The Machine with Magnificent Wheels / the Architecture and Physics of Writing
by Afaa Michael Weaver
I have always loved language, writing, and books. Ours was a working class home where the Bible and a set of encyclopedias from the A&P supermarket formed our home library. My mother collected the encyclopedias one at a time each week she went grocery shopping. We had a Merriam Webster dictionary with a table of alphabets in the back. I used the table to try to create languages. When I was eight years old, I wrote a poem about two cowboys that did not impress my older cousin who was a big brother to me. He was a good man, but he was not moved by my first poem. Despite the lack of a cheering audience, I maintained my love of writing. My parents sent me to Baltimore Polytechnic high school, one of the best public high schools in the country. The curriculum was mostly science and math, which I loved. We were the Poly engineers, and as engineering goes it was creativity that made me really come alive. Due to its speculative nature, physics was my best science course. When I did a research project on Frank Lloyd Wright while studying mechanical drawing, I wanted to be an architect. In 1968, I landed at the University of Maryland in the school of engineering when I was sixteen, having missed the deadline for applying to the new school of architecture. I fell deeply in love with a young lady, and “the poet” awakened inside my heart. So to tell how I go about being this poet that I am, I suppose I should do so in the context of the space in which the poet arose: my love of architecture and physics.
I see creativity as an architectural structure with an interior and an exterior. The exterior for me is the matter of making sure that the day to day business of my life is attuned to sustaining the creative space of writing. When I was a factory worker for fifteen years, my philosophy was that the job was necessary to afford the physical space of a home and a work space inside the home dedicated to my creative work. That idea has progressed to where my home is entirely about the business of being a poet. As I wrote and studied in the factory, I decided that functioning as a poet was all I ever wanted to do in life, regardless of how much or how little attention I received. Whenever I have heard a writer say they gave up poetry because it was not lucrative or they were tired of being ignored, I have always felt that those persons were not really poets, or that they were writers looking for an audience. I decided early on, in the midst of electric cranes, coils of hot tin, vats of soap, trucks and so on that poetry is what I am in the world to do. Inner conviction gave me the bricks and mortar to build the outer structure of this thing called creativity, or rather to house it because creativity itself gets to the physics of things. I will come back to that in a moment, but first the inner structure of creativity.
When I discovered Tai Chi Chuan (Taijijuan), I was able to build the inner structure of creativity. The meditative space of Tai Chi gave me reference points internally so that I could form a self inside myself that reaffirmed the outer structure of external things such as typewriters and desks. It was in this way I could see my entire self, body, mind, and spirit, as something to attune to the outer structure such that the inner was mobile. It was an organic concept that was helped more than a little bit by what I learned of organic structure in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. Once my conviction of being a poet was housed in the inner energetic structure formed by learning the form of Tai Chi, I knew I had a mobile system that I could take with me wherever I lived, and it has been that way for me for all of my writing life. It will never change.
As an architectural structure creativity moves internally according to physics. Once I had the idea of a home and the sense of myself situated inside that home organically, then I could entertain the ideas of writing as they came to me. When my ideas and visions of a poem come entirely from my internal world, it is usually the complex sum of memories and feelings that live in that deepest place inside of us. In the mornings I sometimes write associatively and immediately with whatever comes to my conscious mind. The eye of the mind is as much in need of care as are the eyes that sit on either side of our noses. We protect our eyes from the sun, and we should also protect our mind’s eye from its own most intense source. Know when to stop.
When I am moved to write by what I observe outside of me, it can be a bird, a tree, a song, a visit to a favorite place, or the convergence of those things with inner movement. I enjoy walking in parks, and the ease of that helps put me into that dreamlike state of mind where creativity enters our thinking as artists. We have to be able to play, and when I find a place that enables that dreaming, I will go back to it. I was in Florence for the first time in 1985, and I went to the garden with a grove of trees where Michelangelo liked to walk and think. The image of that was reaffirming for me, just as it was when I visited Harlem and saw the old library on 135th Street that was a venue for the Harlem Renaissance poets.
The questions of how relevant poetry or any writing should be to issues that weigh on humanity with the greatest weight is one each of us has to determine for ourselves. However, my experience has been that I do not write as well when I am trying to address a specific issue. I would like to think that my very existence as poet is a political act, and I am not totally convinced that writing such that people understand actually ameliorates anything in the long run. Having said all that, when I am moved by the fact of an injustice, it is the emotional reality of being moved that helps we write a better poem. I let my writing come into the world on its own power most often, and sometimes that power is what is generated by being outraged or feeling someone else’s pain in the most profound way. The persistence and enlargement of the community of American poets will bring a change in society, I think, that none of us can see right now. It is somewhere in the minds of the unborn poets, I believe.
Timber and Prayer—a case study in how this whole machine of me as poet works. With all the time I spent studying how to build machines and the time I spent in factories, I have come to see myself as a machine waiting to be liberated from that concept itself one day. Folk have said as much to me. “Afaa, you are a machine.” Well, one day I will float into the nirvana of being freed from the idea of structures, and live more inside the soul of the poet as energy, I suppose, and maybe that will come sooner rather than later. However, for now some nuts and bolts.
Timber and Prayer was my fifth book. It was published in 1995, the year Rutgers granted me tenure. Nine years earlier, my then wife and I rented an apartment in East Orange, New Jersey. It was an old apartment building from the art deco period in a changing neighborhood in a city that was over ninety percent black. Our bedroom doubled as my study. My roll top desk sat next to the large windows that made up the corner of the room. In the early hours I got up to work on the manuscript and to struggle with what I thought it was trying to be. I gave myself the project of writing directly to or out of music and visual art. I usually work on at least two manuscripts simultaneously. I was working on three at the time, My Father’s Geography, Mistress in the Maze of Time, and Stations in a Dream. My focus for the shorter space of this essay will be Mistress in the Maze of Time because it was more about the work of ekphrastic writing and the history of jazz. There was that history and my own personal history as there are poems about my travels in New England.
With a notebook and an electronic typewriter, I worked on the manuscript in those early morning hours. I listened to Duke Ellington on my Walkman, with a copy of W. B. Yeats’ collected poems beside me. Yeats was my model for metrics in the formalist poems in the manuscript. I tried to listen to the music and think poetically in meter. In graduate school at Brown I had audited piano & theory, and from that experience I began to think of meter as percussion, even when I was not writing formalist poems. I had an electronic typewriter, but in those early hours I didn’t want to disturb my wife, so I worked in longhand with a notebook, sometimes drafting and sometimes redrafting. I gave the poems a historical framework by focusing on the time of the Harlem Renaissance, and I gave it thematic structure by reading Ellington’s memoir Music is My Mistress and by studying the paintings of Jacob Lawrence.
When we moved to West Philly in 1990, we bought a house in a changing neighborhood near 52nd and Market, where the vendors line the sidewalks with their wares. I set up my study in one of the bedrooms upstairs. I began to work with a catalog from a retrospective of Jacob Lawrence’s work that I also kept near me. I gazed over the paintings that moved me and wrote out of that emotional response when it happened. At other times I looked for a narrative in the paintings, or I created one, collaging them with personal memories. The manuscript had a personal component as well in the poems I wrote from my experience of living and studying in New England. I wrote to Lawrence to tell him I was using his work to inspire my manuscript project, and he wrote back to me. I was ecstatic and kept the letter for years before putting it with my papers at the Gotlieb archives at Boston University.
I organized the sections of the book mathematically. There are sixty-four poems, which is eight to the second power as well as the number of hexagrams in the Yijing, Chinese oracle. I used a quote from different sources to head each section, and in the process of doing this I meditated on the unity of the manuscript, the extent to which I thought it cohered. When I decided it was done, Mistress in the Maze of Time became Timber and Prayer /the Indian Pond Poems. Ed Ochester, my editor at the University of Pittsburgh, said it was the most edited manuscript he had worked on to date. When I said I wanted to make one more change, he said, “”That’s it, Mike. No more changes. The manuscript is going to the printer after this one.”
So these are my aesthetic and philosophical views on the life and practice of being a poet. Let me make one last note on machines. I love pencils. When I finish the first draft of a manuscript I print it out from my computer (as I moved up to computers from the electronic typewriter in the summer of 1994), and once it is printed I begin making more notes with pen and pencil, but I love pencils more than pens. I suppose it goes back to being that fourteen year old Poly engineer sitting at his drafting table with a pencil, dreaming of making things. These days I keep a Moleskin notebook with the sheets in quad format like the paper we had at Poly.
Finally, I like to think I am redeemed by the company of no less than Corbusier in this time that I write of myself as machine, and maybe the act of doing this will free me from the same, and I will have defeated the industrial engineers who saw factories as perfect machines made so by people they forced to work like machines. I will perhaps free myself with a pencil. When that happens I will let you know.
For now, be brave. Be very brave.
by Afaa Michael Weaver
I have always loved language, writing, and books. Ours was a working class home where the Bible and a set of encyclopedias from the A&P supermarket formed our home library. My mother collected the encyclopedias one at a time each week she went grocery shopping. We had a Merriam Webster dictionary with a table of alphabets in the back. I used the table to try to create languages. When I was eight years old, I wrote a poem about two cowboys that did not impress my older cousin who was a big brother to me. He was a good man, but he was not moved by my first poem. Despite the lack of a cheering audience, I maintained my love of writing. My parents sent me to Baltimore Polytechnic high school, one of the best public high schools in the country. The curriculum was mostly science and math, which I loved. We were the Poly engineers, and as engineering goes it was creativity that made me really come alive. Due to its speculative nature, physics was my best science course. When I did a research project on Frank Lloyd Wright while studying mechanical drawing, I wanted to be an architect. In 1968, I landed at the University of Maryland in the school of engineering when I was sixteen, having missed the deadline for applying to the new school of architecture. I fell deeply in love with a young lady, and “the poet” awakened inside my heart. So to tell how I go about being this poet that I am, I suppose I should do so in the context of the space in which the poet arose: my love of architecture and physics.
I see creativity as an architectural structure with an interior and an exterior. The exterior for me is the matter of making sure that the day to day business of my life is attuned to sustaining the creative space of writing. When I was a factory worker for fifteen years, my philosophy was that the job was necessary to afford the physical space of a home and a work space inside the home dedicated to my creative work. That idea has progressed to where my home is entirely about the business of being a poet. As I wrote and studied in the factory, I decided that functioning as a poet was all I ever wanted to do in life, regardless of how much or how little attention I received. Whenever I have heard a writer say they gave up poetry because it was not lucrative or they were tired of being ignored, I have always felt that those persons were not really poets, or that they were writers looking for an audience. I decided early on, in the midst of electric cranes, coils of hot tin, vats of soap, trucks and so on that poetry is what I am in the world to do. Inner conviction gave me the bricks and mortar to build the outer structure of this thing called creativity, or rather to house it because creativity itself gets to the physics of things. I will come back to that in a moment, but first the inner structure of creativity.
When I discovered Tai Chi Chuan (Taijijuan), I was able to build the inner structure of creativity. The meditative space of Tai Chi gave me reference points internally so that I could form a self inside myself that reaffirmed the outer structure of external things such as typewriters and desks. It was in this way I could see my entire self, body, mind, and spirit, as something to attune to the outer structure such that the inner was mobile. It was an organic concept that was helped more than a little bit by what I learned of organic structure in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. Once my conviction of being a poet was housed in the inner energetic structure formed by learning the form of Tai Chi, I knew I had a mobile system that I could take with me wherever I lived, and it has been that way for me for all of my writing life. It will never change.
As an architectural structure creativity moves internally according to physics. Once I had the idea of a home and the sense of myself situated inside that home organically, then I could entertain the ideas of writing as they came to me. When my ideas and visions of a poem come entirely from my internal world, it is usually the complex sum of memories and feelings that live in that deepest place inside of us. In the mornings I sometimes write associatively and immediately with whatever comes to my conscious mind. The eye of the mind is as much in need of care as are the eyes that sit on either side of our noses. We protect our eyes from the sun, and we should also protect our mind’s eye from its own most intense source. Know when to stop.
When I am moved to write by what I observe outside of me, it can be a bird, a tree, a song, a visit to a favorite place, or the convergence of those things with inner movement. I enjoy walking in parks, and the ease of that helps put me into that dreamlike state of mind where creativity enters our thinking as artists. We have to be able to play, and when I find a place that enables that dreaming, I will go back to it. I was in Florence for the first time in 1985, and I went to the garden with a grove of trees where Michelangelo liked to walk and think. The image of that was reaffirming for me, just as it was when I visited Harlem and saw the old library on 135th Street that was a venue for the Harlem Renaissance poets.
The questions of how relevant poetry or any writing should be to issues that weigh on humanity with the greatest weight is one each of us has to determine for ourselves. However, my experience has been that I do not write as well when I am trying to address a specific issue. I would like to think that my very existence as poet is a political act, and I am not totally convinced that writing such that people understand actually ameliorates anything in the long run. Having said all that, when I am moved by the fact of an injustice, it is the emotional reality of being moved that helps we write a better poem. I let my writing come into the world on its own power most often, and sometimes that power is what is generated by being outraged or feeling someone else’s pain in the most profound way. The persistence and enlargement of the community of American poets will bring a change in society, I think, that none of us can see right now. It is somewhere in the minds of the unborn poets, I believe.
Timber and Prayer—a case study in how this whole machine of me as poet works. With all the time I spent studying how to build machines and the time I spent in factories, I have come to see myself as a machine waiting to be liberated from that concept itself one day. Folk have said as much to me. “Afaa, you are a machine.” Well, one day I will float into the nirvana of being freed from the idea of structures, and live more inside the soul of the poet as energy, I suppose, and maybe that will come sooner rather than later. However, for now some nuts and bolts.
Timber and Prayer was my fifth book. It was published in 1995, the year Rutgers granted me tenure. Nine years earlier, my then wife and I rented an apartment in East Orange, New Jersey. It was an old apartment building from the art deco period in a changing neighborhood in a city that was over ninety percent black. Our bedroom doubled as my study. My roll top desk sat next to the large windows that made up the corner of the room. In the early hours I got up to work on the manuscript and to struggle with what I thought it was trying to be. I gave myself the project of writing directly to or out of music and visual art. I usually work on at least two manuscripts simultaneously. I was working on three at the time, My Father’s Geography, Mistress in the Maze of Time, and Stations in a Dream. My focus for the shorter space of this essay will be Mistress in the Maze of Time because it was more about the work of ekphrastic writing and the history of jazz. There was that history and my own personal history as there are poems about my travels in New England.
With a notebook and an electronic typewriter, I worked on the manuscript in those early morning hours. I listened to Duke Ellington on my Walkman, with a copy of W. B. Yeats’ collected poems beside me. Yeats was my model for metrics in the formalist poems in the manuscript. I tried to listen to the music and think poetically in meter. In graduate school at Brown I had audited piano & theory, and from that experience I began to think of meter as percussion, even when I was not writing formalist poems. I had an electronic typewriter, but in those early hours I didn’t want to disturb my wife, so I worked in longhand with a notebook, sometimes drafting and sometimes redrafting. I gave the poems a historical framework by focusing on the time of the Harlem Renaissance, and I gave it thematic structure by reading Ellington’s memoir Music is My Mistress and by studying the paintings of Jacob Lawrence.
When we moved to West Philly in 1990, we bought a house in a changing neighborhood near 52nd and Market, where the vendors line the sidewalks with their wares. I set up my study in one of the bedrooms upstairs. I began to work with a catalog from a retrospective of Jacob Lawrence’s work that I also kept near me. I gazed over the paintings that moved me and wrote out of that emotional response when it happened. At other times I looked for a narrative in the paintings, or I created one, collaging them with personal memories. The manuscript had a personal component as well in the poems I wrote from my experience of living and studying in New England. I wrote to Lawrence to tell him I was using his work to inspire my manuscript project, and he wrote back to me. I was ecstatic and kept the letter for years before putting it with my papers at the Gotlieb archives at Boston University.
I organized the sections of the book mathematically. There are sixty-four poems, which is eight to the second power as well as the number of hexagrams in the Yijing, Chinese oracle. I used a quote from different sources to head each section, and in the process of doing this I meditated on the unity of the manuscript, the extent to which I thought it cohered. When I decided it was done, Mistress in the Maze of Time became Timber and Prayer /the Indian Pond Poems. Ed Ochester, my editor at the University of Pittsburgh, said it was the most edited manuscript he had worked on to date. When I said I wanted to make one more change, he said, “”That’s it, Mike. No more changes. The manuscript is going to the printer after this one.”
So these are my aesthetic and philosophical views on the life and practice of being a poet. Let me make one last note on machines. I love pencils. When I finish the first draft of a manuscript I print it out from my computer (as I moved up to computers from the electronic typewriter in the summer of 1994), and once it is printed I begin making more notes with pen and pencil, but I love pencils more than pens. I suppose it goes back to being that fourteen year old Poly engineer sitting at his drafting table with a pencil, dreaming of making things. These days I keep a Moleskin notebook with the sheets in quad format like the paper we had at Poly.
Finally, I like to think I am redeemed by the company of no less than Corbusier in this time that I write of myself as machine, and maybe the act of doing this will free me from the same, and I will have defeated the industrial engineers who saw factories as perfect machines made so by people they forced to work like machines. I will perhaps free myself with a pencil. When that happens I will let you know.
For now, be brave. Be very brave.
