Nicolette Reim: Your poems are immersive and bring readers into histories of Black Americans. They pulse with family, community and companionship—travelers together, even with those who have been hurtful. The poems balance dualities of young/old, family/outsiders, male/female, black/white, blue collar/white collar, north/south, and east/west. Do I dare ask you during this discouraging time if you remain optimistic that historical dualities are becoming more at peace or do solutions still lie with the slower pace of individual change?​

 

Afaa Weaver: Chaos perhaps best describes the state of things now, but chaos is also the natural state of things in the process of becoming. Historically, I think we are inside the “end stage” of European expansion that began the 14th to the 15th centuries, the post-renaissance beginnings of colonialism, and the great project of acquisition of wealth. No one could have seen the limits of extraction, disruption of cultures, how it has affected the natural environment, and no one knows, quite frankly, if this is the first time this has happened. 

 

But let me be more specific. I am still not convinced of the ability of poetry to affect policy making. We have enough history in the U.S. to know deliberate disinformation is not new. It was used to help steer people into the first Civil War. However, the creators of lies have underestimated, I think, the ability of their own machinery to backfire. People can honor themselves enough to know when they are being taken for fools. Poetry affects that, as I think the expansion of Creative Writing programs has helped foster a higher level of emotional intelligence, which can nurture the intersection between activism and art. 

 

With climate change and these pandemics, time is of the essence. We are into the realities of the real fragility of this system, its chaotic state, and there is a sense of suspension of time, and the overwhelming weight of selective realities. I’m a believer in the idea that reality, as we know it, is a matter of the shared functioning of consciousness, with sometimes imponderable variations in perception, and yet poetry lives in the center of this consciousness. We are bending and being bent. Something will give soon, but it should be very painful.

 

Although COVID-19 brought the harsh realities of racism, racial disparities, and other problems that black and brown people live with every day, that shock seems to be wearing down. So when I think of progress, I have to remember that different people define that differently. Extreme Weather is here, and it’s moving faster than we can predict. The film Don’t Look Up is about that reality, and how human frailty never fails. 

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Langston Hughes’ “Montage of a Dream Deferred” is the perfect looking glass. All that’s wrong and hopeful about this country is in that long poem. It amends “Song of Myself.” 

 

Along with renewable energy sources, reparations for descendants of enslaved African Americans, social services to support police reform, paid child care for the poor, holding members of Congress accountable for taking part in Jan 6th, federal regulation of private equities and high tech, and increased taxation of wealth, we need love.
 

NR: Afaa, your poetry steadily and insistently pulls. Jolts come from highly original descriptions. Poems can be ekphrastic, inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s paintings and convey jazz rhythms, a saxophone, the piano, paying homage to great musicians. Your knowledge and love of music shine through. You invented a poetic style called “Bop.” How far did you go with this and can you describe it for us? 

 

AW: The Bop has traveled first in the work of Cave Canem fellows, and from there to many other places. I have written what I consider the definitive essay on the form for a collection of essays How We Do It, which is forthcoming from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. In one essay I explain an aesthetic influence that led me to invent the form, the “golden mean.” As a young poet, I often traveled with a 35 mm camera, and even had business cards describing myself as a freelance writer and photographer, a rather bold move some might say. Whatever the level of ambition, I studied composition, and had one important conversation with a photographer in Washington D.C. in 1976, the year I met Essex Hemphill. He talked to me about the horizon line, the placement of it, and he encouraged me to stay the geometrics of my subjects because I am color blind.

 

In inventing the bop that spring in 1997 while teaching at Cave Canem, I was thinking of the form vertically, of course. However, with all my poetry I think of its three dimensional presence, which for me comes from studying depth of field. 

 

What’s missing now is an extensive anthology of bop poems. Tara Betts and I assembled one, but if we could start all over with a commitment and editorial support from a publisher, that would be wonderful. It could even be graphic, complete with drawings and thought bubbles - Bops for an Ideal Climate-Concerned World. 
 

NR: Your generous tributes to other artistic ways in your writing is part of a non-exclusionary philosophy and goal of self-definition not based on separation. Fellowships and honors in recognition of your work gave you opportunities to study language and Taijiquan in Taiwan and Mainland China. Your most recent work includes even more of the variety and resourcefulness of historical Black communities; longer line lengths appear. How has your poetic tone and point of view become affected by experiences with these different cultures?

 

AW: The study of Mandarin changed the way I pronounced English, when I came back from living in Taiwan in 2004-05, my first sabbatical at Simmons. When I studied I read the textbooks, as I was studying on the three levels: speaking, reading, and writing. In Chinese the western idea of grammar is difficult to translate. It is possible to alter the order of the characters and still have the same meaning. The pronunciation depends heavily on pitch, and the pronunciation of some characters changes when they are adjacent to certain other tones.

 

In reading Daoist philosophy, studying Mandarin, and practicing Taijiquan, I have found doorways into myself, into realizing what the experiences of my life mean to me. In 2002 I began my Taoist sitting meditation practice, and that especially is the source of an abundance that has driven deeper experiences of developing a container in my spirit that allows me to hold powerfully divergent energies and has driven changes in much of my poetry after The Plum Flower Dance, the first book in my Plum Flower Trilogy, the second of which is The Government of Nature, and the third is City of Eternal Spring. 

 

My own poetic sensibility has been influenced by the study, and the travel, and in organizing the two international conferences on contemporary Chinese poetry at Simmons 2004 and 2008, which gave me a chance to get to know Chinese poets, some of whom I maintain contact with today. My godfather, Dr. Chengshi Perng, a scholar and translator of Shakespeare, as well as a playwright, gave me my Chinese name and helped facilitate my first return trip to Taiwan in 2003, when I was a guest of honor at a conference on poetry in Taiwan, hosted by Dr. Yu Hsi of He Nan Temple and monastery in Hualien, on the country’s western coastline. Beginning in 2002 when I went to Taiwan on the Fulbright, my life there was the other side of my life in Boston. 

 

When I started studying Mandarin, it was as a faculty audit, and I lived in my “cave,” as I called my small apartment in Somerville. My study method included taping the vocabulary of my Chinese lessons, chapter by chapter, on the walls of my bedroom, and listening to my audio tapes, watching Zhong Tian television, and Chinese movies. It was my own immersion experience. I did my sitting meditation in my bedroom facing the rising sun and practiced my Taijiquan and Xingyiquan outside on the parking lot. 

 

That was my life, and it still is, with some adjustments made, of course. In 2019 I remarried, and so I am no longer a lay monk. Spirit Boxing, is the more recent work to come from all of that, the vocabulary on the walls, all of it. The philosophical ideas of the Yijing and Taijiquan directly inform the structure of the poems and the entire book. 

 

But coming back to The Plum Flower Trilogy, City of Eternal Spring has several poems where I do my best to embody the experience of being deeply inside Chinese culture. “Meeting Old Friends at Drunken Moon Lake” is one where I felt the lines breathing the experience, as I did in many other poems in that book. The Harlem Book Fair awarded me the 2014 Phillis Wheatley Book Award for City of Eternal Spring. I treasure that award because it comes from the community of black and brown artists, scholars, and critics. That means so much to me. 

 

NR: I want to ask you about a particularly well-known, anthologized poem – “The Appaloosa.” Sometimes a horse is just a horse, but I read its black, brown and white markings as a striking way to explore the universal evil of racism. The horse, its coat of many colors beautiful upon arriving, has been held down by a saddle. The horse turns mean, rotten. Black, brown and white all succumb when the horse is put to death. I wondered about the difficulty of finding poetic means that describe racism without resorting to dichotomies of good/bad, which you avoid? 

 

AW: I’ve always tried to write without casting blame, or by suggesting it in ways that are more concerned with poetry than polemics. That is a direct result I think, of grasping Daoist ideas of non-dualistic thought when I was in my twenties, and through living my life, trying to understand those principles. The way of nature, as Daoist philosophy explains, is that all things are in the constant state of creation, and that we are, in every part of our being, each a microcosm of the perceptible universe. That is not too unlike the ideas that emanate from Judaism, but without the Jewish emphasis on rational thought. The mind cannot understand the mind, nor can it understand reality in its truth. That requires emptiness, and another way of perception that is above language. The Kabbalah says that, too, but rationally. In April 2023, Red Hen will publish my sixteenth collection, A Fire in the Hills, and the structure and texture of that book is Daoist.

 

NR: Much of your poetry reflects memories of places—southern farms/northern cities, neighborhoods, the distinctiveness of foreign countries. Globalization is homogenizing a world we once took for granted as having differences. Do you see this trend affecting your work and/or poetry in general?

 

AW: I believe human beings have an urge to differentiation. Only for so long can we withstand homogeneity. When everyone starts wearing purple and gold, a few folk who can no longer stand it will opt for another color arrangement or none at all, as in anarchy. The worst that can happen, I think, is nihilism. How will that affect poetry? Well, poets are connected to the inner workings of language, and who knows what’s inside the inner world of language? Down that road lies the end of theory, but not the end of philosophy. Globalization is, I think, the endgame of western capitalism, the chaos. 

 

When I think of writing, or am actually writing a poem these days, I come away from the exhausting space of worry about all that is happening, and when I do step away I embrace the ordinary, the way something gets still in me when I look up at the pictures of my family all around me in my cave, or the way it feels when the pencil scratches across the page, or what comes up when I free sketch in my pad in between writing, or the way the afternoon fills the house with south/southwestern light, filling the space of the windows into our home. When I think of writing things like a manual for my great grandchildren, hoping there will be some, or for all the children of that generation who will be in 2052 - thirty years from now - in a world more uncertain than this one today, I come back to thinking about the faith I had in writing about the persistence of the ordinary as an indication of how we love and how love will live beyond death, or how we believe those things. I come back to that faith and to my love of poetry and theater, of all the arts, of all the ways The Gift comes to some of us, and how The Gift comes with unnamed vulnerabilities, sensibilities, pain, joy, and resilience, and that is all I have or ever will have, that faith and the hopefulness in the joy faith brings against the storms.

 

That’s me for now. May we all be safe and resilient and kind to one another.