Meditations on Michael S. Harper’s Use Trouble

Use Trouble by Michael S. Harper

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Afaa Michael Weaver

November 14, 2009

Michael S. Harper’s most recent collection of poetry is Use Trouble, a glance over many years, a peering into the spaces between chance and opposition, between no way out and the promise of change.

When he told me about his new book about it in an email exchange, I ordered it immediately. I was in Taiwan and had it shipped to my office in Boston. Later I settled back into my apartment here in Somerville and sat at my kitchen table holding it in my hands the way I do when a friend puts a gift into the world this way, a new book. I mark the time that I have known Harper as beginning in the fall semester of 1986, when I sat in his Volvo with him and his daughter Rachel as he lectured me on the need to know metrics, as meter is to poetry what the notation of sound is to music. He later told me that I would find the assignments for his graduate poetry workshop in my mailbox. He put trouble in my line that evening. He launched me into his rigorous pedagogy... the metric exercises , the lectures, the meditations on craft and form.

So I sat at my kitchen table and felt the inspiration to write about the man I have known for twenty-three years, the poet, the teacher the mentor, the friend.

That night we sat in the Volvo we were on Thayer Street, Brown University’s main campus drag for hanging out. On that same street a few weeks later, I stood one morning waiting in line in a convenience store to pay for a snack. It was just a five minute walk from the graduate dormitory where I lived in my second year in the writing program. In Baltimore I had made history, graduating from years of factory work with a dual diploma, one a book in Charles Rowell’s Callaloo series and the other a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It had not been done before, at least not in Baltimore where I had a acquired a certain fame, so much so that one friend questioned why I even wanted to go to graduate school. Jonetta Barras, now a Washington journalist, believed I had already acquired, at the tender age of thirty-three, enough skills and way with the hand--creative mojo in poetry--to be able to go out into the world. I thought otherwise. I felt I needed time to read, think, and get a set of licenses, some high powered backing before heading into academia. As Bob Greene, a Baltimore journalist, said to me, “A nickel and talent won’t get you into the circus.”

It was a bright morning in early fall of 1986, some twenty-three years ago, and I turned around to see Michael S. Harper standing behind me. He is a good two inches taller and a good deal heavier, but there he was, as silent as a cat, and when I turned around he smiled that smile that is mostly mischief and which those of us who have studied with him know very well. It is also the smile of the little boy who hooked school to ride the subways of New York alone in the forties, worrying his mother and striking out in a bold way into the world in the way black poets have had to do for so long. It is also the smile of a father.

Three years earlier, in 1983, the original manuscript of my first book of poetry had been chosen as a finalist by Harper for the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American poets. There were forty finalists out of over a thousand applicants, and the poet who won was my age and has since passed away. His name was Christopher Gilbert. Gilbert was a fine poet, and I regret never having had the chance to meet him. The notice of my finalist ranking came when I was living in a house that I rented with the option to buy. My wife loved the house and wanted to buy it, but the marriage did not have enough collateral. It had instead accrued excessive damage, or trouble. I made note of Harper’s name in the letter announcing my finalist standing, as I had read his work in journals, and I thought it might be good to go where he was teaching. When I saw that George Bass was also at Brown, I began assembling my application materials. In the warehouse where I worked, my coworkers laughed themselves silly when I told them I had applied to Brown University. I had been in factory work for fourteen years and was the janitor in the place.

Harper walked with me outside that morning at the store, and on our way up the street he talked about his struggle with bourgeois opposition in academia. His way of teaching is his way of being. If you listen and watch, you will see and understand what is otherwise too often indecipherable. He loves metaphors and signs, pieces of things, suggestions of what can be real. He is a lover of history, and if you enter that stream with him in conversation, you can walk with him along important paths, paths whose importance are known to many poets. At the Cave Canem retreat in the old monastery, its first meeting ground before moving to Pennsylvania, Harper relayed a conversation he had at Tuskegee with an elderly man who was a disciple of Booker T. Washington. Harper recounted the man’s reverence for Washington, who has beend dead for nearly a century. The message there was about historical continuity...and trouble.

When I read at the 92nd Street Y in New York for Karl Kirchwey some years ago, it was with Elizabeth Alexander, and it was around the time of the publication of her first book. Harper introduced us. Later in an outer room, a young white woman poet posed an academic question in a gesture suggesting an invitation to intellectual sparring, and I responded quickly with a reference to a Yoruba entity, something she did not know. Harper said as he as said to me on other occasions, “Well done, Michael.”

The man had already reinforced in me something I had suspected for many years, namely the political nature of the power of knowledge. What is important to other people may not be important or useful to me. The reverence given to a body of knowledge is one thing. My need to know a certain set of knowledge in order to pursue my writing is quite another cause for reverence.

In speaking of trouble, we can say the configuration of the relative power of knowledge can constitute trouble. There are all kinds of trouble.

There is age, life’s dwindling away.

At the Dodge festival at Waterloo in 1994, Harper and Lucille Clifton were in the hotel with me, and I had already known Lucille for nearly twenty years. Now I was chauffeur for both of them. One morning I drove us to the site of the festival, where I would keep Harper company. At one point we sat in the car and listened to the radio, a piece by Coltrane. It was 1994, and I had never taken the time to be very literate in music, literate enough to name the piece I am listening to in most cases, but Harper knew, of course.

“That’s Naima,” he said.

In the spring of my first year at Brown I took Piano and Theory with Nancy Rosenberg as an audit and preparation for research project in the blues and black theater history. So when I met Harper I had learned to read and write music, although my compositions were simplistic and in no way memorable. With Harper I began to think of prosody’s “significance” as comparable to that of music theory, but I discovered it as a process that I am still engaged in, still meditating on improvisation and abstractions in language. When it comes to naming the composition I am listening to, I am still not literate enough to name the tune.

The visual analogue of the melodic phrase of my time at the Dodge festival was a video clip of me walking behind Harper, a video that was part of Bill Moyer’s special on the festival. A student of mine from Rutgers was beside me, a woman who decided to study with me after reading a poem I wrote about Pearl Bailey. Her name was Karen, and there the two of us were, trailing behind Harper in the way of lineage, walking along as if on the rim of some mountain range or the edge of a perfect triad before it diminishes itself and becomes a blue note.

Poets gather and we are often glad to see one another, a joy that grows as I age, as I realize ambition is more trouble than I want these days. But the word is no good if it just sits in my home. I have to get up and get engaged. The world needs me to be who we are, all of us, wherever we are in meter or the way we make note of sound and its regular or irregular life, its consonance and its dissonance.

The morning in the store on Thayer Street is one I treasure. I say “thank goodness” because it allows me to enjoy the man’s presence. If we have ever disagreed or argued or not spoken, it has been because I wanted his attention, and it has been because it is the way men like us communicate, black men who have had to stare down death in dangerous places. We are much as we were in that store on Thayer Street as poets, here today and for certain not here at some unforeseeable point in the future, although these heavy footsteps we make as two big black men are also the heavy steps we make as wordsmiths, beating out these things called poems in blacksmith shops of the mind that are hot and dangerous with the melting of life and worlds in life so that we can hammer them out on anvils. We name these anvils creativity and courage.

O Black and Unknown Bards, How Do We Love Thee?

Let Us Count the Ways...

“I am writing by the pound...”

Langston Hughes to Arna Bontemps

September 27, 1952

-- Afaa Michael Weaver

“I am writing by the pound,” Hughes wrote to his longtime friend Arna Bontemps. Hughes was in his 50th year of life, with fifteen more active years before his death, and I was not quite one year old. Now at 57, I sense a need to once again take a cue from the old master and be busier at my work. In that same letter Hughes told Bontemps he had shipped some twenty pounds of manuscripts, including all five drafts of his play Simply Heavenly, to Yale University, the repository for his papers.

It was the seriousness with which he took himself as a writer that has so inspired me in my life. It was a seriousness that George Houston Bass, my late mentor, worked to instill more solidly in me. Bass had been one of Hughes’ secretaries, and Hughes named him the executor of his literary estate. I was receiving transmission from Hughes through Bass, an experience I now value more than I did at the time. It was 1985, and I was thirty-three years old.

In a moment of splendor, sitting as I was in his office there in the African American Studies building at Brown, I looked around to my left and upwards to the top of Professor Bass’s bookcase. He was explaining to me that Langston Hughes was very much with us. Some of his ashes were in the room. As often as I have told this story, I have gotten smiles and chuckles each time, but the solemnity of the moment will not go away for me when I am alone and thinking of how things have been passed on, the gift of knowledge and warnings of trials and challenges.

“Hughes fathered me in the way that I am fathering you. Your responsibility as a poet is to bring the respect of the critics to the masses because you come from Blackbottom.” Bass was an intense man, and when he focused on me that way with those heavy eyebrows of his attuned like a hawk, the southern son in me was all obedience.

Professor Bass was trying to get me to understand the significance of class in my own life. All full of expectations about getting an ivy league degree and being a professor, I was not quite sure of what to do with those feet of mine so firmly rooted in the ground of the working class. At the time that Hughes’ father sent him off to Columbia, my grandparents were southern sharecroppers, and my father’s grandparents lived in a log cabin packed with mud and outfitted with wooden sliding windows.

Hughes was a member of the black middle class, a fact I brought to the attention of a white scholar at a conference not too long ago, someone who dismissed my comment by saying, “That adds nothing to the discussion of black poetry.”

His comment adds a great deal to what I already suspect about the tapestry of African American poetry, which is that it is largely unknown and misunderstood across the racial board, as I think there are very few younger black poets who have really let the lives of the dead black poets inform their own lives and work. Poets generally fade in the minds of young poets caught in their ambitions and the dead come to be regarded less and less as direct influences.

I use the word tapestry as I avoid the word “tradition” these days. Tradition seems to imply more or less an adherence to principles which are set forth to insure the continuation of something, and that is perhaps where the aforementioned scholar lives in his own critical world, a place where expansiveness is not to be had. His attitude is akin to one even more limiting, which is that poetry by African Americans is in its own world, something apart from the mainstream. It seems to me that such a view guarantees the stasis of all American poetry, when the truth is that black poetry has always informed and energized American poetry in ways similar to the effects of black demands on the democratic system. Democracy has been taken to task by black folk who have continually asked it to prove itself. Black poets have taken democracy to task. These challenges to America’s ideals have benefited everyone in this country and beyond.

Kelly Miller, part of the old guard at Howard University, would have something to say about the supposed monolith of black American culture, as would his daughter Mae Miller, a poet and playwright herself, a gentle little old lady with whom I had lunch as part of a reading I gave in 1985 at the Library of Congress at the invitation of Gwendolyn Brooks.

She could not eat all of her lunch, and she did not want to waste it. “Here,” she said, “you can have my soup.”

Gwendolyn Brooks was hosting me for the event and was at the other end of the table. She looked down to get a fix on what Mae was trying to do to me. It was all rather harmless, so Gwen left me to the task of eating the soup, which was Ms. Miller’s gift to me.

We should all inherit sustenance. We should all value the gift of literary soup. In its heyday, Howard University had the brown bag test for social life. Folks darker than a brown paper bag were not allowed in certain social sets. There was the Jack and Jill Club. The dirty secrets of color and hierarchy in the early formation of the black middle class are still pretty much secrets, an area too prone to bickering and hearsay for any but the most brave and perhaps foolhardy of scholars to tread. Nonetheless, it is an important aspect of cultural self-knowledge and awareness.

I could very easily say I wish more white poets and critics knew much more about the tapestry of African American poetry, but it is more the responsibility of African American poets to know the distances between historicity and intimacy, to know just how much the history of black poets before them informs and challenges their present circumstance. One should take up the difficult charge of honoring a tradition that was held to be substandard and honor it in a way that leads to the expansive growth of American poetry as a whole. It is not easy, and many have written about it, including Derek Walcott with his trope of the literary houseboy.

However substandard these dead black poets were thought to be, they were the embattled wellspring that is indispensable to the definition of America’s poetry. I do not believe an aesthetic that denies them will stand, nor do I believe an aesthetic that refuses to move on from that historical base will stand either. Cultural and racial groups have to define their own humanity. If others write the African American narratives and name what they see as commonalities in the lives of blacks and whites, the door is left wide open to the denial of the genuine role of racial prejudice in American life.

The discussion of class does not eliminate race, but it can illumine it, make it accessible to a broader critique. There is a story of race, class, and privilege inside black culture that is waiting to be addressed. Langston Hughes was a middle class African American who wrote of ordinary folk as an observer filled with love for the poor and the working poor. Separated as he was from them by education and family circumstance, he maintained his own sense of cultural responsibility in his work. His faith was that his work would be a structure that the unborn poets would one day use. That is a profound commitment to the writing life.

Professor Bass told me of the evening walks they would take through Harlem. Afterwards at his home, Mr. Hughes would ask him to talk about what he saw. Then Hughes would give his view of the neighborhood that evening.

“Well George, this is what I saw.” Mr. Hughes went on to explain Harlem as he saw it. It was the work of an observer, but it was also the work of someone who very much knew he was a member of a specific cultural group facing very clear obstacles configured by racism.

We should all know our origins. That’s easy. What’s not easy is knowing where we are in a country where the obstacles are not what they once were. However, I maintain that no matter how clear your course seems to you as a poet, there is something to be had in loving those black poets who are now gone, and loving them as part of who you are, even if you no longer think race so much defines your life.

I believe the ironic power of race and racism is rooted in denial of the same. The suspension of race as a concept has to be rooted in a complex critique of it, not by simply declaring your transcendence over it. At this point in history, that critique depends on the honest confrontation of class and privilege as very real forces within the African American literary community, for better and for worse.

“Tell me, what do you see?”

Procter & Gamble's Baltimore Plant

(now a day care center for Yuppies)

When Poets Grow in Factories

Afaa Michael Weaver

蔚雅風

August 11, 2009

My first experience in a creative writing class was as a visitor. Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew, allowed me to sit in on his class. It was 1980, and he introduced me to a number of poets, including Frank O’Hara.

I complained to Rodger that I felt alienated from poetry as a factory worker.

“Nonsense, Michael. Your poetry is all around you.”

I thought he was just being flippant. “I don’t know about that, Rodger. Trucks and machines don’t seem very poetic to me.”

But I took his advice and began writing about that world around me. An earlier manuscript became my first book, Water Song, with poems like “Currents” and “The Aftermath,” a poem which Gwen Brooks told me was a favorite of hers.

Immediacy was the lesson, and I learned it from Rodger Kamenetz. He was teaching the creative writing class at Baltimore Community College. O’Hara’s aesthetic of personism and his poem “The Day Lady Died” have been touchstones for me in thinking of immediacy and the American lyric.

It might be hard to imagine liquid dishwashing detergent as something dirty. It seems to be the enemy of dirt. Even when you are too lazy to scour a pot the way you should after you have burned your frozen vegetables, you can take the charred pot and soak it overnight with your detergent of choice. As you sleep, the little bubbles pull out their miniature scouring pads and get busy softening the dark clumps of vegetable burned beyond recognition. Such a powerful agent in a nice place like a kitchen should never be thought of as dirty, but when you work in a place making and packing the stuff, it seems foul beyond redemption sometimes.

It was the early years of the seventies, when polyester came into our lives along with disco. I worked on packing floors at Procter & Gamble’s Baltimore plant in Locust Point, one of the many points along Baltimore’s harbor. Directly across from the plant on the other side of the harbor is Fells Point, which is now a tourist hub, hardly the run of the mill southern Baltimore neighborhood it was during my childhood.

My packing floor career had its high point when I became apprentice to Smithers, an older, white coworker who hunted black bear and had bear sandwiches for lunch sometimes. His wife made the best fruit cake, and I always chose that when he offered me cake or bear between the bread. Smithers was a master paper cutter. He taught me how to use the large iron paper cutter in the Ivory soap department to precisely cut the small sheets that were the inner covers for every bar of soap. We cut these sheets from large slabs of paper that were so heavy we had to heave them onto the iron table. One slip meant the corners of the large sheets were irreparably misaligned and, therefore, useless. We sat in the empty management meeting room for breaks and for lunch, a room with large clear windows where we could look out over the harbor where the commercial ships passed long before the harbor was remade for the tourists. Christmastime lunches were the time for the dessert.

“Bear sandwich, Mike.”

“No thanks, John, but I’ll take a slice of fruit cake.”

“Here you go, buddy.”

In the fall of 1974, after writing in fits and starts for a few years, I was able to establish more of a consistent writing mood. Writing while working in factories is a matter of being able to maintain that meditation on your work despite all the distractions around you. The danger is that you become attached to adversity. It is only now, twenty-four years after leaving factory life that I find I want spaces in which to do nothing but write. Reading was a violation of factory rules, as was writing. The stated objective was our safety, which I believe. I almost lost a hand on a packing unit. However, the oppressive nature of factory life was such that it felt more like the rules of the Gulag. In the latter nineteenth century, as mass production developed, industrial engineers applied the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment to put forth the idea that factories and factory workers should be perfect machines, one the replica of the other.

It was not to be a place to house developing poets, writers, and thinkers, but there we were, many of us the wide eyed idealists of the sixties who dropped out of universities to take work among the masses, some of us following our own interpretations of Marxist ideology. For me it was not Marxism as much as it was the alienation I felt in a predominantly white university. Whatever the reason for our exodus, there we were in industrial life. In those days, conversations among workers ranged the full spectrum of intellectual inquiry. In 1973, I received my first copy of the Daodejing from a factory coworker.

If I wanted to be a pompous egotist, I would say I set out to create the canon of poetry of working class interiority as resistance to the system. Although I had that as a “hazy aesthetic,” the clearer view of things was given to me by Dr. Xiaojing Zhou, a scholar and critic of Asian American literature at University of the Pacific.

“It seems that’s what you’ve been doing all this time,” she said. We were sitting in her office last spring, during my visit to give a reading and talk to classes.

In the winter of 1974 to ’75, I began to assemble the original version of Water Song, a manuscript I called Frenzy. Determined to finish the bachelor’s degree I started six years earlier at the University of Maryland, I enrolled at Morgan State University, but attending college and working on the lines as a poet was too much for my fragile nervous system. I finished the semester, but spent the last ten years in the factory writing and reading on my own, with mentoring from friends in academia and in the world of writers at large, folks not imprisoned as I was at the time, watching thousands and thousands of white, yellow, and blue plastic bottles going around the conveyor system to be filled with the immaculate soap and then boxed to be sent on the long conveyor ride four blocks up the street to the warehouse.

I can hear the noise of the place now, as I write, although it has been shut down and converted into a day care center for those who can afford the luxury condos that sit on the edge of what was once the warehouse parking lot.

The warehouse was Freedom Land. It was where the plant’s misfits and renegades worked. There was space to roam and hide. We could stretch coffee and lunch breaks on evening and night shifts.

The plant had an internal job application system. Folks went from department to department by applying for vacancies. In the fall of 1975, I was able to get a position in the warehouse as a truck loader. My manuscript was sitting somewhere in Toni Morrison’s pile at Random House, where she was an editor. I had the utter audacity to send it to her, and she kept if for almost a year. When she returned it, she included a wonderful note saying she very much wanted to place it but could not. That rejection note was an inspiration, and I kept it for many years before losing it in one of my moves from place to place.

Things were busy in the warehouse, but there was space, physical space that, for me, translated into thinking space, into the unfettering of consciousness. I was able to write more consistently and began a free lance career as a journalist, writing for the Baltimore Sunpapers mostly but also for the Afro-American and the City Paper of Baltimore. I started a small press, and by the early eighties I was a part of Baltimore’s literary renaissance.

We were poets, with me emerging from the masses of bottles and trucks and boxes, and more bottles and trucks and boxes, and conveyors and machines... and oh my, the business of a poet growing and living as African American working class.

Rutgers University Afaa Michael Weaver

Camden Campus 蔚雅風

1990-1998

The Angel of Adjunct Awareness

It was in autumn, in the year nineteen eighty-seven, a few months after I walked across the stage and away from graduate school life, away from the pious heaven of access to some of academe’s best libraries, the heady and inspiring culture of what was, at that time, the most popular undergraduate culture in the country and one of the most popular and competitive writing programs. I didn’t think much about what life would be like outside the campus green, despite the fifteen years of factory work. It was a grand performance in willful forgetting, I suppose, as I even tried to finagle a way to stay at Brown University in the way of a doctorate program, but I waited too late for such a thing and so was cast out onto the outer planets away from the center of the universe. I sat at a lunch table at Essex County Community College in Newark, N.J., munching a homemade turkey sandwich with lettuce but no tomatoes as I could not stand a soggy sandwich in those days of struggle. It must have been the unhappy munching face I made, but whatever the signal I was soon in the presence of The Angel of Adjunct Awareness.

He was a poet. He is a poet. Even today he descends at the most propitious moments to show me he is still prescient.

In his unassuming way, he got quickly to the business of a poet not having much to do in the way of work and needing money to pay bills.

“Do you want to know how to get work in the city?”

Of course, the city was New York City. It was a vision of heaven, bigger name universities, standing before the unwashed masses of students and expounding on some really interesting subject. It was the prospect of getting out of the textbooks for composition and into content courses.

“You look like you could use some help,” he said.

“Oh yes.”

He began to outline the process, telling how to arrange my vita and what times were best to approach department heads looking for work. I was excited and came home to tell my wife there was a chance to break into the metropolis, although we had no chance of moving. I would have to take the NJ Transit train from East Orange to the PATH train. In those days the PATH went into the World Trade Center. It was still the late eighties, before the first bombing of the building.

I had luck right away. In my first attempt, I landed work at Borough of Manhattan Community College, which was still composition but in a new environment, and I thought I had reached the first level of nirvana when I got two courses at NYU. One was the undergraduate course in African American Drama, and the other was an undergraduate Creative Writing course. Mark Rudman and I taught the undergrad poetry workshops under Sharon Olds. I thought I had arrived, but times were still tough. There were challenges that tried a poet’s courage, such as being in the city at night with a token and some very spare and sparse change.

However, it was magical at times, too. My wife at the time, Aissatou Mijiza-Weaver, found work at the Ukrainian high school near St. Mark’s Place, and when we our schedules allowed, we often walked to dinner at one of the Indian restaurants between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. We were young enough, in our late thirties, for it to seem like something of an adventure. She is a painter, sculptor, and art critic, and we spent a lot of time in the world of visual artists. She also worked at the Strand bookstore, which counted among its other prestigious employees none other than the poet Tom Weatherly. The neighborhood’s magic was deepened by the presence of University books, a unique place on the 8th floor of 10th Street, or thereabouts. My memory is a little fuzzy on the address. That store consisted of rare and precious books scattered around with the owner sitting in the midst of everything in his peculiar chair. Prominent scholars from all over made the mecca to this odd place to find books only he had. Now it is gone.

My students were mostly wonderful. The classroom became a place where I could both test myself and feel as if I was making a real contribution, and I usually I loved being with my students. At NYU I conceived and taught the first graduate course in black poetry ever offered at the university. Some of my students later ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project for awhile. In Newark I managed to become the writing consultant for Seton Hall law school, and in the summers that job became the director of the writing division for a summer program for people aspiring to enter law school in the fall. They were eager students, many of them near my age, and I was moved many times by the hunger they had for a law degree.

Teaching had its challenges, for sure, and there was always the challenge of trying to figure the space between my working class experience and whatever this space was that consisted of riding the NY subways for much of the day. I often felt out of place and inadequate. I could still hear the whir of machines and trucks as if they were next to me there as I rode the #2 subway line to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. For a few semesters I taught composition at Brooklyn College, and the adjunct office was across the hall from the office of Allen Ginsberg and John Ashberry. I never saw them, but each time I glanced over at the door I had a long way to go, despite the fame I accrued in Baltimore as some kind of working class hero poet. I was in the bigger, wider world now, and making less than I made in the factory and with none of the benefits. The lack of health insurance especially bothered me.

However, there I was in the Big Apple, and my tenure track position at Rutgers was only two years away. That would come when another friend brought the job opening to my attention. Robert Philipson was doing a post-doc at NYU in African literature, and he pointed out the Rutgers opening to me. I applied and was hired with the support of Henry Louis Gates. Yes, there were other angels, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove. However, my professorial beginnings in the New York area were made tangible by this other very kind and generous poet, the Angel of Adjunct Awareness.

It was The Angel of Adjunct Awareness who brought me closer to landing more firmly in the world of poets who are professors, as firm a thing as that will ever be. The creative mind is not one with the critical and should never be, but all good glory goes to the poet who wants to know things, the happy generalist.

& this angel, who is he?

Tis Barry Seiler, a kind and patient observer of the universe who lives a contemplative life at high altitudes and to whom I am forever grateful.

"Hey Light Bulb!  Where you get that haircut?"

Adjunct Chronicles            

Afaa Michael Weaver

The life of the poet and budding playwright in graduate school was more of a paradise than I realized at the time.  I could write a play in a weekend and have it produced the following weekend.  Brown University has several theaters, and my favorite, of course, was the black box where we had our student showcase.  Lynn Nottage was a classmate of mine in those years, from 1985 to 1987, as well as Teresa Church and C.B. Coleman.  We were having the time of our lives and didn’t know it.  I had the blessing of being under the tutelage of the late George H. Bass and Paula Vogel in playwriting and Keith Waldrop and Michael S. Harper in poetry.  In the Rockefeller library I had a carrel loaded with all the things I wanted to read and think about, including some critical studies on Beckett’s non-relational art.  I thought life would always sorta be this way, me looking out on the expanse of some park or otherwise green area and thinking the great thoughts of language and art the way poets and playwrights do. 

Immediately after graduation, I headed back to East Orange, New Jersey.  I had found     a gig teaching remedial composition and composition at Essex County College, a community college in downtown Newark.  That is where I learned the fundamentals of classroom control, how to pace myself during class meetings, and how to go at the most difficult challenges in teaching students with special needs.  But it was not enough money.  My semester’s salary was barely enough to pay two months’ rent.    

Never mind the gaze over green expanses with great thoughts swimming in my cranium.  I had to help my wife keep a roof over our heads and buy groceries.

There was no health insurance.  The summer was difficult, and the fall threatened to be even tougher.  I called my father in early October to say my wife and I were thinking of moving back to Baltimore.  He was a tough love kind of parent. 

“That won’t do much good. Try to stick it out.”

            I was panic struck.  My wife and I were struggling.  So I fell back to basic survival techniques and went to the school boards in East Orange and New Jersey to sign up as a substitute teacher.  I taught English composition at Essex in the evenings and, in the mornings, waited by the phone with my tuna fish sandwich for the call that would send me to a public school for the day.  Adjuncts shared information, and the word was to stay away from Lincoln elementary school in Newark.  The kids were supposedly uncontrollable.  One day I got the call for Lincoln, and my wife and I needed the money badly.  She was teaching art at a Ukrainian high school in Soho for a small salary.  So I set out for Lincoln, which was within walking distance of our apartment, just across the city line dividing Newark from East Orange.  Lincoln was everything adjunct lore rumored it to be and more.

            My assignment was a second grade class.  When one of the girls took out a makeup kit and began talking about what she did the night before, I knew why I had been warned. I began to hyperventilate when one of the boys stood on his desk and jumped up to the ceiling light, catching it by the edge and swinging.  The climax was yet to come.  Another boy bit his classmate and left teeth marks on the boy’s skin.  I was standing by the door and reached for the emergency button.  In a nanosecond the principal was in the doorway, and the entire class came to silent attention the way Marine recruits stiffen in the presence of the drill instructor.  Whatever fear she carried in her presence was enough to keep them more or less in line for the rest of the day.  I never went back to Lincoln elementary school.  I decided I’d rather starve.

            Looking back at graduate school, it seemed like paradise compared to the beginning of my teaching career, where I fought for my very being in the midst of these half pints who were experts in terrorism.  Brown kept life’s harsh realities away from me.  I had been spoiled. 

In order to save money at that time in my life, I began cutting my own hair.  I thought I had done a fair job of it.  At least my friends said I looked acceptable.  I had grown a beard while at Brown and was wearing that along with thirty-five pounds more than what I carried normally when I worked in factories, with all the walking involved in that life.  So I had a fade haircut of my own design, a beard, and something of a Buddha belly.  Aside from places like Lincoln, I was subbing at a middle school in East Orange.  While walking down the hallway, I heard a group of boys behind me, taunting me.

            “Hey Light Bulb!  Where you get that haircut?”

            They ran when I motioned to confront them, and all I could do for several days afterwards was struggle with the image of my head and neck as a light bulb of some unknown wattage.  From there my self-image hit a downward spiral.  I began to see my entire body as an organic light bulb, punctured by my Buddha belly.  On subsequent assignments to that school, I tried to find the culprits, but to no avail.  They were all in hormonal demon mode.  However, I decided to scrape pennies together to get a haircut from a barber rather than trust my own clippers and the mirror.  But in that fall of 1987, some good things also began to happen.

            I signed on with Berda Rittenhouse and the New Jersey State Arts Council, and that allowed me to get residencies in two elementary schools in Newark so as to teach poetry to kids who might otherwise be chasing me in the hallways and taunting me.. It was rewarding work.  I felt I had a chance to give some input to the kids that might be a catalyst for them at some point in their lives.  I suppose they are in their early thirties now, if they have survived the dangers of urban life. Whatever the future held, I was so happy to be away from the monsters that named me after Thomas Edison’s invention.  My head and hair were looking better and feeling better.

            Later a guardian angel would appear and show me the mysterious secret ways of living adjunct life in the Big Apple.  More on that in the next installment of adjunct chronicles…

 

           

 

 

Arizona

            Tempe is a landscape as far away from Somerville, Massachusetts, as Saturn is from Mars, the spacious desert vs. the rocky hills and ocean, the cacti that take centuries to grow vs. the layers of fall New England foliage.  Each arm of the cactus is some major accomplishment that goes unnoticed by most eyes.  Then there are the stunning moments, such as when a desert owl drops into a downward glide from the inner portion of the top of a tree, one moment an unseen hooting in the evening, and then the noiseless swish of some of the most perfectly placed feathers in the world of the birds, a favorite world of mine.

 

            Meeting Norman Dubie was as much a mecca for me as seeing Twin Buttes, a pair of hills that are sacred Indian ground and which sit next to a very old cemetery, both of which are behind the Fiesta hotel, where I spent a week while in Arizona visiting friends and relaxing.  When I met Norman for the first time after knowing of him for thirty years, he explained the significance of this part of this sacred ground.  We were in the home of my friends the poet Cynthia Hogue and her husband Sylvain, who arranged a reception for me.

 

            “There is a cave there that only a few people have been able to find,” Norman said.  Of course, I went looking the very next day, but I did not find it. 

 

            Poets go into these spaces as much as we go into the unwritten poem, that minute and all too infrequent space between thought and the absence of thought, the timeless now, the space of creativity.

 

            We talked for almost an hour, this poet a few years older than me, his beard a gorgeous, pearly white, his demeanor one of persistent kindness. 

 

            Chris Burawa, poet and translator, told me about the hills before I met Norman Dubie,  So I had been leaving my room in the mornings after my daily bowl of oatmeal and headed out across the parking lot, one of the very few walkers in that part of the world.  In Arizona it seems only the poor and the searchers are walkers, so parts of me qualified for each, as it seemed most people intent on exercise did things indoors.  But I wanted to see these hills from every angle.  After awhile, my gaze made them human, and then I heard the solitary weeping of sacred things wound round and round with highways and litter.

 

            They are as solitary as the mountain lions who climb to the tops of cement fences in backyards, looking as much like lions as one would want an animal to look that close to the living room.  They come looking for food, or they come out of some natural longing to walk about in the world, to be on the move.

 

            Searchers we may very well be. If we look at the time in which we have been searching, the time since some fifty of us walked out of Africa thousands of years ago to populate the planet with all its cultures and the ways we have come to name ourselves, we can revisit the idea of what ground is sacred.  If we think also of the fact that humans are the only group whose disappearance would not obliterate the chain of living things, the idea of what is sacred perhaps belongs in a truly special place.  If insects were to disappear, all other forms of life, the whole web of things, would disappear.  So it seems to me that these grounds on which we come to live and grow are markers of accomplishment like the difficult appendages of the cactus. 

 

As someone who grew up with westerns, the legends of the Old West seem much like the cactus, often prickly things that grew in adverse circumstances.  Billy the Kid was just sixteen years old in Arizona, an emotionally disturbed teenager who was struggling with abandonment issues and living in an America where traumatized veterans from the Civil War roamed the country, many of them armed and prone to violence and all of them quite a bit older than he.        

 

There is that history and there are these mesas of tranquility, such as the Sunday morning group meditation in the Zen center where I went at Chris’ invitation.  After sitting and then chatting for two hours, we stood out in the yard and had dessert, juice, and tea.

 

            Arizona is this kind of place, where sages grow alongside those old legends, where poets with devotion to reverence for life intently walk The Path, word and spirit.  It is this and it is memories and promises, changing circumstances in the heart much like the shifting shadows of the sun over the Twin Buttes, two sacred Indian hills in Tempe.

 

            I will have to go back to Twin Buttes to find that cave which Norman told me about, to go searching again.

 

            Meanwhile, here is the link to an interview with Norman Dubie from

Poets & Writers.

                     http://www.pw.org/content/return_silence_interview_norman_dubie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Place for Stillness

The starter's gun went off, and there we were, battling to see who could stand still in the deepest way.  My competitors could not resist moving, so there I was.  I took the gold for being motionless.  I would not have won this race for standing still, for being in the moment there on the track in Beijing's Olympic Bird's Nest, had it not been for the Fulbright.  Unlike some other awards, it's the one that keeps giving.

It was 2002.  I had been named a Fulbright scholar at National Taiwan University.  A bit confused about the layout of the city, I did what a man raised in cities will do.  I sat on the curb there in Taipei just outside my apartment building and studied the neighborhhood, listened to the sounds of the cows across the street in the university's agricultural school, watched the taxi drivers drinking and hanging out, smelled the new smells, all in a place on the other side of the world from home.

My Chinese was minimal at the time.  In 1984, I enrolled in a weekend class in Baltimore.  It was the Chinese Community Association under Dr. Lillian Kim, who has since passed away.  The classes were taught by a professional musician who was born in Taiwan.   She had a musician's lack of patience for sound mistakes.  So she drilled us, but it was only six months, and in the spring of 1985, I had to leave the classes.  

So there I was sitting in a place where sounds were familiar, but where I could not make any sense of things.  It was as if I had broken the "sound echoing sense" idea of poetry from English metrics.  I was in my own dream of the sound.  Walking along in Taiwan I was suspended between realities, in a place where the usual promptings did not work.  It was a good space, a space where you could look out onto the way people perceive you.   Of course, that is if you have that kind of traveler's instinct in you, the instinct for stepping outside yourself to explore another way to be.

Identity is a set of clothing that seems to grow out of your skin, but if you are fortunate you get to a place where you can consider that maybe it is a set of clothing that you put onto your skin. It's then that you wonder how you ever came think it was innate to your being.

Maybe it's the idea of fluidity, as being black is not something I want to give up.  Rather it's something which I refuse to let interfere with my need to see the world, to experience the world.  For me that means choosing my response to some situations, to being less sensitive to situations that have formed negatively in my own history, the history of me.  

I had a friend who once said that when he went to Africa his life made sense to him.  Well for me, it was going to Taiwan and China.   I was not looking for a sameness in outward appearance, but in what I had held to be true in spirituality.  Of course, the western fascination with foreign ideas of spirituality always has a sobering moment when we travel to the places where these spiritual systems were born, and there is the danger of what Deepak Chopra calls spiritual materialism.  However, I have found affirmation of the idea that there is one truth--goodness.  For me, that goodness has a light.  It is a light I often find when I am sitting down resting my nerves, as my mama used to say.

We should rest our nerves sometimes, rest them in a new place.  Then we will see everyone has the same nerves, these things that live on the inside of us...away from competitions.

When I got back to the Boston, I started studying formally, and I have managed to get to the intermediate level.   My next step is to get into the fluidity--there's that word again--of the vernacular and of idioms so my communication is clearer and more responsive.  As it is, I get into places in a conversation where the other person's personality and instinctive ways with the language lose me and I have to resort to contextualizing.  That's when I lose bits and pieces of meaning.  But maybe that place is where I also lose the bits and pieces of clinging to the old clothing of identity.

It began with the Fulbright.   Studying Chinese formally and working with Chinese poets as a project was an idea that came to me from my Fulbright experience.   It seems as if I can reap the benefits of that experience for a long time, provided I remember the value of stillness.