Spirit Boxing

by Afaa Michael Weaver

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published January 25, 2017

About the author

Afaa Michael Weaver was born Michael S. Weaver and grew up in East Baltimore, the son of a beautician and a steelworker. He entered the University of Maryland–College Park at the age of 16 and studied engineering for two years. He then joined the Army Reserves and worked alongside his father at the Bethlehem Steel mill. His firstborn son died at 10 months of complications from Down syndrome. Weaver worked at the mill and, later, a factory for a total of 15 years, writing poetry on coffee breaks, before publishing his first collection, Water Song (1985). It is a time he describes as a literary apprenticeship, during which he founded 7th Son Press and the journal Blind Alleys. He then earned an MA in theater and playwriting from Brown University, concurrent with a BA from Excelsior College.

Influenced by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael Harper, and Jay Wright, Weaver writes poetry that engages the intersection of contemporary African American culture, the African American literary tradition, and the technical constraints of contemporary Chinese poetry. “He explores and rethinks questions of identity. Over the years, he has listened to a chorus of other voices, the inflections of the past, as they have come together to shape and enlarge his own distinctive, musical voice,” Ed Hirsch observed of Weaver’s Timber and Prayer (1995).

Weaver’s numerous collections of poetry include The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 (2007). He edited the anthology These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family (2002), and co-edited Gathering Voices (1985) with James Taylor and David Beaudouin. Weaver has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He was a Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center and taught as a Fulbright Fellow at National Taiwan University. Among Weaver’s achievements is his invention of a new poetic form, “The Bop,” which he created during a Cave Canem summer retreat.

He has taught at Rutgers University, Cave Canem, and Simmons College, where he co-founded the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center and launched the International Chinese Poetry Conference.

In 1997, to mark his release from the weight of grief that he had carried since the death of his first son, Weaver chose a new name, Afaa, meaning “oracle,” with the help of Nigerian playwright Osonye Tess Onwueme.

Reviews

[C. Varn]

Afaa Michael Weaver blends a mix of Chinese spiritualism with his fascination and intimate knowledge of the American working class. Weaver pulls his native Baltimore into the mix as well: the city's history from Mencken to its factories and ports are strongly incorporated into the verse. Weaver doesn't shy away from describing work: he neither romanticizes it like many prior poets have nor does he present it only as droll and dross. Work, for Weaver, is source of fulfillment and alienation. Weaver, unlike many American leftists, also sees the conflicts in the working class and writes about them with sympathy towards all sides. American labor has both sympathy and solitary and racism and division, Weaver looks away from none of it because he experienced it directly. He worked in Baltimore factories in the 70s and shows how the decline effected the black and Latino community first, then the white community, but he does so with sympathy and human decency towards all groups. Weaver lines like “the army of wealth-making sees us, yet does / not see us" summarizes the way labor both everywhere and invisible in the modern world.

Weaver's poetics come partially out of Daoism, and while poets dabbling in orientalist-laden spiritual notions are not new to American poetics from Pound to the Beats, Weaver uses it the appropriated notions constructively. Sparse language that seems like plain-speech but is highly elevated. Appreciation for the simple, the natural, the human abounds as well. Whatever Weaver says that rhymes with Marxism or other kind of political workerism, Weaver doesn't totally see the world in such political terms: “wise mind that knows men cannot be makers, // that in making we want to break each other, / ache moving us to refuse to surrender to time/ in factories, catacombs feeding on the spirit.” The political and economic impulses from American capitalism are not totally unique to it for Weaver, but something about humanity that has to integrated. Again, the Daoist antipathy to simple politics seems to driving a lot of Weaver's commentary.

Hopefully, this makes Weaver a more well-known American poet: his subtlety paired with direct incorporation of poetically under-explored areas of US society makes him almost unique in American letters. Only Philip Levine has attempted a similar incorporation American working class life into his poetry and poetic ideals, but Weaver, in some ways, is actually more convincing.

[Kassy Lee]

Afaa Michael Weaver's collection blends spiritual and economic modes of inquiry which highlight how the liberation of the worker is twinned with the liberation of the spirit. These intimate poems of love between men are also poems of the journey of loving the self, the hands that have labored, the hips that have danced, the spirit which has boxed with wisdom. This collection touched a part of my heart that is often hard to access, how labor is tied to the spirit, how the factories and packing yards also are places where poetry lives. The poems have long, winding sentences that fill the pages. As I read the poems aloud, I was often left breathless.

[Sam Albala]

This book fed my heart, soul, and spirit.

[Patrick Flannery]

loved front to back