Multitudes: Poems Selected & New.

Afaa Michael Weaver. Multitudes: Poems Selected & New. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2000. 137 pp. $14.95.

A "Selected Poems" always tends toward critical retrospective; that is, a sober accounting of a poet's career--either "thus far" or "at its end." If undertaken by the poet directly, the assembling of a "Selected" work is--for the humble--a terrifying trial of the ego, but perhaps an enlightening one, for it allows the poet to chart progressively keener articulations of talent as well as the steady sounding of essential obsessions. Naturally, a poet's self-scrutiny of his or her oeuvre may be so unforgiving that decades of labor are cut to an hour or so of reading time, editing-shredding--multiple tomes to the size of a single, slim book. (In perverse cases, the selection is so liberal that the resultant volume may as well be termed a "Collected.") Poets cannot be trusted, really, to understand their own processes of becoming, or even to know which moments of their creativity are still living, as opposed to stillborn. Fortunately, Afaa Michael Weaver, the author of five previous books of poetry, in his sixth c ollection, Multitudes: Poems Selected & New, has chosen to underline the maturation of his voice and vision, from Water Song (1985) through to his "New Poems."

Born Michael S. Weaver in 1951, Afaa Weaver is of the same vintage as Rita Dove, but his inspirations are not avant-garde, gaudy, Afro-Modernist stylists like Melvin B. Tolson and Amiri Baraka, but rather plainer, quieter, narrative poets, folks like Michael S. Harper and, in her Bronzeville lyrics, Gwendolyn Brooks. The dominant tone of Multitudes is matter-of-fact, and the predominant generic impulse is memoir. Where Harper is haunted by history and Brooks scrutinizes inner-city socio-psychology, Weaver fixes on family and, fundamentally, the chronicle of life itself. For Weaver, it is not the archive that matters, but ancestry, not existentialism per se, but existence. Biblical in intent, he limns genealogies and the apocalypses of daily being, even writing a sequence of poems whose titles are borrowed from the books of the King James Version. Strikingly too, as Arnold Rampersad notes in his reasoned Introduction, Weaver embraces the American anthems of Phillis Wheatley and Walt Whitman, sharing Wheatley's republican acceptance of mortality and Whitman's democratic adulation of "multitudes." For Weaver, however, mortality is the white space--or silence--that brackets the poetry of life, while the "multitudes" are, in part, the traces of passed-on ancestors that persist in multi-generational homes and within the psyches of survivors. Like Edgar Allan Poe, his brother Baltimorean, Weaver is a poet who "pictures" ghosts.

A 1985 poem, "Water Song," establishes Weaver's attentiveness to absent presences. His persona offers the "picture" of a "fallen" grandfather, the image of "armies of people in the abandoned home, discarnate," and discussions of a place where "people no longer live in flesh," where "the dead come down wooden stairs at midnight." The deceased never really cease. In Weaver's new poem "Sango's Marriage Song," the Yoruban god describes the goddess Osun as dwelling in a "house where you / name all life." Together, the deities parent children who are "the multitude of some / earth, some market." Weaver's ceuvre is defined by its insistent iteration of the deathlessness of ancestral heritage amid the life cycle. His portraits of the "living," of individuals, connect their temporal existences to multitudes who are no longer with us, but still with us nevertheless. The poem "Mass Transit" depicts, for instance, an individual transit rider who preaches the "Apocalypse" to her fellow passengers. Even so, she embodies a rich history of black fundamentalist angels "sent in the last hour" (as well as, simply, the reality of "the poor"). Chez Weaver is a site where words like life, live[s], living, lived, dead, and die are relentlessly pronounced, while the poems attend to "pictures," morticians, babies, fathers, mothers, grandparents, houses, "the plan of life."

To portray individuals caught in the flux of living--or dead--multitudes, Weaver often stages a fiesta of present participles--reminiscent of Whitman--as in "A Photograph of Negro Mania": "Sitting on cracked and peeling marble steps, ... sweating backs, exposed to overeating and ads and ads and ads ..." The style is cinematic, but documentary. In "My Father"s Geography," one of his many self-portraits. Weaver exploits the same technique: "I was parading the Cote d'Azur, / hopping the short trains from Nice to Cannes, / following the maze of streets in Monte Carlo ...." Generally, Weaver adheres to a honed line, restricting adjectives and adverbs, preferring to render his vocalized vision as straightforwardly as possible:

They believed that nothing

but the end could stop them,

the end that comes to all of us,

and to everything we own,

the end that falls to the care in

hands of angels and preservationists....

The house has outlived endings.

The deliberate plainness of Weaver's diction makes his occasional accession of picturesque words all the more spectacular: "When you peek from your window smeared with / paint, I know it is you and not the black / patriot sleeping in shit with dead men." Importantly, Weaver shifts easily between Standard English and African American Vernacular, distinguishing and mingling their registers as he pleases. His audacious rewriting of The Scarlet Letter echoes New England Puritan rhetoric:

I stripped to the waist,

beat myself with tight leather

to loosen the domination

of the flesh, but each time

I shamefully touched myself,

it was you my soul cried for,

you my very being denied grace for,

you I wanted to wrap

in the black leaves of my coat

and press through my naked breast.

But an ornate, earthy, urban orality characterizes the raucous, singing beauty of "Mojo Mamba":

She had breath like a chocolate milkshake,

titties on the emerge, hips like a roller rink....

her legs smellin like aloe vera, my johnson spoke,

standing on its two round hind legs, spoke to spoke

rim to rim / sin to sin / rocking it in....

There are touches of the flamboyant Afro-Modernists here, including Robert Hayden (Weaver's lines "Black, O Dark, Blessed Black, Blue Black. / Kiss Me, O Love, O Sable Sugar ..." allude to Hayden"s "Homage to the Empress of the Blues") but also, electrifyingly, Henry Dumas and Baraka.

Indeed, while Multitudes is a solid and rewarding accomplishment for its first five sections, the concluding sixth, "New Poems," is a sign--or warning--of startling, shouted gospel; unexpected, pure-lust blues; and unconstrained, jazz-styled deconstructions to come. It is serious magic, verbal voodoo, disciplined experimentation, especially in the concluding tour de force, a poem whose title may be the longest in English literature: "Composition for White Critics Who Think African-American Poets Cannot Work in Contexts of Pure Concerns for Language and Post-PostModern Twentyfirst Century Inventiveness in Lyric Expression Due to Their Self-Limiting Concerns With Language as a Means of Self-Expression and Racial/Cultural Identity in Poetry That Is Ultimately Perhaps Beautiful However Too Trite and Too Folksy to Be Post [II] Theorist Efficacy." The poem constitutes Weaver's ars poetica:

What matters is this waving, weaving of textures of night sky floating over,

the stars, as in a night before a day of raining when you can look out and see

the gloom to fall on all you had hoped to do, accomplishing little, as who

will ever know we were here if everyone falls asleep at the machine,

just before the sell-conscious narrative awakens and slaps your grandma

into some bootleg distillery....

"I can't imagine a world without me,"

said the reader in the reading room, safely ensconced in words

that are capable at any time of absolute and murderous rebellion,

leaping off the shelves, abandoning syntax and punctuation....

America oh my poetry America....

The final poem in Multitudes signals that the collection is not just a gallery of Weaver's "best poems," but rather the narration of the poet's journey from a relative conservatism of utterance to a promisingly oral-rooted openness. Multitudes announces Weaver's Brooks-like transformation from curator of a vital "museum" to composer of revitalizing "music": the sound of a tradition renewing itself.