East Baltimore Muse

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 ...

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, an...

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 ear...

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 bee...

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 me...

HIP HOP ROAD, A PATHWAY TO WHO, WHAT WHERE? by Afaa Michael Weaver http://poetryconference.com/default.aspx This spring marks the twentieth anniversary of my graduation from graduate school. I completed my master's in creative writing at Brown University in 1987, and several of my friends were undergraduates, men and women who were about 21 or 22 years old. We had a fabulous ceremony. Stevie Wonder sang and played for us. Connie Chung was there, and so was Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel , wrote the famous children's books THE CAT IN THE HAT and GREEN EGGS AND HAM, among others. I knew those books because I had bought them for my son, who was six years younger than my undergraduate friends. At that time my relationship to folks in their twenties was closer, as now I am thirty-four years older than 21 year olds who will take their degrees this spring. I hope to see them grow into a world of gigantic challenges and become the giants they have to...

HIP HOP DOO WOP FROM A POET IN TAIWAN by Afaa Michael Weaver (Michael S. Weaver) http://poetscafeunitedstates.spaces.live.com/ I was young enough to sing doo wop in the early nineteen sixties, and in the late seventies I was still young enough to appreciate the emergence of rap. Hiphop, doowop , and rap are all words that have come and gone in African-American culture. Hip has been around as long as Cab Calloway's "Salt Peanuts" and hye dee hye dee hay and hye dee hye dee ho. Hop is part of the word for Lindy Hop, a dance popular some years before I was born, and rap was the way you talked to someone you wanted to date in the nineteen sixties. If you watch an American black and white gangster film from the thirties, rap will most likely be the time done for the crime. Or it might be a bum rap. Today hip and hop and rap have more to do with folks like Jay Z. The December 4 th issue of Newsweek magazine has a long feature story on Jay Z, a multimillionaire ...