Multitudes

Poems Selected & New

By Afaa Michael Weaver

2000

First Published

4.33

Average Rating

160

Number of Pages

4H53M

Audio Length

The poems of Multitudes comprise an African-American opera of towering ambition and there are arias and recitatives, whispers and shouts, growls and coos, formal interludes and symphonic improvisation, all set within a revelatory social and cultural context. It is difficult to speak of a poet like Weaver, whose gift is large, lush, and expansive. The difficulty is multiplied when considering a Selected Poems, where the magnitude and range of the poet's accomplishments are fully displayed. One could spend a good deal of time merely on the works of lyrical intensity, such as Weaver's series of poems "Lamentations" which explores the painful permutations of a father's illness and a mother's death. One could marvel over the compressed emotion this series somehow manages to contain and, in the end, to release in the reader. But this would be to ignore the sharply etched portrait poems, such as "Sub Shop Girl," "Bootleg Whiskey," and "Walnut Cinema." It would not fully explain the straightforward narrative power of poems like "The Robe," in which a young boy is cruelly shown his place in the sexual hierarchy of grown women. And it would give no hint of the poet's ability to compose such recent, experimentally daring poems as "Mojo Momba," "Piggly Wiggly," and the breathtakingly associative "A Composition for White Critics . . . " which, among its many effects, brilliantly satirizes "postmodern" literary ethos. And to speak of any individual poems would not capture the extent of Weaver's operatic accomplishment in Multitudes . Weaver is a poet of rare grace, power, and honesty. His work will be read simply because the poetry is superb. Finally, this is a book that embodies the fraught matter of African-American masculinity, in a way that a thousand essays could not begin to match. Multitudes is a clear window into the soul of the African-American male. In this sense it possesses an ambitious, manifest social value that contemporary poetry can rarely claim. Weaver's Selected will be read for the pleasures of its poetry, yes. But it will also be valued for the urgent illumination it provides into one of the central issues of our country and our time. Afaa Michael Weaver (b. Michael S. Weav

Avg Rating

4.33

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

48%

4 STARS

38%

3 STARS

14%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Afaa Michael Weaver

Author · 6 books

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.