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Arts & Entertainment

Acclaimed Poet Emerged From Sparrows Point Steel Mill

The Baltimore poet known by some as the black Walt Whitman contributes an original poem.

Mo’s Seafood

[Eastern near North Point]

The parking lot is where anything can happen,

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the yellow poles too close together to open

to the lot even paved like a desert, the door

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to the dining room a back door, the front door

lost in the lights, and I wander in here like a man

who has been found or a man who finds himself

in places where the world steps off itself and flies

into spirals and cones lights make in skies

so free they never ask for your passport, and

my voice is the deepest voice they have heard

all day in the bar, and the bar is a last look at a kiss

from the night before, all dressed up in coke

and ice.

 

If Baltimore were a station

for old style highway robbers, men who rode

broke down horses and used station wagons, who

slept with the women in cardboard sun decks 

latched onto trailers in the hills, if Baltimore

were the real end of the tired world and the birth

of heaven, this place where crabs are cooked,

this paradise, this last selection on the board

of God’s real estate office would be where 

life crawls out of the sea again to try out new legs

and arms grown out of the tangled seaweed 

that once tied itself around the swollen bodies

of boats, to sing new songs in lungs so glad 

to leave the water they put memories of seas 

in back of the last bus to Antarctica, and it is

all right, all aligned with forgotten prophecies.

 

But tonight it is the simple matter of what will

there is to be the simplest event to hit this place

in years, a man walking unafraid to keep trying

at the heart’s roulette wheel, to spin a few balls

to beat fate, to walk on heels made of diamonds

made from histories of being the last singer

to hit the stand, the mike in his giant hands.

— Afaa Michael Weaver

----

Afaa was born Michael Schan Weaver on Nov. 26, 1951. The East Baltimore native was the first child of Otis and Elsie Weaver’s five children. Neither parent finished high school. The promise of work had brought them to Baltimore from the South.

Young Michael, however, flew through school, skipping the eighth grade and entering the University of Maryland, College Park at 16. During the winter of his freshman year, he began to write poems—the love poems that mark the beginning of many a literary career.

And then his girlfriend and future wife became pregnant—succumbing no doubt, to the power of Weaver’s verse—and the father-to-be left a “large white university where I felt so alienated.”

The son born to the couple, named Schan, died at 10 months old. Their second child is Kala Oboi Weaver, who has made Afaa a grandfather.

In 1970, Weaver returned to Baltimore to go into the steel mill at Sparrows Point, followed by a hitch in the Army Reserves. After service with the 342nd Army Security Agency at Fort Holabird, it was back to the working class grind for Weaver.

This time, he ventured out beyond the assembly lines to introduce himself to the local literati. Weaver recalls a group photograph taken in 1981, during a time of a “literary renaissance” in Baltimore.

The group gathered at grave in downtown Baltimore in late November: Weaver and a gang of poets that included David St. John, Clarinda Harriss, Andrei Codrescu, Dyane Fancey, Daniel Mark Epstein, Elizabeth Spires, and Joe Cardarelli.

The picture ran on the cover of the Sunday Sun magazine, a picture that for Weaver signified the true beginning of his literary career. 

While still at Procter & Gamble he began freelancing for the Sunpapers, writing Op/Ed columns and feature stories for the next decade. His by-line appeared in the Baltimore City Paper, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune.

In 1985, Weaver walked out of the factory for the last time. He left with a wealth of material, aNational Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a published book of poetry called Water Song.

Older and wiser, he left home once again for school, this time   Excelsior College in Albany, NY. There, he earned his BA in English and literature before heading to Brown University for his master’s of fine arts in creative writing, awarded in 1987.

After reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart—and with the help of his friend and fellow playwright Tess Onwueme—Weaver chose the Nigerian name Afaa, meaning oracle, and jettisoned the name Schan. The renaming helped bring closure to his grief over his infant son’s death.

Weaver’s poetry collections include, My Father’s Geography (1992); Stations in a Dream (1993); Timber & Prayer (1995, Pulitzer finalist 1996); Talisman Tia Chucha (1998); Sandy Point (2000), The Ten Lights of God (2000); Multitudes (2000); and The Plum Flower Dance (2007).

Weaver now lives in Somerville, MA, and is a professor at Simmons College in Boston.

His papers are collected in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

—Olivia Obineme

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