Every Friday this yr that the Orioles jog onto the sphere for an additional baseball recreation at Camden Yards, they convey a little bit piece of the Baltimore poet Kondwani Fidel with them.
On a tag on the gamers’ new City Connect uniforms are phrases from one in every of Fidel’s poems: “YOU CAN’T CLIP THESE WINGS.” When nearer Félix Bautista winds as much as pitch, Fidel’s phrase stretches throughout The Mountain’s hips. When outfielder Austin Hays hits a house run, Fidel’s verse runs the bases.
Talk about poetry in movement.
The slogan was taken from a poem of Fidel’s in reward of his hometown that begins:
“When the wells have almost run dry, and the hard times darken the sky, there’s a mantra we live by: ‘You can’t clip these wings.’”
At age 30, Fidel is quickly turning into Baltimore’s unofficial poet laureate, following within the iambic footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe within the nineteenth century and the comedian poet Ogden Nash within the mid-Twentieth century. Many of Fidel’s poems are about Baltimore, a metropolis he loves fiercely regardless of its flaws.
One Fidel poem was broadcast to a nationwide viewers of greater than 102 million in 2020 throughout Super Bowl LIV. “Beneath the Shell” compares Baltimore to a crab with a tough shell, sharp claws and a burst of taste that brings households and buddies collectively. It was featured in an commercial paid for by Visit Baltimore, the city-affiliated tourism and advertising and marketing company.
More than three years later, “Beneath the Shell” stays on view within the Inner Harbor, emblazoned on a banner hanging exterior the National Aquarium.
But Fidel might be linked extra carefully with the Orioles than with another facet of metropolis life.
For the previous three years, an authentic poem by Fidel has been featured in an Orioles video proven earlier than all dwelling video games. In 2021, “A New Song” welcomed followers again to the ballpark after the COVID-19 pandemic. A yr later, “The Origin” celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Camden Yards, “the park that forever changed baseball.”
For the 2023 video, Fidel constructed a whole poem round, “You can’t clip these wings,” a phrase of his that appeared in each earlier movies and resonated strongly with the Orioles.
“Kondwani is an incredible talent, and he is extremely genuine and authentic,” mentioned Tyler Hoffberger, the Orioles’ vp of inventive content material.
“His voice and his words are Baltimore, and the poem is spoken like a Baltimorean. Kondwani was so excited to collaborate with us and to help us tell the story of what this city is all about. He was so happy the day the uniforms were launched. I saw the look on his face when he threw out the first pitch at the game that night. You could tell he wasn’t doing it just for himself.”
It is considerably out of the extraordinary for a sports activities group to have a resident poet. But the O’s are an uncommon group, and Baltimore has at all times blurred the road between athletics and artwork. What different metropolis’s soccer group takes its identify from a spooky nineteenth century poem?
For Fidel, baseball and Baltimore have at all times gone collectively.
“I’ve been an Orioles fan since I was a little kid,” he mentioned.
“When Cal Ripken was featured in a rap song, we were so proud. But looking back on it, the team came secondary. The real reason we wore those orange and black hats and shirts and jerseys is because they represented Baltimore. Even as children, we wanted to let people know where we were from.”
What makes Fidel’s devotion to Baltimore so spectacular is that it was hard-won.
He has described his tough upbringing on Baltimore’s East Side in two poems that went viral. The first poem, which he recited in 2015 instead trainer to a highschool class, racked up greater than 2.7 million views in three weeks. Two years later, his essay, “How a Young Boy Has Been Decaying in Baltimore since Age 10,” additionally took off, receiving greater than 113,000 views on the self-publishing web site Medium in lower than a month.
In the poems, Fidel talks about his mother and father, who suffered from dependancy, and about 5 relations and shut buddies who died violent deaths over an 11-year interval. Four have been murdered and one (the poet’s 7-year-old brother) was pulled from a burning home and died days later.
He writes about how the losses of individuals he liked despatched him down a spiral of suicidal ideas and self-destructive binges.
“There are two Baltimores,” Fidel writes within the essay, “and your zip code determines whether or not you live or die. … I’m supposed to pretend that I’m happy while envisioning the faces of the crying children that killed you: the ones who pop pistols shed tears, too.”
Paradoxically, the hardships Fidel endured are what imbues his writing with authenticity. He advocates passionately for Baltimore with out sugarcoating harsh realities — not a simple steadiness to strike.
“I think Kondwani is one of the best poets we have seen in a long time,” the creator and screenwriter D. Watkins, a good friend of Fidel’s, wrote in an e-mail to The Baltimore Sun.
Watkins and Fidel have been two younger males with expertise and willpower who fought their method up from the underside, a background that Watkins mentioned usually produces truth-tellers.
“Kondwani is hungry to tell that truth,” Watkins mentioned. “He has a talent for peeling back the layers of the negative to show the beauty in our city.”
It wasn’t till Fidel briefly left Baltimore at age 18 and enrolled at Virginia State University that he started to achieve perspective on his hometown and to determine how he would possibly champion it. He refused to let classmates from Los Angeles and New York, individuals who had by no means been to “Down Da Hill” in East Baltimore, dis his metropolis.
“Every city has its s—,” he mentioned. “Every city has a crime rate. But we’re the only city that America needs to pimp. They act like people are getting executed and their heads chopped off in the Inner Harbor.”
As a sophomore, he carried out his poetry earlier than an viewers for the primary time and knew he’d discovered his calling.
“We’ve never before had full control of our own narrative,” he mentioned.
“I’m used to being an underdog and I’m proud to represent an underdog city. My poems say, ‘This is who I am and Baltimore is what it is. And, I want y’all to know it as soon as I walk through the door so there’s no confusion.’”
Over time, Fidel negotiated a truce along with his despair.
Watkins mentioned that within the years after Fidel graduated from school, individuals from the poet’s neighborhood that he had grown up with started getting nationwide consideration for his or her artwork, from the photographer Devin Allen to the author Sheri Booker to Watkins himself.
It helped that Fidel started assembly high Baltimore decision-makers who thought he had one thing essential to say. He grew to become concerned with Visit Baltimore in 2018, when the company introduced native artists on a tour of conference commerce reveals. It was by means of Visit Baltimore that Fidel was launched to the Orioles in early 2020.
“It was evident that this guy was very talented,” Hoffberger mentioned. “We knew immediately that we wanted to collaborate with him.”
Visit Baltimore CEO Al Hutchinson grew to become a mentor of Fidel’s.
“Kondwani stood out,” Hutchinson mentioned. “He didn’t provide you with a silver spoon in his mouth. He grew up in a neighborhood that many individuals don’t come out of. And he has not given up on Baltimore.
“He has a powerful story to tell, and he is a passionate ambassador for his city.”
Though Hutchinson believes Fidel is exceptional, he’s satisfied he’s not distinctive. Baltimore’s poorest and most challenged neighborhoods are chock-full of unrecognized expertise, he mentioned.
“There are so many Kondwanis out there that we need to find and invest in,” Hutchinson mentioned, “so many who have not been part of the stories about Baltimore we traditionally have told.”
Fidel is simply starting to shine a highlight on the Baltimore he is aware of — at Camden Yards, on the partitions of the National Aquarium, and inside a classroom at Coppin State University, the place he’s an assistant professor of English.
“Never in my lifetime did I think that I would become a poet and would create content for the city of Baltimore and for the Orioles,” he mentioned. “It nonetheless appears surreal.
“So much of life is outside our jurisdiction. There is so much we can’t control. It’s a reminder that all we can do is work hard and keep our hearts pure.”
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Source: www.bostonherald.com