Afaa Michael Weaver
“I have always seen myself as having been born with the gift to write and not someone who had to try to learn to write poetry as one learns a vocation. I do not see my gift as dependent on my childhood trauma, however. That trauma has presented challenges to developing my gift, but the gift is not contingent upon trauma.”
“In terms of the range of his content and tone, Afaa Weaver is the African American successor to Walt Whitman, and one of the finest American poets of his time,” said Ed Ochester, editor of the Pitt Poetry Series, which will publish Weaver’s tenth book this fall. In the last four years, one of the series’ authors has won a Pulitzer and two others have been named as finalists. “We publish a large number of exceptional poets,” Ochester said. “Among them, no one’s star is brighter than Afaa’s.”
“In this kinetic 11th collection, Weaver draws on his years as a “worker poet” to find the nightmarish urgencies in lives of quiet desperation: “shears cutting shiny tin into thin plates/ fast enough to cut the bone away so cleanly// a man has to remember to scream.” Weaver’s practice in taijiquan (tai chi)... becomes an apt metaphor for the wheels of production and the repetition of workers’ nights and days; the heart of the collection is with in-between moments, in break rooms where self-declared white hillbillies can commiserate with African-American workers, where diverse realms of experience mingle, “ringing out truth’s raw gospel.” At times Weaver is unabashedly sentimental, and his empathy is a narrative strength ...Craftsmanlike in the best sense, mimetic of the textures and processes of assemblage, Weaver’s language is at its most transcendent in fusions of the technical and the numinous: “Geometry makes the soul of machines,/ a hypotenuse connecting the dark corners/ where wheels seethe with envy of wings.”
“A bold collection. As he embraces spiritualism, Weaver always has two feet firmly planted in the American experience as he has lived it.”
“A book of narrative meditations that look bravely and, at times, with striking clarity, at the memory of childhood abuse—the poems falling down on the memory itself like so much rain. But these poems don’t point only to themselves—their reach extends out, developing a deep politics of suffering, survival, and family history. Weaver’s poems are crisp in their narrative telling, and also rich with the lyrical complexity that is the pillar of Weaver’s work. . . .If you want to come face to face with the ways identity, family history, language, and suffering build and rebuild who we imagine ourselves to be, then read ‘The Government of Nature.’ And read it more than once.”
“Weaver has crafted a virtual planet in this book with plenty of alternate geographies for readers of all flavors and stripes. Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious.”
Afaa Michael Weaver is a poet, playwright, and translator. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, most recently A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press, 2023). Other recent books include Spirit Boxing (Pitt Poetry Series, 2017); City of Eternal Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award; The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985-2005 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr as “one of the most significant poets writing today,” Weaver’s many honors include four Pushcart prizes, inclusion in Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), The May Sarton Award, a Pew Fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship to teach at National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts, and the Gold Friendship Medal from the Beijing Writers’ Association. As a playwright, in addition to an NEA fellowship, he won the PDI award in playwriting from the ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago for his play Elvira and the Lost Prince. Some of his poetry has been translated into Arabic and Chinese, and, having studied at the Taipei Language Institute in Taiwan, Weaver himself has done translation and written poems of his own in Chinese.
The son of a sharecropper, he grew up in working class Baltimore, did a stint in the Army, and spent fifteen years as a factory worker, during which time he wrote intermittently and founded Seventh Son Press and the literary journal Blind Alleys. After 10 years of work on his first book, Weaver released Water Song in 1985, and won an NEA fellowship in the same year. Weaver’s early work was influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and his later poems have been compared by the Los Angeles Review of Books to the “personal, historic, epic, and spiritual” journey of Dante’s Divine Comedy “into the depths of human experience and suffering, and then back up and out.”
In an interview with Kaveh Akbar in Divedapper, he was asked about his iconic poem, To Malcolm X on his second coming and how it came about: “Malcolm X remains one of my central heroes for several reasons. There is that adamant resistance, but there is also the self-definition. He built himself organically out of his own experience. You can say that’s the American experience and I would agree, but in the specificity of being a black man in a predominantly white culture, there is another self-definition, another kind of organic growth that is not so much the boot strap theory.”
Weaver was the first African American poet to serve as Poet in Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center, and has also taught at NYU, City University of New York, Seton Hall Law School, Rutgers University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he held an Endowed Chair at Simmons College for twenty years. He has been on the faculty at Cave Canem since its inception and in 1998 became Cave Canem’s first Elder. Afaa and his wife Kristen live in a small farmhouse in the Hudson Valley.
Open and right-click to download
(c) Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
