Of course he wasn't "my poet." He was my friend who was also a poet. I'd had other friends who wrote poetry and who had even published with commercial presses, but MW was the real deal. A poet through and through. It was poetry that extracted him from the dead-end factory jobs at which he had labored for 16 years. He still lived in his hometown of Baltimore where he had married young and fathered a son, born with Down Syndrome and dead after ten months. He came as close to spiritual extinction as most people do under the grind of uncreative work and the responsibility of providing for his family, but he never stopped feeling, never stopped writing.
In 1985, at the age of 34, he got his break. A volume of poetry published by a major university press and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship sprung him from the factory, and he resumed his long-abandoned path in higher education, culminating in an MFA in creative writing from Brown University.
MW and I met at New York University where we were both aspirants to a secure berth in a prestigious institution of higher education (MW ultimately succeeded; I didn't). MW was hired as an adjunct to teach creative writing and courses in African American literature in the English Department. As a newly-minted Ph.D., I had received a teaching fellowship to develop courses in African literature in the Department of Comparative Literature. Our paths crossed when I audited his course on African American drama (and was appalled by the clumsily nihilistic Rachel, a play written by Angelina Weld Grimké in 1916 which advocated racial suicide).
During the two years, our professional paths paralleled in New York, we struck up an unlikely friendship based on literature, a respect for each other's intelligence, and his tolerance for my then-monumental ignorance for what the Black experience was really like in spite of my years in Africa and subsequent academic studies. In so many ways we were opposites. MW was straight; on his second wife with whom I got along famously; was proudly and consciously working class, and was a poet. I was gay; conventionally promiscuous (NYU was a 20-minute walk from Christopher Street); arrogantly thought that my time in Africa and studies outside of the white middle class had broadened me; and wrote facile literary criticism.
And yet we were friends. Our agreements and disagreements about literature stimulated us both. As he educated me about the subtleties of class and color in the Black community, I spoke to him about the perplexities of race, class and internalized homophobia in the gay and lesbian world (this was 1990, and the queer alphabet hadn't been invented yet). Our personal discussions could occasionally go deep. MW had a lot of pain to exorcise, and I was a sympathetic listener to his songs of dissatisfaction -- the usual racist crap from white society; the elitist crap from the academic class into which he had "risen." During one of our conversations, he confessed to being sexually abused as a child. (I'm breaking no confidences here; he later brought it all up through therapy, confronted his abuser, and incorporated it into his poetry.)
We were maturing men at the beginning of promising literary careers in New York. The pace and crowd of the city could be oppressive: sensory overload was the norm; and it was hard to break through people's ambitions to SUCCEED and know them as vulnerable humans. MW and I immediately established a soul-to-soul communication (though his soul was immeasurably deeper than mine). We can both tell you of magic walks we took together through Brooklyn and Manhattan. I and my Trinidadian boyfriend went to his apartment in Orange, NJ where we danced the electric slide along with his wife's closeted gay uncle who beamed at us approvingly.
Life took us in different directions. With my academic path blocked, I returned to California to be with my family. MW prospered both as a teacher and a poet. He snagged a position at Rutgers and lived in Philadelphia for the next eight years. With frequent trips to the East Coast, I was able to maintain our friendship for a while. In 1993 I attended the premiere of his one produced play and was his confidant when he fell in love with the female lead, thus accelerating the failure of his second marriage. (The flirtation was only a notch on her belt but a serious wound to MW's heart.)
The geographical separation took its toll. I stayed in California working my dead-end job as a computer literacy consultant during the 90s. MW ended up in a nicely tenured position at a Boston college; he continued writing and publishing to ever-greater acclaim, the recipient of numerous awards. He took a deep dive into Chinese culture not typical of African American writers. I had given up on fiction but not on the academic book that eventually got accepted by a university press and which nobody read. We eventually stopped communicating.
Poets are a special breed. They are attuned to language and all its ramifications in ways that we are not. "Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter," to quote John Keats. I've suspected that the most avid readers of poetry are other poets. Poetry is not the genre I turn to first when I choose to read for pleasure. Thus, I am not so familiar with the extensive oeuvre of "my poet." Years later, long after we had stopped communicating, I was asked to write a one-page summary of a number of African American writers for a coffee table photo book. MW became once again my poet, and so I dipped into his world of words anew. I found myself again enchanted. And this is part of what I wrote about his poem, "Beginnings."
"His vision transforms the modest house of his childhood ... into portals of transcendence and cosmic communion."
Inside it had no end; the stairs led to God's tongue
the basement was a warm door
to the labyrinth of the Earth.
We lived on the rising chest of a star.
"But all this is extinguished with the introduction of violence when the young boy draws his first blood in a fist fight."
The world became many houses,
all of them under siege
If you are lucky, you've been transfixed -- more than once -- by a lyric or a line that has captured you in all its senses. "Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."
-- Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Poetry and Lynching
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