Afaa Michael Weaver 蔚雅風

Leaves

The lines that make you are infinite, but I count them
every day to hear the stories you carry. These are not secrets
but records, things we should know but ignore. If I commit
the sin of tearing you from the tree, I find another world
inside the torn vein, another lifetime of counting the records
of who walked here before, of what lovers lay here
holding each other through wars and starvation.

Some days I stand here until I lose focus and travel,
drifting off out of the moment, too full of it, and my legs
are now like trees, mindless but vigilant, held
into the earth by the rules of debt, what we owe
to nature for trying to tear ourselves away. I drift
and the pleasure of touch comes again, layers of green
in the mountainside a tickling in my palms.

The pleasure is that of being lost here in the crowd
of trunks and pulp, the ground thick with the death of you,
sinking under my feet as I go, touching one and another,
linking myself through until the place where I entered
is gone. When I am afraid, my breath is caught in my throat.
When I am not afraid, I lift both hands up under a bunch
of you to find the way the world felt on the first day.

published in Orion magazine

CRITICAL QUOTES REGARDING WEAVER'S WORK
THE POETRY

"Moving beyond identity, embracing his Ibo and Chinese names, Afaa Michael Weaver's poems (The Plum Flower Dance) are sturdy and direct. He achieves the rare exception in American poetry by returning to Whitman, toward the self, to permeate the spirit and to see God."
Olssons Books
March 5, 2008


"It (The Plum Flower Dance) is nothing less than a personal cosmogony, cosmology: each section heralded by the five elements of Chinese philosophy...It is a tour-de-force of expansiveness in African American poetics...Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious."
Vince Gotera
North American Review
January/​February 2008


“Weaver fixes on family, and, fundamentally, the chronicle of life itself. For Weaver, it is not the archive that matters, but ancestry, not existentialism, but existence. Strikingly too...Weaver embraces the American anthems of Phillis Wheatley and Walt Whitman, sharing Wheatley’s republican acceptance of mortality and Whitman’s democratic adulations of “multitudes.” To portray individuals caught in the flux of living—or dead—multitudes, Weaver often stages a fiesta of present participles,--reminiscent of Whitman—as in “A Photograph of Negro Mania…”
George Elliott Clarke
on Multitudes, 2000
African American Review


"Afaa Michael Weaver is a poet of angels and demons. His roots are wide and deep, going back to writers of mystical and devotional poetry like Traherne or the early Blake, and conjoined with the moods (though not the rhythms) of blues. There is an even, slow pacing in his poems that feels like wisdom."
Alicia Ostriker
writing on "Multitudes" 2000


"Fanon said, '...to speak is to assume a culture and to bear responsibility for a civilization.' Afaa Michael Weaver has done that in his poems. This poet has been to the "carnival in the city" and returned with the knowledge that the country is alive because of his benedictions."
Sonia Sanchez
writing on "Multitudes" 2000


"Weaver finds a place in the legacy of Whitman and the mid-nineteenth century when in the evolution of American poetry the glory of vernacular speech first became fused in verse with an inspired sense of the American self, sensuous and yet transcendent...(He) has made himself into a virtuoso in his manipulations of vernacular form. Poems such as "Mojo Mamba" and "Piggly Wiggly"--Rabelasian sendups of black American phallocentric humor...are composed so deftly that one is brought up short when the exaggeration and the laughter stop and the meditative voice and rhythms return to serve the poet's more intimate needs. His vision is local and focused, and as befits a poet of genuine depth and seriousness of purpose, it is as wide as the horizon itself. Weaver's depiction of black culture clearly emerges from a profound love of black people."
Arnold Rampersad
Stanford University
from his preface to Weaver's Multitudes, 2000


THE PLAYS
"The Michael S. Weaver play “Rosa”...works magic on the soul...Eugene O”Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” kept coming to mind as this play unfolded...I think my connection had more to do with O’Neill’s sovereign sense of drama--a quality Weaver, a poet of some consequence, also evidenced in his writing here.”
Nels Nelson
The Philadelphia Daily News
June 8, 1993


“The spirit of the late William Inge inhabits the weather-beaten house, the rose-covered arbor, and the people in search of connection in Michael S. Weaver’s Rosa...”
Clifford A. Ridley
The Philadelphia Inquirer
June 5, 1993


MORE ON THE POETRY

"What the sages know is what Weaver submitted himself to learning from the time of his childhood, a black kid exposed to both city and country in the last days of segregation...The book (The Plum Flower Dance) is that rare bird, both weightless and profound...It simply understands, as St. Teresa of Avila understood when she counseled "let nothing perturb you," that there is no gain in desperation."
Ralph Jones
East Providence Post
November 30, 2007


"Weaver is expanding the great tradition in American parlance and song. He strives for the deep resonance of American Grand Opera, in the Whitman tradition."
Michael S. Harper
Brown University
on My Father's Geography 1992


"Afaa Michael Weaver is one of the most significant poets writing today. With its blend of Chinese spiritualism and American groundedness, his poetry presents the reader (and the listener, for his body of work is meant to be read aloud) with challenging questions about identity, about how physicality and spirit act together or counteract each other to shape who we are in the world. His attention to the way language works is rare, and the effects of that attention on his poetry are distinctive and expansive."
Henry Louis Gates
Harvard University


"That Weaver refuses to play victim politics means his work is infused with the dignity of African American life, without demonization of mainstream white culture. Certainly the lives portrayed in these poems are not easy, but acute and accurate observation of quotidian detail underlines the poignant intersection of elegance of loss. Weaver's new poems here belie a fascinating turn toward jazzy, vernacular collage, playing High John the Conqueror with black stereotypes and myths."
Vince Gotera
writing on Multitudes
North American Review
January-February 2005


"...Afaa Weaver is the African American successor to Walt Whitman, and one of the finest American poets of his time."
Ed Ochester
Taipei Times
July 8, 2007



on History

Books of Poetry:

Water Song U of VA 1985
some days it’s a slow walk to evening Paradigm Press 1989
My Father’s Geography U of Pittsburgh 1992
Stations in a Dream Dolphin Moon Press 1993
Timber & Prayer University of Pittsburgh 1995 (Pulitzer finalist 1996)
Talisman Tia Chucha/​Northwestern University 1998
Sandy Point The Press of Appletree Alley 2000
The Ten Lights of God Bucknell UP 2000
Multitudes Sarabande Books 2000
The Plum Flower Dance U of Pittsburgh 2007
Like the Wind (Arabic) trans. by Wissal Al-Allaq 2010

Anthologies (as editor):
Gathering Voices (in collaboration with James Taylor and David Beaudouin) 1985
These Hands I Know Sarabande Books 2002

Poetry in journals (a sampling):
The Kenyon Review African-American Review
The Southern Review Women’s Studies Quarterly
American Poetry Review River Styx
Cream City Review Seattle Review
Artist and Influence 5 a.m.
Poetry Callaloo

Plays professionally produced:
Rosa Venture Theater 1993 (a small Equity professional production)
Elvira and the Lost Prince ETA Theater 1993 (winner of PDI Award)

The New England Poetry Club awarded Weaver the 2009 May Sarton Award for his service to the art of poetry and for serving as an inspiration to fellow poets. Weaver shared the award with Fred Marchant of Suffolk University.