play Simply Heavenly, to Yale University, the repository for his papers.

It was the seriousness with which he took himself as a writer that has so inspired me in my life. It was a seriousness that George Houston Bass, my late mentor, worked to instill more solidly in me. Bass had been one of Hughes’ secretaries, and Hughes named him the executor of his literary estate. I was receiving transmission from Hughes through Bass, an experience I now value more than I did at the time. It was 1985, and I was thirty-three years old.

In a moment of splendor, sitting as I was in his office there in the African American Studies building at Brown, I looked around to my left and upwards to the top of Professor Bass’s bookcase. He was explaining to me that Langston Hughes was very much with us. Some of his ashes were in the room. As often as I have told this story, I have gotten smiles and chuckles each time, but the solemnity of the moment will not go away for me when I am alone and thinking of how things have been passed on, the gift of knowledge and warnings of trials and challenges.

“Hughes fathered me in the way that I am fathering you. Your responsibility as a poet is to bring the respect of the critics to the masses because you come from Blackbottom.” Bass was an intense man, and when he focused on me that way with those heavy eyebrows of his attuned like a hawk, the southern son in me was all obedience.

Professor Bass was trying to get me to understand the significance of class in my own life. All full of expectations about getting an ivy league degree and being a professor, I was not quite sure of what to do with those feet of mine so firmly rooted in the ground of the working class. At the time that Hughes’ father sent him off to Columbia, my grandparents were southern sharecroppers, and my father’s grandparents lived in a log cabin packed with mud and outfitted with wooden sliding windows.

Hughes was a member of the black middle class, a fact I brought to the attention of a white scholar at a conference not too long ago, someone who dismissed my comment by saying, “That adds nothing to the discussion of black poetry.”

His comment adds a great deal to what I already suspect about the tapestry of African American poetry, which is that it is largely unknown and misunderstood across the racial board, as I think there are very few younger black poets who have really let the lives of the dead black poets inform their own lives and work. Poets generally fade in the minds of young poets caught in their ambitions and the dead come to be regarded less and less as direct influences.

I use the word tapestry as I avoid the word “tradition” these days. Tradition seems to imply more or less an adherence to principles which are set forth to insure the continuation of something, and that is perhaps where the aforementioned scholar lives in his own critical world, a place where expansiveness is not to be had. His attitude is akin to one even more limiting, which is that poetry by African Americans is in its own world, something apart from the mainstream. It seems to me that such a view guarantees the stasis of all American poetry, when the truth is that black poetry has always informed and energized American poetry in ways similar to the effects of black demands on the democratic system. Democracy has been taken to task by black folk who have continually asked it to prove itself. Black poets have taken democracy to task. These challenges to America’s ideals have benefited everyone in this country and beyond.

Kelly Miller, part of the old guard at Howard University, would have something to say about the supposed monolith of black American culture, as would his daughter Mae Miller, a poet and playwright herself, a gentle little old lady with whom I had lunch as part of a reading I gave in 1985 at the Library of Congress at the invitation of Gwendolyn Brooks.

She could not eat all of her lunch, and she did not want to waste it. “Here,” she said, “you can have my soup.”

Gwendolyn Brooks was hosting me for the event and was at the other end of the table. She looked down to get a fix on what Mae was trying to do to me. It was all rather harmless, so Gwen left me to the task of eating the soup, which was Ms. Miller’s gift to me.

We should all inherit sustenance. We should all value the gift of literary soup. In its heyday, Howard University had the brown bag test for social life. Folks darker than a brown paper bag were not allowed in certain social sets. There was the Jack and Jill Club. The dirty secrets of color and hierarchy in the early formation of the black middle class are still pretty much secrets, an area too prone to bickering and hearsay for any but the most brave and perhaps foolhardy of scholars to tread. Nonetheless, it is an important aspect of cultural self-knowledge and awareness.

I could very easily say I wish more white poets and critics knew much more about the tapestry of African American poetry, but it is more the responsibility of African American poets to know the distances between historicity and intimacy, to know just how much the history of black poets before them informs and challenges their present circumstance. One should take up the difficult charge of honoring a tradition that was held to be substandard and honor it in a way that leads to the expansive growth of American poetry as a whole. It is not easy, and many have written about it, including Derek Walcott with his trope of the literary houseboy.

However substandard these dead black poets were thought to be, they were the embattled wellspring that is indispensable to the definition of America’s poetry. I do not believe an aesthetic that denies them will stand, nor do I believe an aesthetic that refuses to move on from that historical base will stand either. Cultural and racial groups have to define their own humanity. If others write the African American narratives and name what they see as commonalities in the lives of blacks and whites, the door is left wide open to the denial of the genuine role of racial prejudice in American life.

The discussion of class does not eliminate race, but it can illumine it, make it accessible to a broader critique. There is a story of race, class, and privilege inside black culture that is waiting to be addressed. Langston Hughes was a middle class African American who wrote of ordinary folk as an observer filled with love for the poor and the working poor. Separated as he was from them by education and family circumstance, he maintained his own sense of cultural responsibility in his work. His faith was that his work would be a structure that the unborn poets would one day use. That is a profound commitment to the writing life.

Professor Bass told me of the evening walks they would take through Harlem. Afterwards at his home, Mr. Hughes would ask him to talk about what he saw. Then Hughes would give his view of the neighborhood that evening.

“Well George, this is what I saw.” Mr. Hughes went on to explain Harlem as he saw it. It was the work of an observer, but it was also the work of someone who very much knew he was a member of a specific cultural group facing very clear obstacles configured by racism.

We should all know our origins. That’s easy. What’s not easy is knowing where we are in a country where the obstacles are not what they once were. However, I maintain that no matter how clear your course seems to you as a poet, there is something to be had in loving those black poets who are now gone, and loving them as part of who you are, even if you no longer think race so much defines your life.

I believe the ironic power of race and racism is rooted in denial of the same. The suspension of race as a concept has to be rooted in a complex critique of it, not by simply declaring your transcendence over it. At this point in history, that critique depends on the honest confrontation of class and privilege as very real forces within the African American literary community, for better and for worse.

“Tell me, what do you see?”

2009-08-11T06:13:00.000-07:00

Procter & Gamble's Baltimore Plant

(now a day care center for Yuppies)

When Poets Grow in Factories

Afaa Michael Weaver

蔚雅風

August 11, 2009

My first experience in a creative writing class was as a visitor. Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew, allowed me to sit in on his class. It was 1980, and he introduced me to a number of poets, including Frank O’Hara.

I complained to Rodger that I felt alienated from poetry as a factory worker.

“Nonsense, Michael. Your poetry is all around you.”

I thought he was just being flippant. “I don’t know about that, Rodger. Trucks and machines don’t seem very poetic to me.”

But I took his advice and began writing about that world around me. An earlier manuscript became my first book, Water Song, with poems like “Currents” and “The Aftermath,” a poem which Gwen Brooks told me was a favorite of hers.

Immediacy was the lesson, and I learned it from Rodger Kamenetz. He was teaching the creative writing class at Baltimore Community College. O’Hara’s aesthetic of personism and his poem “The Day Lady Died” have been touchstones for me in thinking of immediacy and the American lyric.

It might be hard to imagine liquid dishwashing detergent as something dirty. It seems to be the enemy of dirt. Even when you are too lazy to scour a pot the way you should after you have burned your frozen vegetables, you can take the charred pot and soak it overnight with your detergent of choice. As you sleep, the little bubbles pull out their miniature scouring pads and get busy softening the dark clumps of vegetable burned beyond recognition. Such a powerful agent in a nice place like a kitchen should never be thought of as dirty, but when you work in a place making and packing the stuff, it seems foul beyond redemption sometimes.

It was the early years of the seventies, when polyester came into our lives along with disco. I worked on packing floors at Procter & Gamble’s Baltimore plant in Locust Point, one of the many points along Baltimore’s harbor. Directly across from the plant on the other side of the harbor is Fells Point, which is now a tourist hub, hardly the run of the mill southern Baltimore neighborhood it was during my childhood.

My packing floor career had its high point when I became apprentice to Smithers, an older, white coworker who hunted black bear and had bear sandwiches for lunch sometimes. His wife made the best fruit cake, and I always chose that when he offered me cake or bear between the bread. Smithers was a master paper cutter. He taught me how to use the large iron paper cutter in the Ivory soap department to precisely cut the small sheets that were the inner covers for every bar of soap. We cut these sheets from large slabs of paper that were so heavy we had to heave them onto the iron table. One slip meant the corners of the large sheets were irreparably misaligned and, therefore, useless. We sat in the empty management meeting room for breaks and for lunch, a room with large clear windows where we could look out over the harbor where the commercial ships passed long before the harbor was remade for the tourists. Christmastime lunches were the time for the dessert.

“Bear sandwich, Mike.”

“No thanks, John, but I’ll take a slice of fruit cake.”

“Here you go, buddy.”

In the fall of 1974, after writing in fits and starts for a few years, I was able to establish more of a consistent writing mood. Writing while working in factories is a matter of being able to maintain that meditation on your work despite all the distractions around you. The danger is that you become attached to adversity. It is only now, twenty-four years after leaving factory life that I find I want spaces in which to do nothing but write. Reading was a violation of factory rules, as was writing. The stated objective was our safety, which I believe. I almost lost a hand on a packing unit. However, the oppressive nature of factory life was such that it felt more like the rules of the Gulag. In the latter nineteenth century, as mass production developed, industrial engineers applied the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment to put forth the idea that factories and factory workers should be perfect machines, one the replica of the other.

It was not to be a place to house developing poets, writers, and thinkers, but there we were, many of us the wide eyed idealists of the sixties who dropped out of universities to take work among the masses, some of us following our own interpretations of Marxist ideology. For me it was not Marxism as much as it was the alienation I felt in a predominantly white university. Whatever the reason for our exodus, there we were in industrial life. In those days, conversations among workers ranged the full spectrum of intellectual inquiry. In 1973, I received my first copy of the Daodejing from a factory coworker.

If I wanted to be a pompous egotist, I would say I set out to create the canon of poetry of working class interiority as resistance to the system. Although I had that as a “hazy aesthetic,” the clearer view of things was given to me by Dr. Xiaojing Zhou, a scholar and critic of Asian American literature at University of the Pacific.

“It seems that’s what you’ve been doing all this time,” she said. We were sitting in her office last spring, during my visit to give a reading and talk to classes.

In the winter of 1974 to ’75, I began to assemble the original version of Water Song, a manuscript I called Frenzy. Determined to finish the bachelor’s degree I started six years earlier at the University of Maryland, I enrolled at Morgan State University, but attending college and working on the lines as a poet was too much for my fragile nervous system. I finished the semester, but spent the last ten years in the factory writing and reading on my own, with mentoring from friends in academia and in the world of writers at large, folks not imprisoned as I was at the time, watching thousands and thousands of white, yellow, and blue plastic bottles going around the conveyor system to be filled with the immaculate soap and then boxed to be sent on the long conveyor ride four blocks up the street to the warehouse.

I can hear the noise of the place now, as I write, although it has been shut down and converted into a day care center for those who can afford the luxury condos that sit on the edge of what was once the warehouse parking lot.

The warehouse was Freedom Land. It was where the plant’s misfits and renegades worked. There was space to roam and hide. We could stretch coffee and lunch breaks on evening and night shifts.

The plant had an internal job application system. Folks went from department to department by applying for vacancies. In the fall of 1975, I was able to get a position in the warehouse as a truck loader. My manuscript was sitting somewhere in Toni Morrison’s pile at Random House, where she was an editor. I had the utter audacity to send it to her, and she kept if for almost a year. When she returned it, she included a wonderful note saying she very much wanted to place it but could not. That rejection note was an inspiration, and I kept it for many years before losing it in one of my moves from place to place.

Things were busy in the warehouse, but there was space, physical space that, for me, translated into thinking space, into the unfettering of consciousness. I was able to write more consistently and began a free lance career as a journalist, writing for the Baltimore Sunpapers mostly but also for the Afro-American and the City Paper of Baltimore. I started a small press, and by the early eighties I was a part of Baltimore’s literary renaissance.

We were poets, with me emerging from the masses of bottles and trucks and boxes, and more bottles and trucks and boxes, and conveyors and machines... and oh my, the business of a poet growing and living as African American working class.

2009-07-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

Rutgers University Afaa Michael Weaver

Camden Campus 蔚雅風

1990-1998

The Angel of Adjunct Awareness

It was in autumn, in the year nineteen eighty-seven, a few months after I walked across the stage and away from graduate school life, away from the pious heaven of access to some of academe’s best libraries, the heady and inspiring culture of what was, at that time, the most popular undergraduate culture in the country and one of the most popular and competitive writing programs. I didn’t think much about what life would be like outside the campus green, despite the fifteen years of factory work. It was a grand performance in willful forgetting, I suppose, as I even tried to finagle a way to stay at Brown University in the way of a doctorate program, but I waited too late for such a thing and so was cast out onto the outer planets away from the center of the universe. I sat at a lunch table at Essex County Community College in Newark, N.J., munching a homemade turkey sandwich with lettuce but no tomatoes as I could not stand a soggy sandwich in those days of struggle. It must have been the unhappy munching face I made, but whatever the signal I was soon in the presence of The Angel of Adjunct Awareness.

He was a poet. He is a poet. Even today he descends at the most propitious moments to show me he is still prescient.

In his unassuming way, he got quickly to the business of a poet not having much to do in the way of work and needing money to pay bills.

“Do you want to know how to get work in the city?”

Of course, the city was New York City. It was a vision of heaven, bigger name universities, standing before the unwashed masses of students and expounding on some really interesting subject. It was the prospect of getting out of the textbooks for composition and into content courses.

“You look like you could use some help,” he said.

“Oh yes.”

He began to outline the process, telling how to arrange my vita and what times were best to approach department heads looking for work. I was excited and came home to tell my wife there was a chance to break into the metropolis, although we had no chance of moving. I would have to take the NJ Transit train from East Orange to the PATH train. In those days the PATH went into the World Trade Center. It was still the late eighties, before the first bombing of the building.

I had luck right away. In my first attempt, I landed work at Borough of Manhattan Community College, which was still composition but in a new environment, and I thought I had reached the first level of nirvana when I got two courses at NYU. One was the undergraduate course in African American Drama, and the other was an undergraduate Creative Writing course. Mark Rudman and I taught the undergrad poetry workshops under Sharon Olds. I thought I had arrived, but times were still tough. There were challenges that tried a poet’s courage, such as being in the city at night with a token and some very spare and sparse change.

However, it was magical at times, too. My wife at the time, Aissatou Mijiza-Weaver, found work at the Ukrainian high school near St. Mark’s Place, and when we our schedules allowed, we often walked to dinner at one of the Indian restaurants between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. We were young enough, in our late thirties, for it to seem like something of an adventure. She is a painter, sculptor, and art critic, and we spent a lot of time in the world of visual artists. She also worked at the Strand bookstore, which counted among its other prestigious employees none other than the poet Tom Weatherly. The neighborhood’s magic was deepened by the presence of University books, a unique place on the 8th floor of 10th Street, or thereabouts. My memory is a little fuzzy on the address. That store consisted of rare and precious books scattered around with the owner sitting in the midst of everything in his peculiar chair. Prominent scholars from all over made the mecca to this odd place to find books only he had. Now it is gone.

My students were mostly wonderful. The classroom became a place where I could both test myself and feel as if I was making a real contribution, and I usually I loved being with my students. At NYU I conceived and taught the first graduate course in black poetry ever offered at the university. Some of my students later ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project for awhile. In Newark I managed to become the writing consultant for Seton Hall law school, and in the summers that job became the director of the writing division for a summer program for people aspiring to enter law school in the fall. They were eager students, many of them near my age, and I was moved many times by the hunger they had for a law degree.

Teaching had its challenges, for sure, and there was always the challenge of trying to figure the space between my working class experience and whatever this space was that consisted of riding the NY subways for much of the day. I often felt out of place and inadequate. I could still hear the whir of machines and trucks as if they were next to me there as I rode the #2 subway line to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. For a few semesters I taught composition at Brooklyn College, and the adjunct office was across the hall from the office of Allen Ginsberg and John Ashberry. I never saw them, but each time I glanced over at the door I had a long way to go, despite the fame I accrued in Baltimore as some kind of working class hero poet. I was in the bigger, wider world now, and making less than I made in the factory and with none of the benefits. The lack of health insurance especially bothered me.

However, there I was in the Big Apple, and my tenure track position at Rutgers was only two years away. That would come when another friend brought the job opening to my attention. Robert Philipson was doing a post-doc at NYU in African literature, and he pointed out the Rutgers opening to me. I applied and was hired with the support of Henry Louis Gates. Yes, there were other angels, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove. However, my professorial beginnings in the New York area were made tangible by this other very kind and generous poet, the Angel of Adjunct Awareness.

It was The Angel of Adjunct Awareness who brought me closer to landing more firmly in the world of poets who are professors, as firm a thing as that will ever be. The creative mind is not one with the critical and should never be, but all good glory goes to the poet who wants to know things, the happy generalist.

& this angel, who is he?

Tis Barry Seiler, a kind and patient observer of the universe who lives a contemplative life at high altitudes and to whom I am forever grateful.

2009-03-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

"Hey Light Bulb! Where you get that haircut?"

Adjunct Chronicles

Afaa Michael Weaver

The life of the poet and budding playwright in graduate school was more of a paradise than I realized at the time. I could write a play in a weekend and have it produced the following weekend. Brown University has several theaters, and my favorite, of course, was the black box where we had our student showcase. Lynn Nottage was a classmate of mine in those years, from 1985 to 1987, as well as Teresa Church and C.B. Coleman. We were having the time of our lives and didn’t know it. I had the blessing of being under the tutelage of the late George H. Bass and Paula Vogel in playwriting and Keith Waldrop and Michael S. Harper in poetry. In the Rockefeller library I had a carrel loaded with all the things I wanted to read and think about, including some critical studies on Beckett’s non-relational art. I thought life would always sorta be this way, me looking out on the expanse of some park or otherwise green area and thinking the great thoughts of language and art the way poets and playwrights do.

Immediately after graduation, I headed back to East Orange, New Jersey. I had found a gig teaching remedial composition and composition at Essex County College, a community college in downtown Newark. That is where I learned the fundamentals of classroom control, how to pace myself during class meetings, and how to go at the most difficult challenges in teaching students with special needs. But it was not enough money. My semester’s salary was barely enough to pay two months’ rent.

Never mind the gaze over green expanses with great thoughts swimming in my cranium. I had to help my wife keep a roof over our heads and buy groceries.

There was no health insurance. The summer was difficult, and the fall threatened to be even tougher. I called my father in early October to say my wife and I were thinking of moving back to Baltimore. He was a tough love kind of parent.

“That won’t do much good. Try to stick it out.”

I was panic struck. My wife and I were struggling. So I fell back to basic survival techniques and went to the school boards in East Orange and New Jersey to sign up as a substitute teacher. I taught English composition at Essex in the evenings and, in the mornings, waited by the phone with my tuna fish sandwich for the call that would send me to a public school for the day. Adjuncts shared information, and the word was to stay away from Lincoln elementary school in Newark. The kids were supposedly uncontrollable. One day I got the call for Lincoln, and my wife and I needed the money badly. She was teaching art at a Ukrainian high school in Soho for a small salary. So I set out for Lincoln, which was within walking distance of our apartment, just across the city line dividing Newark from East Orange. Lincoln was everything adjunct lore rumored it to be and more.

My assignment was a second grade class. When one of the girls took out a makeup kit and began talking about what she did the night before, I knew why I had been warned. I began to hyperventilate when one of the boys stood on his desk and jumped up to the ceiling light, catching it by the edge and swinging. The climax was yet to come. Another boy bit his classmate and left teeth marks on the boy’s skin. I was standing by the door and reached for the emergency button. In a nanosecond the principal was in the doorway, and the entire class came to silent attention the way Marine recruits stiffen in the presence of the drill instructor. Whatever fear she carried in her presence was enough to keep them more or less in line for the rest of the day. I never went back to Lincoln elementary school. I decided I’d rather starve.

Looking back at graduate school, it seemed like paradise compared to the beginning of my teaching career, where I fought for my very being in the midst of these half pints who were experts in terrorism. Brown kept life’s harsh realities away from me. I had been spoiled.

In order to save money at that time in my life, I began cutting my own hair. I thought I had done a fair job of it. At least my friends said I looked acceptable. I had grown a beard while at Brown and was wearing that along with thirty-five pounds more than what I carried normally when I worked in factories, with all the walking involved in that life. So I had a fade haircut of my own design, a beard, and something of a Buddha belly. Aside from places like Lincoln, I was subbing at a middle school in East Orange. While walking down the hallway, I heard a group of boys behind me, taunting me.

“Hey Light Bulb! Where you get that haircut?”

They ran when I motioned to confront them, and all I could do for several days afterwards was struggle with the image of my head and neck as a light bulb of some unknown wattage. From there my self-image hit a downward spiral. I began to see my entire body as an organic light bulb, punctured by my Buddha belly. On subsequent assignments to that school, I tried to find the culprits, but to no avail. They were all in hormonal demon mode. However, I decided to scrape pennies together to get a haircut from a barber rather than trust my own clippers and the mirror. But in that fall of 1987, some good things also began to happen.

I signed on with Berda Rittenhouse and the New Jersey State Arts Council, and that allowed me to get residencies in two elementary schools in Newark so as to teach poetry to kids who might otherwise be chasing me in the hallways and taunting me.. It was rewarding work. I felt I had a chance to give some input to the kids that might be a catalyst for them at some point in their lives. I suppose they are in their early thirties now, if they have survived the dangers of urban life. Whatever the future held, I was so happy to be away from the monsters that named me after Thomas Edison’s invention. My head and hair were looking better and feeling better.

Later a guardian angel would appear and show me the mysterious secret ways of living adjunct life in the Big Apple. More on that in the next installment of adjunct chronicles…

2008-12-28T12:55:00.000-08:00

Arizona

Tempe is a landscape as far away from Somerville, Massachusetts, as Saturn is from Mars, the spacious desert vs. the rocky hills and ocean, the cacti that take centuries to grow vs. the layers of fall New England foliage. Each arm of the cactus is some major accomplishment that goes unnoticed by most eyes. Then there are the stunning moments, such as when a desert owl drops into a downward glide from the inner portion of the top of a tree, one moment an unseen hooting in the evening, and then the noiseless swish of some of the most perfectly placed feathers in the world of the birds, a favorite world of mine.

Meeting Norman Dubie was as much a mecca for me as seeing Twin Buttes, a pair of hills that are sacred Indian ground and which sit next to a very old cemetery, both of which are behind the Fiesta hotel, where I spent a week while in Arizona visiting friends and relaxing. When I met Norman for the first time after knowing of him for thirty years, he explained the significance of this part of this sacred ground. We were in the home of my friends the poet Cynthia Hogue and her husband Sylvain, who arranged a reception for me.

“There is a cave there that only a few people have been able to find,” Norman said. Of course, I went looking the very next day, but I did not find it.

Poets go into these spaces as much as we go into the unwritten poem, that minute and all too infrequent space between thought and the absence of thought, the timeless now, the space of creativity.

We talked for almost an hour, this poet a few years older than me, his beard a gorgeous, pearly white, his demeanor one of persistent kindness.

Chris Burawa, poet and translator, told me about the hills before I met Norman Dubie, So I had been leaving my room in the mornings after my daily bowl of oatmeal and headed out across the parking lot, one of the very few walkers in that part of the world. In Arizona it seems only the poor and the searchers are walkers, so parts of me qualified for each, as it seemed most people intent on exercise did things indoors. But I wanted to see these hills from every angle. After awhile, my gaze made them human, and then I heard the solitary weeping of sacred things wound round and round with highways and litter.

They are as solitary as the mountain lions who climb to the tops of cement fences in backyards, looking as much like lions as one would want an animal to look that close to the living room. They come looking for food, or they come out of some natural longing to walk about in the world, to be on the move.

Searchers we may very well be. If we look at the time in which we have been searching, the time since some fifty of us walked out of Africa thousands of years ago to populate the planet with all its cultures and the ways we have come to name ourselves, we can revisit the idea of what ground is sacred. If we think also of the fact that humans are the only group whose disappearance would not obliterate the chain of living things, the idea of what is sacred perhaps belongs in a truly special place. If insects were to disappear, all other forms of life, the whole web of things, would disappear. So it seems to me that these grounds on which we come to live and grow are markers of accomplishment like the difficult appendages of the cactus.

As someone who grew up with westerns, the legends of the Old West seem much like the cactus, often prickly things that grew in adverse circumstances. Billy the Kid was just sixteen years old in Arizona, an emotionally disturbed teenager who was struggling with abandonment issues and living in an America where traumatized veterans from the Civil War roamed the country, many of them armed and prone to violence and all of them quite a bit older than he.

There is that history and there are these mesas of tranquility, such as the Sunday morning group meditation in the Zen center where I went at Chris’ invitation. After sitting and then chatting for two hours, we stood out in the yard and had dessert, juice, and tea.

Arizona is this kind of place, where sages grow alongside those old legends, where poets with devotion to reverence for life intently walk The Path, word and spirit. It is this and it is memories and promises, changing circumstances in the heart much like the shifting shadows of the sun over the Twin Buttes, two sacred Indian hills in Tempe.

I will have to go back to Twin Buttes to find that cave which Norman told me about, to go searching again.

Meanwhile, here is the link to an interview with Norman Dubie from

Poets & Writers.

http://www.pw.org/content/return_silence_interview_norman_dubie

2008-11-25T19:06:00.000-08:00

First Place for Stillness

The starter's gun went off, and there we were, battling to see who could stand still in the deepest way. My competitors could not resist moving, so there I was. I took the gold for being motionless. I would not have won this race for standing still, for being in the moment there on the track in Beijing's Olympic Bird's Nest, had it not been for the Fulbright. Unlike some other awards, it's the one that keeps giving.

It was 2002. I had been named a Fulbright scholar at National Taiwan University. A bit confused about the layout of the city, I did what a man raised in cities will do. I sat on the curb there in Taipei just outside my apartment building and studied the neighborhhood, listened to the sounds of the cows across the street in the university's agricultural school, watched the taxi drivers drinking and hanging out, smelled the new smells, all in a place on the other side of the world from home.

My Chinese was minimal at the time. In 1984, I enrolled in a weekend class in Baltimore. It was the Chinese Community Association under Dr. Lillian Kim, who has since passed away. The classes were taught by a professional musician who was born in Taiwan. She had a musician's lack of patience for sound mistakes. So she drilled us, but it was only six months, and in the spring of 1985, I had to leave the classes.

So there I was sitting in a place where sounds were familiar, but where I could not make any sense of things. It was as if I had broken the "sound echoing sense" idea of poetry from English metrics. I was in my own dream of the sound. Walking along in Taiwan I was suspended between realities, in a place where the usual promptings did not work. It was a good space, a space where you could look out onto the way people perceive you. Of course, that is if you have that kind of traveler's instinct in you, the instinct for stepping outside yourself to explore another way to be.

Identity is a set of clothing that seems to grow out of your skin, but if you are fortunate you get to a place where you can consider that maybe it is a set of clothing that you put onto your skin. It's then that you wonder how you ever came think it was innate to your being.

Maybe it's the idea of fluidity, as being black is not something I want to give up. Rather it's something which I refuse to let interfere with my need to see the world, to experience the world. For me that means choosing my response to some situations, to being less sensitive to situations that have formed negatively in my own history, the history of me.

I had a friend who once said that when he went to Africa his life made sense to him. Well for me, it was going to Taiwan and China. I was not looking for a sameness in outward appearance, but in what I had held to be true in spirituality. Of course, the western fascination with foreign ideas of spirituality always has a sobering moment when we travel to the places where these spiritual systems were born, and there is the danger of what Deepak Chopra calls spiritual materialism. However, I have found affirmation of the idea that there is one truth--goodness. For me, that goodness has a light. It is a light I often find when I am sitting down resting my nerves, as my mama used to say.

We should rest our nerves sometimes, rest them in a new place. Then we will see everyone has the same nerves, these things that live on the inside of us...away from competitions.

When I got back to the Boston, I started studying formally, and I have managed to get to the intermediate level. My next step is to get into the fluidity--there's that word again--of the vernacular and of idioms so my communication is clearer and more responsive. As it is, I get into places in a conversation where the other person's personality and instinctive ways with the language lose me and I have to resort to contextualizing. That's when I lose bits and pieces of meaning. But maybe that place is where I also lose the bits and pieces of clinging to the old clothing of identity.

It began with the Fulbright. Studying Chinese formally and working with Chinese poets as a project was an idea that came to me from my Fulbright experience. It seems as if I can reap the benefits of that experience for a long time, provided I remember the value of stillness.

2008-10-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

食指
The Hand of the Poet

THE WORLD LITERATURE TODAY CONFERENCE
AT BEIJING NORMAL UNIVERSITY
FRIDAY OCTOBER 17, 2008

It is early Thursday night. The first day of the conference has gone nicely, and I am walking along in Beijing with Kwame Dawes. We ease along as we do when we talk, little by little, a slow motion kind of ambling that is as much southern and Caribbean as anything else. The shops are mostly closed, although the night is young. I have been here before, but it is Kwame’s first time, and for him it has personal significance. His father came here in a delegation from Ghana long before the opening of China. In presenting his paper, “Babylon by Bus,” he spoke of his father.

We get to an upraised section of the next sidewalk and two people are approaching. It is 食指 Shi Zhi, the poet, and his wife. We poets have just had a wonderful festival reading that included poets from the Beijing area. Shi Zhi is a very special poet, a living monument for the contemporary Chinese lyric. In the sixties he wrote lyric poetry when it was not appropriate to do so by government regulations. He was detained for many years, and for a good deal of that time he was detained in a psychiatric center. I met him when I was here three years ago. Now he is being celebrated.

We pass on the sidewalk, and I greet him in Chinese as he has no English. I nod and wish he and his wife a good night with beautiful dreams. He smiles widely and deeply. Then they move on as before, an older couple, he older than she but both of them in some kind of synchronicity with everything, the bold harmonic of stillness, the moon filling with silence, the soft foot sounds of the very few of us out here in the night.

After his reading, I took time to tell Shi Zhi how much I like his work and how moved I am by his story. I say how special he is, and he understands. I tried very hard not to let tears roll while he was reading, but it was no use. He touched deep personal chords inside me.

This is the World Literature Today (WLT) Conference at Beijing Normal University, a cooperative project between Beijing Normal and the University of Oklahoma, the home of World Literature Today and Oklahoma U's Institute for US-China Issues . The WLT conference awarded the very first Newman Prize for Chinese Literature to Mo Yen for his accomplishments in the Chinese literary world. This WLT is historic in many ways. The Newman Prize is the first such prize offered by a US-based organization.

I gave a paper entitled “To Write a Poem in Chinese and Bid It Sing/the Translatable Spaces of Creativity,” wherein I explored the changing dynamics of identity as one moves through languages and cultures. The moderators were high-ranking academics from Beijing’s academic community. I received a good grade, as they examined my every word and said they appreciate my interest in the culture. I was nervous and sweated through my shirt’s long sleeves. Afterward I went to the next panel, a discussion involving poets from China, several of whom I know through my work with them at Simmons College’s International Chinese Poetry Festival, which convened last weekend.

Later, Kwame and I moved along in the night, talking about language, change, and the lives we live as black men…in a city where the legendary bicycle paths are now roadways full of traffic.

2008-10-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

Back to China
回到中國

October 14, 2008
十月十四日二零零八年
Beijing 北京

Beijing is a big city, not unlike big cities everywhere. The structures of these places are the buildings we build, and they are also the structures of our attempts to stay connected with each other, to know and to be with one another, to understand. On Monday, I landed in Mainland China for the third time. It is Tuesday evening here in Beijing’s Jinhua Hotel as… I write.

I was invited to the World Literature Conference at Beijing Normal University and the Fulbright 31st Anniversary Conference at Days Inn in Beijing’s Chaoyang District. Once my friends in the literary community here heard that I was coming, my itinerary filled so that I will be quite busy on this trip and happily so.

My friend Bei Ta made temporary arrangements for me through his friend Nan Feng, a businessman. At the airport I was met by Nan Feng’s secretary and a driver. They took my bags and walked with me to the car. The airport has been redesigned since I was here three years ago, and this new terminal is a massive construction that seems to dwarf all of us a thousand times and then a thousand more. We waited for the elevator in an area that is the size of the Houston astrodome and that has that kind of geodesic canopy. However, the whole place was far less busy than O’Hare, which has always disturbed me because the planes sometimes approach the airport on runway sections that go over the highways.

The image of O’Hare’s runways over Chicago’s highways just seems a bit too much of an urban mess, a plane going by you as you are driving your car along the road.

Nan Feng’s employees helped me settle into my room where I would stay for the first two days, and we made arrangements for dinner. Nan Feng and a few other poet friends and his secretaries treated me to dinner here in the Jinghua Hotel where I am spending two nights before moving onto Beijing Normal University. We had a wonderful arrangement of dishes, complete with red wine. Nan Feng gave me several of his books, all of which have photographs that accompany the poems, something he feels helps draw the reading audience. One of his books is all about the Wen Chuan earthquake, and another is about the SARS epidemic that struck a few years ago.

Nan Feng is committed to social awareness and citizenship that way. We talked and everyone was impressed with my level of Chinese, which is intermediate. I get to a certain level of comprehension in a conversation and then need assistance sometimes. I said that a year in China would bump my Chinese up to another level.
Nan Feng and his friends responded, “It would be good if you could stay in China.”

When we enter each other’s spaces, we have to try to translate the experience of being new to and with each other. I have enough Chinese to hold a decent conversation and read some intermediate texts, but then there is also the cultural way. Beijing is the sprawling capital of the city in a way that New York would be if the White House and all the rest of our central government were there on the Hudson. We dwarf each other when we gather in such huge numbers. The sound of us to ourselves is the sound of a song that accumulates and makes its personal sense a thing we sometimes do not understand. Even in our own native language, we struggle for our personal connections in the complexities of urban life.

As such, life is a dream that always changes, and that is, I think, our hope.

On Tuesday morning I went to visit Marilyn Chin’s class at the Foreign Studies University here, and I was so moved. Marilyn is here for the semester as a Visiting Professor and is teaching a translation class, and two other classes. She had her students translate five of my poems. I read them in English, and some of them read their translations. We spoke in English, but I let them know I have some Chinese. We met in this most fascinating place called translation, where languages and cultures look over each other, where they try to understand each other.

One of the poems they translated is “A Black Man’s Sonata,” a piece I wrote for Maria Gillan’s anthology Unsettling America. I imagine that poem. as well as the others of mine in that collection, unsettled some people. I had the triadic structure of sonatas in mind when I wrote the poem but could not recall it while there with Marilyn’s class. As I was thinking about sonatas, the questions came, and I found myself trying to explain how black people’s lives are part of the struggles of people of color and of women to make America realize its own democratic ideals for people who were excluded from those ideals when they were written by white men who owned property and held power.

Marilyn asked them to read some of their poems. One student by the name of June read a poem she wrote in English about feeling estranged from Chinese culture by spending so much time studying foreign cultures. Rachel, another student, read her translations and gave me a packet of her original poems in Chinese. August, who is Marilyn’s teaching assistant, read a few of his translations of my poems. They sounded and felt very much like the sense I had of my own work. Translation is fascinating, and when it carries the emotional content from one language to another, it has accomplished a difficult and important thing in our lives.

We were people. It sounds funny to me as I write, perhaps because it is a sentence I never use. We were people. We saw each other and spoke in each other’s language. We formed connections as intricate as geodesic structures, but we did it in much more quickly. No one can build an airport in ninety minutes. But we can build in relations in that time.

Afterwards I went to lunch with Marilyn, her teaching assistant and another young professor. We had an elaborate meal there in the faculty section of the dining hall and later walked out to where I could catch a taxi. In the Chinese way, Marilyn’s teaching assistant August carried my bag, and I was wearing a deep navy sport jacket with black pants and a navy knit shirt. Along the way we passed construction workers who were so mesmerized with the sight of us that they seemed suddenly frozen, as if they had become a still photograph that the four of us were walking through. This way of staring at foreigners is something I have gotten used to in Chinese culture, and in my own inner way I am staring, too.

For the moment I was caught in my own worker life, suddenly back in that space of machines and truck loading docks in Procter & Gamble’s Baltimore warehouse, a time in my life that coincided with that of many people in China who were sent to the worker life among commoners in order to have a touchstone. There are several Chinese poets I know who share my work history, a sense of community that does not exist for me at home in the U.S. where self-examination in the form of class consciousness is not a vital part of our lives. Hopefully, one day it will be.

Meanwhile, there is Joe Weil over at Binghamton University. He and I share that work history, and when I went there to read this past winter he and I met for the first time after knowing each other through correspondence. We met in words and letters. Tom Daly, a Cambridge poet, spent many years as a machinist, labor organizer, and anti-racism worker.

The weekend before coming here to Beijing, I convened the international festival of Chinese poetry back in Boston, at Simmons College, and we spent a good deal of time working with and discussing translation. The poet Tino Villaneuva, who is Chicano by way of Texas and who won the American Book Award for his book Giant, took part in the workshop. One of his poems was translated in a team that included the poet Zhou Zan, a woman who lives and teaches in Beijing. She read her translation to all of us from her laptop, and the connection happened. The emotion of the poem, its breath and spirit, made the journey from one language to another.

Communication such as that is what we so urgently need in our lives now, as we amass in ever greater numbers in the spaces of each other’s lives, in the cities of actual spaces, and in the cities that are the spaces of our relationships with one another.
The mind works that way, and so does the heart. Marilyn’s students gave me the gift of a poem by the great ancient poet Du Fu that one of them did in her own calligraphy. I am going to frame it when I get back to Boston.
I am in China again. This is my third time.

“这是我的三次.”

“這是我的三次.”

2008-08-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

Driving While Southern
August 5, 2008

In Secaucus, I look carefully over the rims of entrance and exit ramps, none of which seem to lead anywhere, as each turn seems to hold the promise of some monster from the blog. The whiz of things seems to sting the air, make it an uninhabitable place where you cannot breathe. It is part of the mythology of New Jersey, that the only part of the state is that visible from the turnpike, the capitol of which is the layering of upright pipes that line the landscape like muted priests, solemn and overwrought with knowledge of the earth. In Secaucus, I get a severe test of my ability to drive, to take to the curves and feel the car’s center of gravity roll into the grave of the curve so that I know when to apply the brakes and how to keep my focus on the present moment of things, that steady American meditation of driving, knowing the car and the road as the only thing happening when there are countless stories around you, unfolding in bewildering exponential ways between sets of ears of folks behind the wheel.

Curves are teachers, and I got my most frightening lessons driving in the county roads in Virginia, place where my parents were born and where I spent summers as a child in the same way as many black folk did, and many other Americans as migration is an American thing. We are a country of people who move. In those curves I learned to respect gravity.

They were steep, so steep you wondered whether the civil engineering was left to the devices of people who had no such schooling. The car would almost tilt, and you had to slow down enough to get through and not lose control and become one of the mythological accidents that got recounted in those old wooden farmhouses people like my grandparents lived in, wooden houses that were an accumulation of additions to a central unit and which sat on pillars of rocks that left spaces underneath where the cats slept. If you feel into a curve and did not emerge except in an ambulance headed to the morgue, then you also became a part of the silence like the still wind in the grass on the edge of cotton, corn, and tobacco fields, or the silence of pines.

There were the flat stretches, too, flat stretches like the stretches of the turnpike just outside of Manhattan and heading down into New Brunswick. The speed limit is something people don’t think of in flat stretches. You think only of speed, speed when you are young and have so much time, and speed when you are older and rushing to get to or away from something. In Virginia, there was the whooshing sound of going past the trees, long stretches with no houses and no one to see us pushing the speedometer as far as it would go. We pushed until we could hear the pistons begin to go shrill, beating them senseless to keep up the demands on them made by the engine. The engine is a thing that has its own mind, and the mind demands a performance from each and every part, and it demands its sustenance, the gasoline that smelled like an aphrodisiac to us when we were young.

We were so young we had no license. No license was needed in the farmlands, only guts, a certain set of guts.

Drag racing was dangerous there, and it was even more dangerous in Baltimore, a southern city that gets dimmed by the northern capitol just below it. In Baltimore in the sixties, there were cars that had the sound of thunder, and I kept a certain love for it punctuated by Robert Mitchum’s Thunder Road, a film about bootlegging and outrunning the state police. These cars that had the sound of thunder also had tires we called Cheetah slicks, large radius tires with very thin rubber bodies. They were made for the tracks. I was young when an uncle of mine and his drag racing buddies lined their cars up on a side street in East Baltimore, the engines breathing like big cats after a long run on the plain.

I raced in a car not fit for racing, my father’s Chevrolet Bel-Air, the ’62 model, a four door sedan. One night out with friends in another car we took it up to 90 miles per hour. I was looking over at the other car, laughing along with my friend when both of us saw a red light at the bottom of the hill with cars sitting and waiting. We had passengers in each car, and to avert a crash I drove onto the shoulder and slid the car through the light and halfway down to the next light, leaving a quarter mile stretch of tire marks and busting a rod on the engine. The engine called for power its innards could not muster. My father was crestfallen, and only now do I know the full weight in his eyes. All I knew was that I was a good driver, certified as such by my companions.

There were stories like this happening all over the country, but in Baltimore I call it part of growing up southern. On the trips down to Virginia in the summer, my mother threw her arm around my father as he drove. First we had a ’54 Ford, a Sherman tank of a car, and then they bought the Bel-Air. My father came home with an Impala that was a year old, but my mother told him to take it back and get the Bel-Air. She had the idea that it was a better way to go home. My mother was a proud woman, as was my father, but her pride settled matters that needed settling within the home.

Driving to Baltimore two weeks ago, I stopped in a rest stop just over the state line. Inside I saw black folk who seemed to move slower than black folks I saw at the stops in New Jersey. There was jazz playing, and the white people looked more like the whites I know from growing up, people who know poverty and who come into Baltimore from West Virginia. These are people I worked with for many years in Baltimore.

There was a section of travel brochures for Maryland and for Baltimore, all of them around the theme of the Civil War. The one for Baltimore explains that it was a divided city during the war. The Union forces came in and arrested the entire city government at one point, and Ft. McHenry was used as a prison for some 1500 southern sympathizers from the city during the war. I sat in my car, a Ford Edge I rented for my vacation, and read the brochures and chuckled to myself.

I knew I was going home, not the home of exact memories but one of adjustments made by the fact of history and adjustments made by my growth in life. It is a home below the Mason-Dixon Line, south of some place called the north.

Home is down home. Home is in a southern way in my mind.

2008-07-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

The Main Buildings of the Baltimore Procter & Gamble Plant Now A Day Care Center

The Wire Insider
Part III The Last of Three Commentaries on The Wire
Industrial Me

July 5, 2008
The street on which my family lived was a major route to a place we called “The Point,” a short version of Sparrows Point, location of the Bethlehem Steel Company plant that was at one time the largest steel plant in the world. My father and uncles came to work there during and after WWII, when steel was needed for the war. There were about thirty thousand people, mostly men, working in the mills in the late sixties. I took a job in the 42” Skin Pass section of the tin mill, on the cold side of the plant as opposed to the hot side where they handled molten steel in places like the coke oven, where some of my uncles worked. My father worked in the pipe mill on the cold side for thirty-six years.

I was there for one year beginning in 1970, when I dropped out of the University of Maryland at College Park after two years. After that year I moved on to the Procter & Gamble plant in Locust Point. The points are these nautical areas strung along the Baltimore harbor, the largest inland harbor on the east coast. There was a time when slave ships pulled up to the docks, and Frederick Douglass lived in Fells Point until he escaped. I could look from the window of Procter & Gamble and see where he lived.

The machines in the tin mill were massive, full of metal’s heaviness. I worked in what was known as the “labor gang,” a job category where you went wherever you were needed on any given day. It was the bottom of the rung. One day my supervisor walked me over to a pit of dirty oil in the floor of the tin mill. My job for the day was to get down in there and clean it out, which meant dipping the slime for eight hours. But at least I had work.

In Baltimore you could get a job at The Point or at Social Security and be thought to be somewhat successful. There was also the post office. I could not abide the idea of being in an office all day, or worse, in some cubicle.

Never mind the fact that I am in academia now.

Getting to the steel mill was easy. Many drivers traveled up and down the street on which my parents had the house they bought in 1957, during the national blockbusting project of real estate companies all over the country. They used scare tactics to tell white neighbors the blacks were coming and then sold the houses to us for a neat profit. Our white neighbors were gone so fast I only remember a little girl who was my playmate for what seemed like a microsecond. When my father took his job in the mills, segregation was the order of the day. Blacks and whites had separate lockers and eating areas. Moreover, they hardly spoke to one another. But getting there in the time I was a steelworker was easy.

I just stood on the street and held out my brown paper lunch bag. Before long, someone would pull over and ask if I wanted a ride. For a week you gave the rider five dollars or so for gas, and on Fridays nearly everyone stopped at a cash checking place called Micky’s to get cash and very often something to drink. One of my riders, a short and somewhat corpulent man, drank a half pint of Vodka on the way in to the job and at least that much on the way home. It was as if he was using it to clear the soot from his system.

This was the world that allowed men and women to support themselves and send their children off to college. It was a world that seemed as sure as the steady drumming of the machines that made the products that fed the burgeoning economic system that is the largest in the world. Detroit, for example, was the largest manufacturing city in recorded history, or so I have been told. I do not doubt it.

If I worked at night in the tin mill and had the crane’s helper job, I would put my sandwich on the top of the heaters we had to keep us warm. The galvanized tin walls increased the heat of summer and the cold of winter. The same would be true in P&G’s warehouse, where I would spend ten years before my manumission came in the form of an NEA fellowship for poetry. But there in the tin mill my sandwich was always ready after it sat on the heater for a while. I followed the giant overhead electric crane that could lift several tons at a time. It was used to change the giant steel pins in the processing plants that pressed the raw tin to where it was smoother and shinier until it was eventually the texture needed for tin cans. It was a job that required vigilance, as you could lose your hand if it got caught between the hoisting cables and the pins themselves. Without seeing you, the operator could lift the whole affair and tear your hand right off from your wrist or mash your fingers until they were nothing but bloody mush.

I was fortunate enough not to lose any limbs, but others were not so lucky. My uncle Paul was killed in the coke oven when I was nine years old. One of the vats of molten steel tipped over on him while he and my cousin Melvin were in the pit. Melvin tried to save him, and he lingered in the hospital for a few days before passing. When my mother got the news over the phone, she screamed. I was in the back room of the basement playing with my Civil War army set, things made of plastic to represent things made of metal.

I left Bethlehem Steel for Procter & Gamble in the spring of 1971, just after I returned from basic combat training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. At that time the Maryland Dry-dock company was also in Locust Point on Key Highway, the street that eventually leads to Ft. McHenry. On the way to P&G on the afternoon shift, I often saw several hundred people crossing the street for the change of shifts, and driving by there at night I could see the ships in dry-dock lit like giant Christmas trees. The sparks from the welders seemed celebratory, as if these were little victories, the joining of one metal thing to another.

In the tin mill, I concealed my books in brown lunch bags and wrote on paper I brought from home or on the backs of the tally sheets we used to weigh the tin coils after they went through the process of being made thinner and shinier. At P&G I kept the practice of concealing my books, but it wasn’t until I got to the warehouse in 1975 that I could find spaces to steal time and really focus on poetry.

The city was changing rapidly. Drugs poured into the communities as the industrial jobs began to disappear. At P&G they constantly reminded us that costs had to be cut, and one way of cutting costs was to get rid of the dead weight of a plant that was doing substandard performance. In the late nineteenth century, the rise of industrial engineering brought with it the idea of a perfect factory where machines had perfect efficiency and humans worked like machines. The idea grew out of mechanistic philosophy, an idea the thinkers of the Enlightenment resurrected and developed more distinctly as an aspect of the western march to accumulating massive amounts of wealth through industrialism and colonial expansion.

Now when I read about the deliberate campaign to make people work like machines, I get angry. However, I am immediately faced a central paradox in our lives. There is the incredible array of “stuff” available for consumption. I have worked and lived on both sides of it and have no real answers for the quandary we humans have given ourselves, and I do see it as a collective act inasmuch as I believe human consciousness is a massive creative force. Otherwise I would sell this laptop and try to get off the grid. However, it seems the grid has become so self-aware that it preempts its own deconstruction by allowing us the time and space to ruminate over all the ironic constructs of life in this postindustrial and postcolonial age in which we live that gives us access to so many material goods, so many things.

One day in the early eighties I was on my way to work on the afternoon shift. I picked up a coworker who lived in my old neighborhood, and we headed down Milton Avenue toward the southeastern part of the city where P&G was located. Just as we got onto Milton Avenue, we saw the door of a house open with a black man bursting out and running for his life. Behind him was another black man chasing him and loading a double barrel shotgun as he ran. By the time we got to the job, the man being chased was dead, shot to death by the man following him. During my adolescence I saw my neighborhood change. Friends died or went to prison. The story was repeated in black communities in large cities all over America.

The steady world of factory jobs like the ones my father and uncles had were fading, and so was the stability those jobs allowed. In the context of all of this, my P&G job was thought to be one of the best. Men and women retired from Procter & Gamble with small fortunes in stock, but after retirement, the challenge was to find a new life. Sometimes work and the routine of it was all we knew as blue collar workers.

Every good warehouseman knows the value of a flashlight. I have five of them now, including two medium size Maglites. At Simmons, where I am a member of the English department, I sometimes sit and watch the men working on the construction of the new parking lot and school of marketing. I love to get outside and walk when the weather is nice, and the difficult reconciliation of these two lives inside me is easier now than it used to be, but only because I do not place so much value on the responses of people when they learn about my factory life. Proletarian minds are supposed to have limits that do not include being a published poet and a professor.

I was processed as a poet among the masses, stripped down and melted and crafted into the shape I would need to go out in the world and grow and function as poet and writer. As a lifelong factory worker my poetry would have suffered. A poet needs more than two ten minute coffee breaks and a half hour at lunchtime.

In The Wire the blighted areas you see--many of which are in my old neighborhood--were full of people and bustling with energy forty years ago, before the gradual and steady disappearance of blue collar jobs that had formed so much of the economy, before the great decline in Baltimore. The days when my father and uncles sat around in our kitchen eating my mother’s hot chili or ox tail soup and sipping their whiskey and Coca-Cola are gone along with the steady lives they were able to give us children.

Bless them.

2008-03-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

Wire Insider Part II
Chinese Connection

Afaa Michael Weaver
The Plum Flower Dance
http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=35884

HBO’s The Wire is done. I am adding the second of my three postscripts to the show. This second postscript speaks to the Asian, more specifically the Chinese presence in Baltimore.

The gentleman in the photograph is Shiye Huang Chien-liang, my teacher and the 64th generation grandmaster of the Tien Shan Pai system of Chinese martial arts. Shiye Huang has lived and taught in Baltimore for more than 25 years. In the Owings Mills section of the city he owns and directs the U.S. Kuoshu Academy. The word “Shiye” means teacher and advisor.

As one of Shiye Huang’s disciples, I travel to Baltimore for my studies and sometimes study privately with him. When I get there early enough I head in to change my clothes after bowing to him in the traditional way. While going through his mail he will look up and ask if I want some tea. I am always excited to have tea with him because it is a chance to chat with a great man.

A soft-spoken man in his 60th year, Shiye is the only disciple of Late Supreme Master Wang Chueh Jen, a tiny man from Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province. Wang trained Chiang Kai Shek’s special forces and came to Taiwan with Chiang Kai Shek in 1949, at the end of the Civil War. As Shiye Huang makes the tea, he is sitting at his front desk with the red boards bearing the Tien Shan Pai calligraphy behind him. These boards were given to him by Wang to signify that he was passing the system to him. The tea is delicious, like silk to the lips.

Shiye Huang is a serious teacher who does not spare severe criticism. Watching me one day struggling with the long staff, a long piece of flexible wood that is one of the highest weapons in the Chinese system, he gave a ready assessment.

“You look worse now than you did the last time.” He stood there frowning. I was honored as in the way of the Chinese educational system, I had just received some hard-earned affection.

Shiye Huang’s annual international martial arts tournament is the largest of its kind in the country, and the only tournament that gets official recognition from the federal, state, and local governments. Each year dignitaries from the White House, the Governor’s office and the Office of the Mayor attend the conference. In the past two years I have done volunteer work as one of the security people at the doors to the competition arenas. I enjoy my job. Watching the kids fly across the room at the speed of light is a humbling experience.

I have won a few medals, including a gold medal for demonstrating that long staff. I was in a room with a low ceiling, so I was worried about hitting the sprinklers. When I got the gold medal, I told someone it was for not setting off the fire extinguishers and flooding the room.

Beyond stereotypes of martial arts and Asian culture, in the 1970’s, when black people felt disempowered by the changes in their lives and seemed to be floating away from each other, kungfu movies were a new way of experiencing community. Let us not forget the Legends of the Ghetto, folks with superhuman powers we often heard of but almost never saw. In Baltimore there was Winky, who could jump from the ground and kick up over his head to hit a basketball rim with angelic ease.

Black American and Chinese American histories have been involved with each other at least since the American Civil War when they did the same kinds of laboring jobs, but the connectin more likely happened around the matter of food. There were Chinese take out restaurants long before any fast food restaurants. However, genuine Chinese food was a long way from the place on Milton Avenue in East Baltimore that I have named The Alamo. It has been there since the mid 1960’s and is still there, although the exterior is mostly a matter of security bars covering a cement surface, like a bunker. The neighborhood is now rather dangerous.

I have been at martial arts in one way or another since my cousins and I saw Bruce Lee on television as Kato, the Green Hornet’s sidekick. Stevie Wonder was right in including Lee on his classic album Songs in the Key of Life. Naming the list of heroes for black people, he cites Bruce Lee.

We had boards we tried to chop with our hands, dipping them in vinegar for hardness. That bright idea came from one of one of my cousins. To test the toughness of our hands we tried our skills on each other. One day my cousin Geff introduced us to a friend of his who had a brown belt in karate. He gave us all a private lesson. We knew we were ready for a ninja attack. In high school, I took Okinawan karate with a classmate who was a member of the Nation of Islam. While sparring with him one day I managed to land a spinning back kick, but on another day while sparring with a classmate, I got my first black eye.

While working in the warehouse section of Baltimore’s Procter & Gamble plant, I used to practice my Taijiquan out on the warehouse floor during my breaks. I danced my way out of factory life. It was a good job when I could get it, and the trials that The Wire shows are facing the city are due in no small part to the change in the face of the world of work in Baltimore.

The jobs I danced my way out of have danced their way out of the lives of poor people across the racial and ethnic range, forcefully changing their lives in the town that was once known as Charm City.

Shiye Huang and I finish our tea, and he tells me to go and start working out. He teaches in the traditional way, which is to show me a form or a section of a form and then leave me to practice. At the end of the hour, he comes to check to see if I have remembered. In the 6 or 8 weeks between trips, I practice at home in Massachusetts, sometimes on the parking lot just behind the house where my apartment is located, and the neighborhood kids are a difficult audience.

“Do you always move that slow?”

It was a bunch of kids from the high school across the street who were my audience on this particular morning. I did a few of the Taiji moves at high speed to answer their question.

They shouted, “Whoa! Look at that!” Thus inspired they went across the street to school, which is where they should have been in the first place rather than smoking cigarettes behind the houses. I had performed some intervention, as I know some of the cigarettes are marijuana, not tobacco.

***
Martial arts intervened in the black community as it was beginning to take a beating from the onset of drug culture and the loss of industrial jobs. In the third and final postscript to The Wire, I will talk about what Baltimore was like when working class jobs were plentiful, in the old days.

2008-01-10T15:52:00.000-08:00

Wire Insider, Part One
The Big Boys

Afaa M. Weaver, author
The Plum Flower Dance

East Baltimore Muse has its home in East Baltimore, which is part of the setting for the HBO Series The Wire. The Wire is an excellent program that is very true to the scene it depicts, the daily struggles of the black poor in the city where America’s national anthem was written. I thought it might be good to go back in time for this blog entry, back to the time of rhythm and blues, when black life had another kind of rhythm…I was born in Baltimore and know every corner of the East side and much of the West side of The Wire.

Baltimore has a heroin problem, and it has a problem with urban violence that seems pretty stubborn. The real heroes in this struggle are people like my three sisters who work in agencies related to mental and physical health. The heroes are also friends and family members who have beat the odds and live lives of recovery. We have lost some folks to the life, as we call it, and we miss them, but we struggle on in a city that is more beautiful and precious than most people know.

Milton Avenue is a few blocks from my family home. As kids, we took the long walk - or so it seemed to us -up the five blocks along Federal street to the corner of Milton Avenue, where Lucky’s liquor store still stands, although it is no longer open. From there we walked up Milton Avenue past the rowhomes decorated for the Afro-American Clean Block, a competition run by the newspaper. The winners were acknowledged in the newspaper and had an insignia to hang on their door to let the world know their house had the aesthetic taste, the manner of presentation that fit the community and the race.

Once we got to the store, we usually bought guppies, as my cousin Roy was raising them in a small aquarium at home where he, his sister, and their parents lived in the second floor apartment of our two family home. Once when one of the females was expecting, Roy thought she was too long in delivering, so her performed a Caesarian. The babies all survived, but they were motherless. Life was dangerous in my cousin’s aquarium, more dangerous than it was outside, as long as we stayed within the borders of our segregated black world.

Walking the streets we had to look out for the big boys, and in those days the worst they did was take your money and leave you feeling embarrassed. Walking to the barber shop alone was a trial for me, as the big boys were everywhere, and it was all about giving them the respect they wanted. That has changed, but barber shops and looking good has not changed, As a matter of fact, the young boys today are getting haircuts in the style we used to get in the early 1960’s, before the Afro hairstyles came in to our world. Looking good was about putting old stocking caps on your head at night to make waves.

Production for The Corner, the series directed by Charles Dutton and which preceded The Wire began in East Baltimore. It showed the tragedy of the drug trade as it came to be after the collapse of the steel mill and other industrial jobs for black folk. We all lived in the same communities in those days, teachers and professionals alongside my parents. Dutton set the cameras rolling in the block where Ms. Geraldine had her barber shop, a shop I enjoyed going to because she actually cut your hair the way you asked. Her uncle Arthur would listen to you as you took your time to explain on which side you wanted him to place your part and how you wanted your hair brushed. Then he did it his way in his barber shop. Ms. Geraldine was different. She actually listened to us.

There was a movie house around the corner where the movies where only 35 cents in those days, and next to the movie house there was a Five & Dime that seemed to have every necessity and every lovely little trite thing a ten year old boy could imagine. We could not shop downtown because of the segregation laws, so I don’t remember going into the large department stores until I was a young adult, but I knew the Five & Dime. I knew it, and I knew the 10 cent hot dogs in the movie house.

East Baltimore was also the setting of a scene from Romeo and Juliet, the Black American version. It was a spring night in 1970, warm but chilly enough for a jacket. I stood there beneath the second story window. My girlfriend and her sister were in the window as it was past their curfew. They couldn’t sit on the steps after a certain hour. Their parents were Apostolic church folk and quite strict that way. My wife to be and her sister were giggling.

“What do you want,” they said.
“I want to ask Ellie a question.”
“What question?”
“Ellie, will you marry me?”

There was no theme music, but there should have been, maybe the Yoruba talking drums, a little blues, some jazz, and certainly some old spirituals and gospels. But the only music was the excitement of being alive at that time. It was the late 1960’s.

The Wire shows the rowhouses with the marble steps, and it shows rowhouses with front lawns like the houses in the block where I lived, four blocks away from the young lady who would be my first wife and the mother of my children. It’s all East Baltimore.

The place we called home had been many things in the sixties, not the least of which was a battlefield. I looked out of my grandmother’s bedroom window at army jeeps and dogs the size of dinosaurs while the city burned and smoke filled the sky. Dr. King had been killed. That summer and those before and after were anxious times as we watched television to see the body count from Vietnam and the news of another American city exploding in what some of us called the black rebellion.

Something strange and tragic and historic happened. Some of the big boys became warriors. Our models for manhood had to battle a world that was new and strange, a world of freedom, and in that world came new attacks, the spread of drugs and the loss of the jobs the big boys had been raised on by their fathers and mothers.

In the 1970’s, taking each other’s money gradually gave way to less innocent ways of preying on each other. As the jobs disappeared and businesses fled to the suburbs, we became the prey of international drug merchants. The inner cities were a ready labor force and market for the drug lords of the world, and we began to make money by feeding death to each other. For many people this was the only way to survive. For others it was turning our souls over to the Adversary, as church folk put it, surrendering when we had all the reasons to claim our gifts and go on living so as to generate life.

The model for being a man fell over to the negative swell of criminality. So teaching young men by challenging them in the street became a war of dominance where guns replaced the more benign thing of being roughed up a little. Roughing up became murder.

So it was with the world in which we lived. It came under siege with changes brought in with Civil Rights, and we had to learn new ways to be. One of those things that helped us adjust was martial arts.

2007-08-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

Mei Nong

Taiwan's Beautiful Farms Area

Standing here on the top of Lion Mountain in southern Taiwan, you can see the area of Mei Nong, or Beautiful Farm. As you look over to the other side of the valley, you can see the southern end of the mountain range that stretches along the eastern side of the country, forming beautiful seashore areas where, in some places, there is a sheer drop from the mountains to the Pacific ocean. Here in Mei Nong the mountainsides are home to a variety of wildlife, including monkeys who shake the trees in the morning as they settle down to breakfast. This farming area is now being turned into a haven for the newly rich, as the old farm houses built by a Chinese ethnic group known as the Hakka give way to hacienda style houses that look like encampments, some with large metal doors and surrounded by stone walls. Mei Nong includes a smaller area called Long Du, or Dragon’s Belly, where two hundred children have been born who have later earned doctorate degrees.

Standing here with me are the two ladies who are nuns in the spiritual community. They invited me to take the trip there from Taipei, a three hour ride on the High Speed Train. It was my first time in Mei Nong, and so I did not know the only way I could get around was on the back of a scooter, but there I was, all 200 plus many pounds of me. Of that spectacle I am happy to say I have no pictures. But one might imagine.

This is the interior of one of the farm houses built by the Hakka people in Taiwan. The Hakkas are originally from northern China. They came to Taiwan in the first waves of Chinese people to come to the island some 300 years ago, and when they came they encountered the Aboriginal cultures who had been there for many years. The Aboriginal people are believed to be the Austronesian group of people who inhabit areas from Malay to Hawaii and New Zealand. They have been in Taiwan for a few thousand years, but are now very small in number. The Hakka gradually inhabited the land area here in Mei Nong, and the Aborigines retreated to the mountains, as they did elsewhere in Taiwan. The houses built by the Hakka are old and quite lovely. This one belongs to a popular musician who sings the music of the Puyuma culture. This website from Taiwan’s official tourist agency has information on Aboriginal culture.
http://www.sinica.edu.tw/tit/culture/0795_TribesOfTaiwan.html

Ah Shan, the gentleman who was our guide, took us to a pottery shop owned by a ceramic artist and his father. It was a fabulous moment for me as a I am always fascinated by visual artists. They make things you can hold in your hands or put up on walls. We poets sing to the soul, and although it is supposed to be a lofty calling, there is something that calls to me from the world of working with wood, earth, and other things. I guess it’s the thingliness of things. In any event, I have spent several precious moments since this trip back in June thinking of what it would be like to retire here in one of these old houses and just write. Get out in the mornings, do my exercises, and walk for an hour or so before settling in for a day to make art. Not bad, huh?

Ah Shan is the gentleman to my right. He also teaches children in a neighboring school the art of organic farming. He is dedicated to living things, he says, and is seriously concerned about what our alteration of the world is doing to the world and to us. The bridge where we are standing is on the grounds of the elementary school where he teaches. The kids were in summer session while we were observing their handiwork.

Ah Shan let me stay in his study while I was in Mei Nong for the weekend, and his three goats were my new friends, mama, papa, and baby goat. We had a little bit of a conflict. Ah Shan’s study has lots of paper, and you know how goats like paper. Well, at 2:00 in the morning when they were sure I was asleep, one of them stepped back a few paces, squared off, and then rammed the door with his/her head. I would go to the window and shoo them off, listening to their feet tapping the stones. Then a few minutes later they were back. It was probably papa, or maybe he and mama took turns teaching baby goat how to harden his or her head. In any event, I won’t have any goats when I retire to Mei Nong and into a Hakka farmhouse.

Read the poetry of Akuwuwu, a member of the Yi ethnic people in Mainland China. Go to: Poets Cafe: http://poetscafeunitedstates.spaces.live.com/

2007-06-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

The China Blues

It is said the Blues sometimes travels in the form of a woman, a woman who changes her form according to the way she travels the tracks of history. She knows the rhythmic rise and fall of hammers laying the ties for the railroads that connected the West Coast with the East Coast, Chinese workers and black workers laboring alongside whites and under white supervision. The hammers rising and falling with the sound of music being born was the rising din of this long bone that became the belly belt of a nation looking to sit on top of the world. It is said this woman knows magic and is magic incarnate, so the regional team the Poetic Advocates for Truth and Epiphanies, otherwise known as PATE, was called to convene in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania on the campus of Bucknell University to investigate the latest reports of sightings. The team launched an arduous investigation, but there were diversions.

As members of the regional team of PATE, we had been given advance warning of her ability to completely confuse our investigative efforts, but none of us thought she would leave this abandoned canary house on the porch of our B&B as a diversionary tactic. However, it worked. We sat around for hours trying to sing the canary blues.

Oh, I got a cage, and the bars wait for you,
Oh, I got a cage, and the bars wait for you,
When you get near me, Baby, my love is like glue.

Of course, after we realized we would never get a record deal, we awoke from the spell she had cast like the chill of the March wind in this quaint Pennsylvania college town.

We sought sanctuary in one of the town churches, thinking we could bind ourselves against our spells, but as soon as we got inside the building we heard the chanting of Tang Dynasty poems, the slow and deliberate chanting that is the way of teaching poetry and Chinese language in the old educational system. Pretty soon we were being fed baked rice by church members who had somehow found the recipe. Then there came the first confession after we interrogated them. She had taught them the recipe hours before we arrived, and she had bribed them, telling them they would get free rides on a dragon boat. We were nonplussed, but were soon let outside into the light to resume our investigation.

We narrowed the search to one of two women, and lo and behold! They were members of our team. Still, we were unable to get them to confess as to who is who, not even after an elaborate and expensive gourmet dinner in one of Lewisburg’s posh Mexican restaurant, so the team advised me to leave you to decide which of these two women is Marilyn Chin, the Magic Woman of the China Blues. Fellow poets and friends in the world, we wish you luck. Her magic is beyond discernment.

Marilyn Chin & Shara McCallum

Shara McCallum & Marilyn Chin

O, Mysteries

The China Blues

2007-01-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

LIFE IN THE MONASTERY

TEACHING TAI CHI CHUAN IN TAIWAN

by Afaa Michael Weaver
http://poetscafeunitedstates.spaces.live.com

Taipei, Taiwan, is usually a very busy city, and it especially comes alive, at least for me, at night when all the neon signs are lit and a ride through the city in a taxi is mesmerizing. Or a night spent in the night markets with all the food and goods and the loud music of life is more than your sensors can process at times. There is the stinky tofu, so named for the smell it makes when it is being fried. However, disturbing the smell, I love the stuff. You can buy it at any time of the day. The city sits in a basin with the mountains of the northern end of the island surrounding it like a natural wall. The "pei" part of Taipei means north, and this is the northernmost metropolitan area of this island country that I first visited five years ago, almost to the day as I shipped out to do a Fulbright at National Taiwan University on January 22, 2002, just five months after 911. I feel awkward marking time after 911, but I won't hit the delete button. I'll just leave it here and tell a little bit about why I left Taipei and went into a monastery for a while during my most recent time in Taiwan and China.

This is the dormitory where I lived while at the monastery. It is the He Han Temple and Monastery in Hualien, Taiwan, on the eastern coast of the country, a place where my friend Dr. Yu Hsi, the poet, novelist and playwright, is the director and teacher. A monk himself, Dr. Yu Hsi pursues the mission of the monastery, which is to promote Buddhism through art. So it is a small artists' retreat as well, a lovely place, with the sound of birds calling before dawn, so many birds it seems they could never be counted. Then there is the sound of the Pacific, which is just across the street.

I had moved to Taiwan to study Chinese in the immersion way for eight months. At the Taipei Language Institute, a private school with branches in other places in Taiwan and in China, I studied in tutorial fashion for two hours every day. With just myself and the teacher, it was intense. I had two teachers, and the teacher for the first hour is the lady who encouraged me to write poems in Chinese, which was equivlanet to taking me by the hand and walking me into the language. I had studied at Simmons College for free with my faculty audit for two years before going, but there is nothing quite like immersion, and this lady took me to the deeper waters. She had to stop teaching to return to other business, so I was left alone at the gateway. It was the Chinese New Year when everyone goes home to their families. I went to the monastery where I was welcomed with open arms.

Sitting on the grounds of the monastery, I could see the sun forming a mirror on the surface of the ocean, and I would sit sometimes at the foot of the statue of Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and think over my life. I had grown weary of poetry, weary of the careerism, all the struggle to be known, the young poets battling for space in the margins of anonymity, and I had grown fearful of the power of poetry. Life in the monastery seemed so serene. I thought seriously about staying for the rst of my life, but then I would take my cell phone and call across the ocean to family and friends to check in with folks. Home would beckon, but the convenience of the phone at times became another reason for staying inside the walls. I could always call home.

This is a lookout point near the monastery gate. Dr. Yu Hsi asked me to move into the monastery and teach Tai Chi Chuan to the monks, most of whom are women, and I emailed my Tai Chi teacher to get his permission. He said I could teach anyone who wanted to learn. So I moved there in May, 2005, for a period of five weeks, and our outdoor classroom was near the lookout point. The monks were the best students. Teaching them was a joy. Some days after class, I would climb the hill and just stand there and look out over the ocean, stand and listen to the endless drumroll of countless tons of water, our origin. A few times Dr. Yu Hsi and I went for walks around the monastery and we would run up the hill like two big kids, laughing and panting for breath at the top.

This statue of Guan Yin is where I would sit, in a pavilion to the left of the grand lady. One story is that she reached enlightenment, but when it was time to enter paradise she opted to stay in the world to help those who suffer. So thus she is the goddess of mercy. It is a long climb up the hill to where she is, and a few times Dr. Yu Hsi and I made the loop a couple of times, racing to see who was in the best shape. We are the same age, both of us born in the year of the Rabbit. Two rabbits we were, one a dedicated monk and one who plays with the idea, one Chinese and one African-American.

Eventually, I returned to Taipei city and to my Chinese classes, to the three hours of homework.

Taipei, Taiwan, is a busy city. Back there from the monastery, I dioscovered that the news of a black man teaching Tai Chi Chuan in the monastery had spread like wildfire. I listened covertly to two little old ladies one day as I was walking to the subway after class. They saw me and began to talk in Chinese about the wonder of this thing, that I was "elevated." However, it was another day of class and I was worn out. I came back to my flat at the top of the apartment building where I lived and stretched out on the bed, in the afternoon sun, and listened to my radio. It's interesting to me to think of who we are and what we take with us when we travel.