Lamont Poet Afaa Michael Weaver Shares Work With Exeter

Afaa Michael Weaver, this year’s winter 2017 Lamont Poet, shared his works with the Exeter community at a reading, question-and-answer session and book-signing last Wednesday night.Weaver has published twelve books of poetry including Water Song, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005, Multitudes, The Ten Lights of God, City of Eternal Spring and The Government of Nature. His full-length play Rosa was produced in 1993 at Venture Theater in Philadelphia, PA, and his short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies. Weaver also founded a publishing company and has worked as a freelance writer for Baltimore’s primary newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. He has received prestigious awards such as the Pew Fellowship in Poetry, the 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award for Poetry and the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award.

“The poems condense such a long history into so few words without losing the importance of what has happened."

Recognizing Weaver as a well-established voice in American poetry, the Lamont Poet Committee wanted to invite him to Exeter before he retired. Instructor in English Eimer Page, who serves on the committee, found Weaver’s work captivating, calling it “a poetic parallel to the personal narrative.”Page was equally impressed by the universal resonance of Weaver’s writing.  “He leans on his lived experience for his work, but his poetry has a universality to it as well,” she explained. She also commended Weaver for his ability to read his own work well, a sentiment many students agreed with.Weaver began his presentation by reminding Exonians of the privilege afforded them by the Academy and the potential that higher education offers. He reflected on his upbringing in an impoverished East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lived with his steelworker father and part-time beautician mother. After military service and during his fifteen years of factory labor, Weaver began to write poetry, a process he called “intuitive.”While employed as a warehouseman for PG&E, Weaver’s first collection of poetry, Water Song, was picked up by a publishing company, which would later qualify him for a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship in 1985. That spring, Weaver was accepted into the writing program at Brown University on a full scholarship. The “poetry renaissance” of Baltimore had just begun during the 1980s, and Weaver soon became a well-known figure.“Poetry was my liberation from the factories, my gateway to higher education. To some degree, my story is a story of overcoming odds,” he reflected. “If you had looked at me fifty or forty five years ago, you would have never thought I would accomplish what I have accomplished.”Weaver went on, explaining that his background and childhood have heavily impacted his writing. His proximity to America’s workforce resulted in literary themes of working-class citizens, racial tensions, poverty and mistreatment. However, the breadth of Weaver’s inspiration is endless. “What inspires my writing? Everything,” he explained. “I’ve written about Marx, mysticism, memories, my family, history...”Many in attendance were lowers who were reading Weaver’s work in their English classes. Lower Ingrid Bergill, a student in English Instructor Courtney Marshall’s class, was fascinated by Weaver’s range of topics. “The poems cover so many important moments in history,” Bergill said, commenting on her experience of reading Weaver’s anthology, A Hard Summation.“The poems condense such a long history into so few words without losing the importance of what has happened,”she said. For Bergill, Marshall’s unique way of teaching these poems made it much easier to contextualize the events that pertained to each poem. “We were responsible for looking up any unknown historical events or figures and explaining them to the class,” she explained. “[The poems] went in chronological order, from the beginning of slavery to 2012.”At the reading, Weaver read his poem “The Kidnapper” from A Hard Summation, a tribute to enslaved children and how their forced integration into a white America resulted in a dispossession of their native African culture. He asked his audience to consider historical events like slavery, lynchings and segregation in an objective manner. “I encourage you all to have an open and comprehensive mind when thinking about history. It is our responsibility to write and communicate and deliberate sincerely and honestly,” he said. “At the same time, we must forgive and understand if we are to continue as a human species.”Lower Isadora Kron found Weaver’s message of amnesty and tolerance relevant to ongoing racial, economic and social breaches. “His message of history and forgiveness still rings today because history repeats itself,” she said. “There’s a current tension in this country and around the world in regards to economics and social issues, so I think it’s really important now, more than ever, to hear voices of people from all sides of a situation.” Kron continued, commending Weaver’s art form. “Poetry is a good way to hear the stories of different sides that you might not be experiencing, which might help resolve those issues,” she explained.Weaver also read excerpts from The City of Eternal Spring, reflecting on his embrace of Chinese culture and his travels to China, where, as a 27 year-old, he discovered the art of Tai Chi. Weaver, now a dedicated Daoist, explained that both Chinese meditation and his Southern Baptist background to be spiritual remedies for childhood traumas.Upper Wendi Yan appreciated Weaver’s exploration of Chinese culture in his works. “Reading [the] poems has also made me wonder a lot about how a poem with a similar theme could look like in Chinese,” she explained. “He really made me hope that there could be a more nourishing and vibrant environment for contemporary poetry in China.” Yan went on, saying that despite the obvious gaps between Weaver’s and her own culture, he connected his experiences with Chinese ethnology to his own life and upbringing. “It was just fascinating to see a Westerner’s poem with Chinese cultural elements that we often assume we would see from Chinese poets alone,” she said.Students were not the only audience members inspired by Weaver’s poetry. His fiancee, alumna Kristen Skedgell ‘74, enjoyed hearing him perform at Exeter, which she described as “a place of inspiration and fond memory.” “It’s great to see him share his work with current Exonians. Afaa and I are both in our sixties, we’ve lived full lives,” she said. “And now I try to imagine being a teenager, young again, hearing him and wondering if I would have gotten what he was saying.”Page expressed hope that in the future, more students will take advantage of the Lamont Poetry Series. “I was sorry to see a smaller number of students there than normal, but I can understand that with recent snow days it was harder for teachers to give release time to require attendance,” Page said. “I hope students understand the incredible opportunity they have to hear from living writers on such a regular basis.”