with Poet & Playwright Afaa Michael Weaver

Sling Interview

Bonita Lee Penn

Craft, as I understand the word, is how you build a poem. In that way, even a bad poem has craft. It’s bad craft, but it is craft.

 

Sling: The poem from The Plum Flower Dance, “Composition For White Critics Who Think African-American Poets Cannot Work In Contexts Of Pure Concerns For Language And Post-Postmodern Twenty-First Century Inventiveness In Lyric Expression Due To Their Self-Limiting Concerns With Language As A Means Of Self-Expression And Racial/Cultural Identity In Poetry That Is Ultimately Perhaps Beautiful However Too Trite And Too Folksy To Be Post[//] Theorist Efficacy.”

 

This was my first study of craft and I described this poem, “The deliberate and echoing tone of the speaker, along with concise line breaks after every two or three beats (caesura), gives a sense of vastness so great it can only be compared to the voice of God. The enjambment channels the poem’s movement; the word choice is the beat.”

 

This is how I image the sound of God’s (nature’s) voice. You have this mindfulness and connection to nature, place and being (placing it all in harmony). Reminds me of Bashō’s haiku “old pond.”  old pond. . . / a frog leaps in / water's sound.

 

Okay the question, how did you reach this place in your craft?

 

AMW: You mean how did I manifest the “Voice of God?” Prayer would be the answer.

 

Or the answer would be I allowed the gateway to associative movement in writing to open as wide as it would go. I took the idea of showing the power of associative thought as proof that African American poets can do it. I have since regretted dedicating it to Jorie Graham in its earlier published forms because I do admire a great bit of her work. To my knowledge, Graham never made such a statement about black poets. In the moment of writing that poem I let language flow inside me.

 

That ability comes with years of working to trust your intuition, of liberating it, but also of knowing when to put it away and think in linear ways. Intuition is its own logic, but don’t spend all your waking hours in creative, associative mode. You might hurt yourself. Over the course of a lifetime of writing I have learned to nurture and value my intuition, that part of the imagination that may be the most elusive when you try to describe or define it, but one that has its own wisdom and sanity.

 

I know your question is longer than my answer, but that’s all I can say without being pretentious. I have been compared to Walt Whitman and Dante Alighieri, and that’s all very flattering.  However, I am certainly not God. God save me from arrogance.

 

Sling:  In 1979 you receive a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Taiwan. Following that period you have continued your education and connection with Chinese language and culture. How this study influenced your craft?

 

AFW:  It has helped, I think, with my ability to think associatively. It has also made me more conscious of the sound of English and the value of writing systems that are based in the image. As for the culture, Taijiquan (Tai Chi Chuan) has been the organizing principle of my life, beginning in the winter of 1978 to 1979 when I began studying it. I studied Taiji and read the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Jing), the first copy of which I received in 1973, when I was 21 years old.

 

My first substantial teacher in Taiji told me the teacher gives the student the dragon in outline, and over the years the student finds the details. That has been a guide for me for self-exploration for over thirty years now.

 

Sling:  What would be your response to a poet (of any age/gender) who is part of a community workshop (and not part of an academic program), how they would go about the study of poetic craft? I ask this question, as I believe many great poets are born, not educated; and based on the fact you refer to your “literary apprenticeship” period during the time you worked at a factory. There is something about life’s experience and self-study that also develops a poet.

 

AMW:  That story of the dragon is about self-study. I agree that there is something about life’s experience and self-study that help, and if you can endure it over the course of a lifetime, your pursuit of it will be your biggest reward. However, I would disagree little about a poet being born and not educated. It’s that talent cannot be gained. You can learn skills, but the gift is a gift.  I was at university when I was sixteen years old and acquired a music method of study and research at the very prestigious high school I attended in Baltimore, Polytechnic. Read as much as you can. Listen to poetry. If you go to a reading and are inspired by the voice and work of a poet to the point that you begin to sketch poems as you listen, then you have found an important place inside yourself. This is a high point in self-study, this deep connecting with a poet’s voice and work.

 

Some poets get to wherever they get due to social positioning. A person of privilege can demand to be seen as a poet, and that will happen to an extent. They will have some success. The world of poetry is political, as is everything. A poor person with a gift has to struggle for a more genuine humility and avoid the traps of resentment. The gift has to be affirmed by others. Self-proclaimed geniuses don’t get too far.

Let’s just say it ain’t easy.

 

Sling:  If you don‘t mind I would like to ask for your thoughts on the state of African-American poetry from your point of entry until now. How has the landscape changed since you have been writing? Is there too much emphasis placed on the academics of poetry?

 

AMW:  I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. I think African American poetry came into its own in the last quarter of the 20th century, and that blossoming was hugely influenced by the Civil Rights Movement. That latter part of the 20th century was for African American poetry what the latter 19th century was for the dominant culture.

 

Much much more poetry is being published now. When Charles Rowell published Water Song in 1985, there was nowhere near the amount and variety of poetry published as there is now. I am the last of a generation born in the 1930’s and into the early 1950’s, and our take on poetry was more of writing to and out of an overview of the culture. I see younger poets writing more to their own contemporaneity.

 

It’s all good. It’s all different. The postmodern poets, most of whom are in their forties now, are being followed by a younger group that is seemingly somewhere between older ideas of lyric narrative and later variations on hip hop stances in English.  You have Kiki Petrosini and Dwayne Betts following poets in their forties.

 

I am not exactly a project book person. I work more organically. However, the project books I see now on the topic of slavery are interesting. There is so much that is not written yet from that vortex.  Then there are the younger variations on the Black Arts Movement.

 

In the Diaspora interesting things are happening with poets who came here in more recent waves of immigration. They have their observations of the U.S. along with their lived experience here, but more importantly, I think, they have their memories of places where they were born and lived outside the U.S. Poets like Enzo Surin, whose background is Haitian, will have interesting works to share, I believe.

 

It’s all good and interesting. It’s all different from my generation. The recent waves of black immigrants to the U.S. didn’t happen until I was grown. I come from a pre-Civil War black family. We have different sensibilities.

 

Sling:  Our focus this issue is on craft. One cannot speak of poetry without thanking those who came before. The poets of the Black Arts Movement has influenced me (and continue to do so); do you feel the Black Aesthetic is relevant today?

 

AMW:  The history of the tradition is always important to those of us who believe in tradition. You have to understand what influenced them and what influences they generated. They are relevant historically, and although their strategies may not work in the world such as it is now, the fact that they had one and they took on the powers that be is an important lesson as we face ongoing racism as well as the global specter of climate change. How important will any issue be if half the world freezes? The Black Arts Movement can help us construct lenses of intersectionality.

 

Sling:  Your study/practice of Daoist, how has it influenced your writing style?

AMW:  It has helped me believe in myself.  As I age, I come to understand how important some things are and how unimportant other things are. I feel I have to speak to the interiority of working class people by remembering that I am working class myself- despite what some people think. Daoism has helped me explore intensely personal issues, most notably the fact that I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I see that as a political act in itself, one that speaks to the dominant powers as well as the other dominant power of repression and denial in African American culture.

 

Sling:  The narrative in “The Picnic, An Homage to Civil Rights”, has great language which paints vivid images that stays with the reader long after the book has been closed. What are some of the craft elements you find important to use language in this way?

 

 “On the edges to mark the encampment, / like gypsies settling in for revelry / in a forest in Romania or pioneers / blazing through the land of the Sioux, / the Apache, and the Arapaho, looking guardedly / over our perimeters for poachers” or “the sun crashed through the trees, / tumbling down and splattering in shadows / on the baseball diamond like mashed bananas”

 

AMW:  That poem is ekphrastic. I was thinking of the painting by the same name and trying to imagine myself as a painter. Study visual art. That’s so so important to poets. Study all visual art wherever you can find it. When I say study I mean stand with the thing, look at it, see if it speaks to you. Art has a voice.

 

Sling:  What suggestions would you like to offer our readers when it comes to the study of craft in poetry? What are some books you may suggest, or readings or daily exercise?

 

AMW:  Here’s a small list:

Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Langston Hughes and his recently published collection of selected letters by Hughes.

The essays by Robert Hayden.

The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry

Singing School by Robert Pinsky

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 

A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

The Book of Forms by Lewis Turco

Book of Rhymes by Adam Bradley

The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser

 

 

Thank you so much for taking the time. We are truly appreciative.

—Bonita

 

You’re welcome.

—Afaa