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The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 (Pitt Poetry Series)

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the plum flower dance

review by Rafael Alvarez, examiner.com/baltimore


Today, I tell you about a beautiful book of poems: The Plum Flower Dance. And of the man who created it, an American factory worker who embraced the philosophy of the East, was saved by it and became a professor of the great poets who cleared the path before him.

- o -

I can never convince my father
That my best work is done in naps,
In the greenest of grass, near the smell
Of manure, in the song of neighing
And snorting, in the infinite music
That fills the word with bright meaning . . .

- o -

On the far side of the river in my Temple of Books, at the back of a closet deep in the Bleeding Heart of the Holy Land, lies the unpublished memoir of the man who wrote that remarkable stanza: Aafa Michael Weaver.

Titled "Heaven Has No Horses," it sits behind a pair of black Converse high tops worn out at the heel and a pair of cowboy boots from Muleshoe, Texas that always pinched my feet. Weaver's remembrance is guarded by crooked stacks of poetry books: Whitman, to whom Weaver has been compared in earnest; Lorca, Daniel Berrigan and Robert Frost, an overflow waiting for the next shelf.

A poet kid I know in Los Angeles, homeless by the choice in the way Walt Whitman chose to brave the Civil War front to hand out books, found a ragged English text in a coffee house not long ago and raced through it until Frost put the brakes on.

"The beady spider, the flower like a froth . . .
and the moth carried like a paper kite . . ."

Said the kid, hungry but not begging: "The spider is desperate. I relate."

There is no desperation in "The Plum Flower Dance," not in poems of ancient radios broadcasting ballgames or idle clarinets in the summer. Each page is but a request for a moment of your time.

"Alone, I meditate on the invisible . . ."

This is not a passive book. It simply understands, as St. Teresa of Avila understood when she counseled "let nothing perturb you," that there is no gain in desperation.

What the sages know is what Weaver submitted himself to learning from the time of his childhood, a black kid exposed to both city and country in the last days of segregation.

Weaver watched his beloved uncle blast a neighbor's dog with a shotgun and followed orders to dump the corpse on a pile of junk to be burned. Later, he stood dry eyed, frozen under "layers and layers of loss," as the glue man hauled his beloved Appaloosa away, the horse declared loco for eating wood.

His life was changed, as it would continue to change for years to come (centuries before Beatle George, Avila's Teresa also preached that all things must pass), on the Christmas he found a Brownie camera under the tree.

Though the camera became Weaver's third eye, "there was something in life I was not seeing," he wrote in Heaven Has No Horses. "There was something in me I wanted to capture . . . but it was many years away, inside [of] me."

The things hidden deep inside of Aafa Weaver are given voice in "The Plum Flower Dance," two decades of poems [1985 to 2005] released this autumn by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

The book is that rare bird, both weightless and profound, whose journey out into the world is apt to bring laurels home for its author.

I don't follow poetry the way I study fiction, but like I said earlier, people who know what they're talking about are comparing Weaver to Whitman.

Of course, by the end of Whitman's life he was scrambling for a menial civil servant's job to keep food on the table and ink in his pen, but that's the ballgame. The point is this:

"Can you contain my most intimate whisper,
settle it down after it has entered you,
make it a part of you and still cling
to my hand as gently as your eyes hold me?"

Declarations: As co-editor of "Off the Coast," I am about to publish a review of new translations of Du Fu and Li Bai that we asked Afaa Michael Weaver to write. He wrote a blurb for my last book of poetry. He didn't ask me for blurbs because his book is graced with quotes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael S. Harper, and Edward Hirsch. But I am glad to do this review for Amazon.

In this collection spanning 20 years, Michael Weaver's poetry shows an incisive edge, the sort of sharpness that can slice you when you're not looking or, like a paper cut, get you while you were halfway through a simple, unsuspecting move. This is poetry of subtlety, not a forceful samurai sword that takes your head off before you feel the blade. His writing comes at you directly, with apparent innocence, until you feel the sting and see the blood. People and places are deeply felt and tightly focused. The clues to this depth---underwater, in a cemetery, behind walls---are arranged in elemental sections: Gold, Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, which (as the author notes) are the Daoist creative path. Yes, the poetry is that basic, that powerful, the simple work of a Tai Chi master (which he is) or a factory worker (which he was) or a man maintaining strong family, geographic, and loving connections.

And pure. Consider these three lines about a young man and an old woman leaving church:

"Through the benediction and the hush,
we walk together outside, an unusual machine
turning on the pistons of forgiveness and curiosity."

Or this opening line: "The fist is a hand that has made decisions."

Or these capturing the moment love captures:

"I was instantly figured over with lines,
like Gulliver in Lilliput, your love
having converted itself to a million pygmies."

The book finishes with a long poem titled "New England," which is a remarkable topography of history, place, character, feeling and truth. Here we have 20 years of Weaver's best, each line a town, every sentence a city, for, as he writes:

"Every organization
of thought
is a city."

I have no affiliation with the University of Pittsburgh or its press, but as you might expect, they have done a handsome product in keeping with their caring commitment to poetry.

Afaa M. Weaver's magnificent collection, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985-2005,
bears rereading, for it opens to deeper understanding of class as well as race, of the journey to heal as well as the story of harm, in ways both moving and insightful. I read through the book before I read in the notes that the poems are organized according to the "five elements of Chinese philosophy," which, placed in this order--gold, water, wood, fire, and earth--serve to construct the "Creative Path." I read for the logic of the poems together, and the synergy of their placement. Each section opens with a crystalline, koan-like verse (excerpted from Ten Lights of God), and then moves into meditations on relations (of father to son, of poet to self, of self to loss), origins--both personal and cultural--and poetic investigations that are radically, delicately innovative.

"Wood," opens with a meditation on how the speaker's mother's voice "chang[ed] up for white folk," which the speaker neither likes nor understands, significantly, "how Mama taught me translation." I found such scenes of code-switching, often performed in the poem that is contemplating the action, incisive and subtle analysis. From there we move to poems that dwell on the complexities of making a living in the black community that fights poverty and the casual or concerted racism. But there are also, importantly, poems of great celebration--of jazz, of Civil Rights, of cultural heritage and plain speech. Yet there's nothing plain-spoken about Weaver's poetics or portraits. Weaver soars easily through riffs of allusions ("in the shadows of the lilacs in the last door") and alights in the garden of black heritage. See, for example, his blazingly witty, tour de force "The Last Jazz Club" (death, I think), and his critically nuanced and beautiful "Composition for White Critics..."

Finally, we move to poems of friendship and love in "Fire," which treat loneliness as it transforms through the poet's labor into a fruitful solitude, becoming by the final section, "Earth," full of wisdom and lament. For me, "Water Song" is gorgeously elegiac, "New England" a powerful poem, at once hauntingly lyrical and an incisive indictment of the sources of northern wealth and Puritanical hypocrisy (we are told that the founder of Brown University, for example, made his money from "Africans,/ molasses, rum, and oil."). Weaver ends with a tribute to Langston Hughes which gestures toward the genetic hybridity they both came from: "I meditate on the congregation of genes and wishes/ that brought me here, counting back the four generations/ to the first African, naming along the way the Native Americans/ Europeans the polka-dot army of chromosomes and molecules/ like tiny spaceships that align themselves with mystic glue/ so that I am the same mystery each day and do not dissolve..." This is a wondrous and attentive gathering of poems--representative of the poet's individual creative path. Afaa Weaver is a path-forger, and as he calls a dear and lost friend, "a warrior"--one who has trained rigorously to survive to teach wisdom not war.
Cynthia Hogue

This latest collection of poetry from Afaa Michael Weaver does not disappoint. Brillant, touching, inspiring the poetry takes us on a journey through the Chinese five elements in order of the route to creativity. The poems themselves are strongly American, never mincing
words on the problems inherent in america, its racism, rage, comic perspective and utlimately potential for transformation. It does not get any better than this. BRAVO. I hope many are inspired by this review to
read on and be with its journey for the soul!

I cited Weaver's Plum Flower Dance as one of my "favorite things" from 2007 for a special episode of my regular videocast E-Verse Radio. You may view the video of that episode here:

http://www.eversevideo.com/our-favorite-things-from-2007-e-verse-radio/

Weaver has published his work with a variety of worthy publishers over the years, so it is a distinct pleasure to have selections from those many sources brought together between two covers. Weaver is a national treasure and a living legend. Highly recommended for any who have not yet read him as well as those who have followed his impressive career.