Interview

Abstract

Interview Dora Malech (bio), Melvin E. Brown (bio), and Afaa Michael Weaver (bio) On March 4, 2019, the poets Melvin E. Brown and Afaa Michael Weaver gave a reading at Johns Hopkins through "Archive and Action," an Arts Innovation project sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Before the reading, the two poets spoke with the poet Dora Malech, and this interview is an edited version of their conversation. Dora Malech: The catalyst for this conversation was the recent digitization—led by the scholar Mary Rizzo—of the archives of Chicory, a magazine of poetry and art by Baltimore residents published out of the Enoch Pratt Free Library from 1966 to 1983. Melvin, you were Chicory's longest serving editor, and Afaa, I was thrilled to come across such early poems from you in its pages. I'm interested in the literary Baltimore of those decades, particularly during the height of the Black Arts Movement, and this archive gives such an intimate sense of the voices and concerns of that time, both in terms of a range of community voices, and in terms of those, like you, Afaa, who went on to professional lives in writing. Teaching at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, I'm also interested in that institutional literary history and its relationship with what was going on in Baltimore and nationally. Melvin, in your poem "Dance-Walking on the Waters of Langston's Rivers," inspired by Chester Higgins Jr.'s photograph of Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka dancing, you write, "In that moment you were not the great Black Poets / Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou / Naw, not in that moment … / On that day in that moment you were just / LeRoi from Newark and Marguerite from Stamps." And in your poem, "In [End Page 25] Mencken's Neighborhood," Afaa, you write, "I wrote / my way to the Cultured Pearl, a bar where / we poets read, where we drank until bubbles // floated across the room into streets where / Mencken once walked … I studied how to be with them, these poets / who were real enough to be called poets, while // I worked to believe in myself in Baltimore." Both of your poems include these navigations of the image of a public poet-self and the self that lives and has lived a life. So, I'd love to ask about those selves for each of you. I mean, did you see each other at the Cultured Pearl? How did your relationship with each other start and who were the other figures in your life at that time? Afaa Michael Weaver: Melvin, you were talking to Lucille [Clifton], and she was telling you about me? That's how it got started. Lucille. She didn't drive, and Melvin would drive her to readings sometimes and sometimes I drove her to her readings. So Lucille was telling you about this poet who was working down at Procter & Gamble. And that was in the late '70s, right? Melvin E. Brown: Yes. She put us in touch with one another. I became the editor of Chicory in '71, and I met a lot of poets throughout the city, but Lucille connected us together in the late '70s. The first of Afaa's poems are in a 1980 issue. He subsequently had more poems, but the first poem that I found that was his was in 1980. Yes, Lucille meant so much to both of us. DM: And where was Lucille Clifton living at that time that you would both pick her up and drive her to readings? MEB: West Baltimore, close to Leakin Park, wasn't it? AMW: Leakin or Gwynn Oak? It was a big, stand-alone house. And her husband was still alive at that time, it was before he got cancer. When we put tonight's event on Facebook, Gillian, one of her daughters, [End Page 26] responded and she said she remembered both of us coming to pick up her mother. They were little girls, they were babies when we would go to pick up Lucille. But I don't remember the very first time we actually sat down together, Melvin, do you? MEB: I don't either...