Don’t Walk

Mary E. Weems, Ph.D.--the eldest daughter of four, the mama of one daughter, Michelle E. Weems, and the blessed-to-be-with-him-wife/partner of James Amie-- is an accomplished poet, playwright, author, editor, performer, motivational speaker, and imagination-intellect theorist. Weems--proud to have been raised by her mama, and to be from a poor, working-class background, Mary started writing poems when she was thirteen to learn to love herself--has been widely published in journals, anthologies, and several books including Public Education and the Imagination-Intellect: I Speak from the Wound in My Mouth (Lang, 2003), developed from her dissertation which argues for imagination-intellectual development as the primary goal of public education. She won the Wick Chapbook Award for her collection in 1996, and in 1997 her play Another Way to Dance won the Chilcote award for The Most Innovative Play by an Ohio Playwright. Her most recent chapbook Tampon Class (Pavement Saw Press, 2005) is in its second printing. Mary Weems currently teaches in the English and Education departments at John Carroll University, and works as a language-artist-scholar in k-12 classrooms, university settings and other venues through her business Bringing Words to Life. Contact Professor Weems, mweems45@sbcglobal.net, for readings and more information.

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A Poet and a Poetry to Reckon With

A Review by Rudolph Lewis

ChickenBones Best Poetry Book of 2008

Mary E. Weems. An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles. Huron: Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 2008.

Writing poetry, Mary E. Weems pares down sociology to the social, to ancestors beginning with the stories of grandma and granny, to mama saying everything changes nothing, and daddy face down in the mud, to the self, a hole within a hole. Ideology is peeled down to the personal, to a tangerine attitude that engages the struggle to find meaning and play in the midst of absence and loss. An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles is a poetic tour de force, an act against erasure or again in the words of E. Ethelbert Miller, a “spiritual text” that outs deceptions and applauds change that moves us to higher ground.

Weems brings into focus scenes of our lives we “don’t need an expert to identify,” not only the abuse and rape of women and children, but also the ordinary and the great. There’s “a sistah” who waits tables with a “broken mouth smile.” There’s God in an unemployment line, where “patience drops on a counter/like a rock.” The problem of illiteracy within our communities is noted in which “crosswalks don’t have word signs.” There’s the shock of the beautiful and successful Phyllis Hyman (1949-1995). “In between songs she talks of life . . . several days later she ended a life I would have sworn was just beginning.”

History and the a-historical rather than erased are presented in delightful wordplay, especially in the use of Eugene Redmond’s poetic form, the Kwansaba. As in “Brother Wright . . . argues with God for forty cloud acres” and June Jordan dumps “word bombs . . . on all the ways the world needs to collect / rain change” and James Brown “writes freedom on wings” with “funk cologne.” In Weems’ poetry, the struggle for justice and hope is relentless. In “Young men with no legs,” a “black man walks time / each day another chance at chance.”

Weems’ technique in writing poetry is what most appeals. Nothing is superfluous. She strips down not just for precision but also for pleasing riffs and rhythms. When I read her poems I am encouraged to go back and take a second look at my own poems that tend to mean more with less. The starkness of her poems, the absence of watery sentimentalism in word choices, is filled with pleasing surprises and little shocks of imaginativeness. Weems’ An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles teaches as well inspires; a book of poems that will provoke many, many readings.

Weems’ approach to poetry gains its most focus in the latter third of the book, the “Obama Chronicles,” when she hones in on the earth shaking impact and possibility of a “real” black president. This section gathers up all the devices used in the preceding section of the book. For she creates these poems out of memories and experiences of family and community, out of play and that which gives black life its distinctiveness. There’s the daughter who “grew up with Black history/in the house like another family/member.” There’s Martin, Malcolm, and Moms Mabley, in heaven, listening to “debates in barber and beauty shops.”

Overall, it’s the sideways look that Professor Weems takes toward life that really intrigues. The last line of her poem “Nomination,” brings that in view. She says, “It’s not/hate we’re afraid of, its what hate can do/to a moment.”