Fogged Clarity Podcast

Our lives unraveling in rain, late Sunday

in March, on a platform of the T, we hug

and wave goodbye to sons reared

to manhood, who turn away and disappear,

reminding us of the shame of knowing

we’re redundant and crude, perhaps even

a little deranged. Paula, forgive me

for my constant complaint. In a painting

of your saint in the wilderness of Phrygia,

the days of miracles had already ended

and would never be restored. Groves

would never again teem with crowds,

the cured, the healed, voices of children

at play. It seemed so brief, that moment

fulfilled even as it broke my heart. A stone

in my fist, I pound my chest, the lion inside

my clouds of doubts, the sagging flesh

upon its crooked timbers. I never grasped

the erotic, though you urged, baring

your shoulders, the deep curving hollow

of your back, long hair unbound.

Paula, I cannot undo my vows

to this solitude, this umber murk,

underworld our grim maker rendered

with few scumbled brushstrokes, the tiny

confines of nature, and no anti-nature

gleaming beyond its border. We count

each station as it passes—seven more stops

to terminus. And seal our tongues tight

against the roofs of our mouths, trying

to stifle what we know is already lost

and therefore becoming words,

impure always, wayward, confused,

and mistranslated by every generation.

David Axelrod‘s most recent collections of poems are Folly and What Next, Old Knife, both from Lost Horse Press. Individual poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in High Desert Journal, Miramar, Serving House Journal, Stringtown, Talking River Review, Terrain, and Western Humanities Review, among others.

The esteemed poet discusses how poetry and God helped him to overcome a traumatic past and find peace.

*A full transcription of this audio interview can be found below.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning it’s my great honor to be joined by the distinguished poet and scholar Afaa Michael Weaver. Lucid and sensuous, Weaver’s is a poetic voice rooted in both craft and a spiritual practice that helped him to transcend a complex, and often difficult past. He is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including 2013’s The Government of Nature which won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts award. A 2002 Fulbright Scholar, Weaver’s further honors include fellowships from both The Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He makes his home in Boston where he serves as a Professor of English at Simmons College. Afaa, thank you for taking the time.

Afaa Michael Weaver: My pleasure, Ben. Thanks for inviting me.

BE: In reflecting on both your life and poetic career to this point the words “patience” and “persistence” most readily come to mind. I’ve marveled, in studying your journey, at your ability to continually accept and adapt to adversity. I wonder, to set the stage for our discussion, if you’d take a moment to talk about some of the formative challenges you’ve endured in order to become the man and poet you are today?

AMW: I could go back to my early years in the factory, as a factory worker, when I dropped out of the university in 1970. I was 18 years old and began working as a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel when my father worked and several of my uncles, with the idea that I would develop and grow as a poet and a writer among the workers so to speak… I had a very naive kind of idea, as many of us did at that time, kind of a neo-Marxist idea, that the poet or the writer should develop in the context of the working class, working people, but I was not really in touch with the fact that I wasn’t entering that group (but) that I was actually a member of it. And once I began to realize just where I was the challenges became very apparent. When my first marriage collapsed we lost the first child and I suffered a rather severe breakdown, I realized that the challenges were rather immense. And at the time America’s working class base was much different than it is now, and so I left the steel mill after the first year, after serving in the military, well, basic training rather, came back home and got a job at Procter & Gamble and I found myself on packing floors trying to write at home in my spare time and develop a reading schedule, and it was an incredibly difficult time. If you’ve never worked on a packing floor then you don’t have an idea of the monotony and the kind of deadening atmosphere. Inside the plant we could apply for different job positions and so I applied for a position in the warehouse in 1975. So from ’75 until ’85, when I left, I was a warehouseman and in the space of the warehouse little by little I found job categories that allowed me more space and time and I was able to write, and I started a small press and I started working as a freelance journalist and wrote a collection of short stories. I did all of that while I was working for Procter & Gamble in Baltimore. But there was the challenge of the atmosphere of the factory itself, the challenge of being different, and then once I had had the breakdown inside the black community there’s a really complex stigma attached to you and I found myself in a space where I was not trusted, people did not believe what I said, but little by little I came to see that space as a wonderful potential freedom. But that’s a general outline of the challenges. And so when I emerged from the factory in 1985 with the NEA fell...

My head, too, was an unexploded shell

that summer of ‘67, Detroit

burning

a hundred miles away,

so when one-armed Keebler and

his buddy,

Bogash, drive up

in a coral-colored GTO

two days into the riots and

honk,

I just swish a few,

pet the purring car. And then

it is

my father

who comes running—against

a backdrop of fresh paint,

clapboard

—not burned building,

blackened skeleton of car.

They are going

down to the lake

to water-ski. They have

drinks in their hands.

I don’t know yet

what a bastard Bogash is,

or how Keebler stinks as a boss,

I just

know it’s my father’s

new job and I have to laugh

at their jokes, love

what they love,

admire the little doorknob

on the wheel so Keebler

can steer

with his stub, nurse his whiskey.

Already my father is lost:

his trunks ill-fit him, so later,

when he wipes out

and tumbles in the wake

like a flesh propellor

they will chide him raw

for days. But for now

he’s hopeful. This is money.

This is drink. This

is an expensive car.

For as long as it lasts

it’s a convertible and the wind

— the wind

is cool and childless.

So when Bogash grins, my

father grins, clambers in the back.

Fists a drink.

Nods or laughs

or chuckles— I can’t tell—

when Bogash

drops the N-word, threatens

local riots. It’s a lie, but

I don’t sense it. Blind pig.

Blind pigs.

I just see arm-in-arm marching

seven country miles

to this ring of houses

beside the lake,

something in me hazed,

thrashed

—bleeding

money/

panic/fear

so when Keebler

finally nudges

his car toward his boat

on the lake, I am already

inside

loading a shotgun.

A pump-action, six rounds,

I one-arm

up the scaffold,

back of the house,

that lofts our television antenna

like a wire

angel into the sky.

Wind blows, rioting burns

and rolls

in bad reception

on the screen. No one

watches. We just leave it

on

as outboards echo across

the lake. From the roof

I can see

one skier

—Bogash? Keebler? tumbling

father?—cut the skin of water

until

it is briefly scarred,

briefly whipped, before it

calms again,

stills to their perfect summer coin.

Dennis Hinrichsen’s most recent works are Skin Music, co-winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press, and Electrocution, A Partial History, winner of the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize from Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art. Both will appear in 2015. His previous books include Rip-tooth (2010 Tampa Poetry Prize) and Kurosawa’s Dog (2008 FIELD Poetry Prize). An earlier work, Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, received the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize.

after the film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

In the Boston Common I take a bag of popcorn,

sit near the playground on benches with the homeless,

the chill of an August afternoon feeling good on the bones,

and I rub my face with the edge of my sweater the way

a puppy would use its fuzzy paw, remembering

my mama’s words about playing with puppies,

they will lick you in the face…

and she said as if to warn me, but it would take years

to believe I had a right to protect myself or understand

what a puppy needs, and I stiffen a bit against a

flash of a moment where I am being raped, and it

feels as if the wind has been torn out of its geography,

or the grass pulled up and planted again with its

roots growing to the sun, as if roots can feed on light,

and the world knows how to fix the undone things

we are…

at home again

I watch these women in Shanghai’s old brothels

and know what it is to give up the rights to one’s own

body when the body does not know it has rights.

Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including The Government of Nature, which won the 2014 Kingsley Tufts award. A former Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of fellowships from both the NEA and Pew Charitable Trusts, he serves as Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston.

The day I came to talk to my uncle about the letter

was a day a shimmering came over the world, everything

that was not me stepped away so that I would not die

under the weight of walking with the devil, as the world

is Lucifer’s, and everything is his imagination,

the traffic, the signs, the old road out of Baltimore,

into Catholic Maryland, a horse farmer’s state, each thing

I thought I could touch was only there because I intervened

against thought waves from Pandemonium, and my uncle

walked onto his porch, half bent from strokes, smiling,

and I remembered in a second how he can turn cruel

when no one is looking, and I remembered in a second

how much I love him, and in another second the shame

of being shut away in asylums, made mad by what makes

children mad, how we are shuffled away, our words

taken to be nonsense or lies the insane create–

I walked over to him, met his smile with my smile,

saw the faces of our ancestors in his face, the bald spot

that is becoming mine, as we walked into the house

to talk about mistakes and failure or how his computer

was stuck and he could not write back to online prostitutes–

outside God put the world back into His divine order, being

becoming being, waves of heat rising from my prayers.

Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including The Government of Nature, which won the 2014 Kingsley Tufts award. A former Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of fellowships from both the NEA and Pew Charitable Trusts, he serves as Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston.

It is a peculiar thing only the tranquil mind can see,

and once seen it shows you the other side of things–

in the light you know what is broken can be fixed.

Afaa Michael Weaver is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including The Government of Nature, which won the 2014 Kingsley Tufts award. A former Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of fellowships from both the NEA and Pew Charitable Trusts, he serves as Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston.

Will plays piano and sings his song “Horses” in this very special recording.

Will Oldham is a musician and actor living in Louisville, Kentucky. Since 1993, he has released over twenty albums as Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs, and the pseudonym under which he has recorded for the past fifteen years, Bonnie “Prince” Billy. As an actor, Oldham has appeared in the films Eden, Pioneer, New Jerusalem, Junebug, Wendy and Lucy, and Old Joy, among others.