Poetry in motion: Kondwani Fidel is an ambassador in verse for Baltimore and the Orioles

Every Friday this year that the Orioles jog onto the field for another baseball game at Camden Yards, they bring a little piece of the Baltimore poet Kondwani Fidel with them.

On a tag on the players’ new City Connect uniforms are words from one of Fidel’s poems: “YOU CAN’T CLIP THESE WINGS.” When closer Félix Bautista winds up to pitch, Fidel’s phrase stretches across The Mountain’s hips. When outfielder Austin Hays hits a home run, Fidel’s verse runs the bases.

Talk about poetry in motion.

The slogan was taken from a poem of Fidel’s in praise 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 rapidly becoming Baltimore’s unofficial poet laureate, following in the iambic footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th century and the comic poet Ogden Nash in the mid-20th century. Many of Fidel’s poems are about Baltimore, a city he loves fiercely despite its flaws.

One Fidel poem was broadcast to a nationwide audience of more than 102 million in 2020 during Super Bowl LIV. “Beneath the Shell” compares Baltimore to a crab with a hard shell, sharp claws and a burst of flavor that brings families and friends together. It was featured in an advertisement paid for by Visit Baltimore, the city-affiliated tourism and marketing agency.

More than three years later, “Beneath the Shell” remains on view in the Inner Harbor, emblazoned on a banner hanging outside the National Aquarium.

But Fidel is probably linked more closely with the Orioles than with any other aspect of city life.

For the past three years, an original poem by Fidel has been featured in an Orioles video shown before all home games. In 2021, “A New Song” welcomed fans back to the ballpark after the COVID-19 pandemic. A year later, “The Origin” celebrated the 30th anniversary of Camden Yards, “the park that forever changed baseball.”

For the 2023 video, Fidel built an entire poem around, “You can’t clip these wings,” a phrase of his that appeared in both earlier videos and resonated strongly with the Orioles.

“Kondwani is an incredible talent, and he is extremely genuine and authentic,” said Tyler Hoffberger, the Orioles’ vice president of creative content.

“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 somewhat out of the ordinary for a sports team to have a resident poet. But the O’s are an unusual team, and Baltimore has always blurred the line between athletics and art. What other city’s football team takes its name from a spooky 19th century poem?

For Fidel, baseball and Baltimore have always gone together.

“I’ve been an Orioles fan since I was a little kid,” he said.

“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 impressive is that it was hard-won.

He has described his difficult upbringing on Baltimore’s East Side in two poems that went viral. The first poem, which he recited in 2015 as a substitute teacher to a high school class, racked up more 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,” also took off, receiving more than 113,000 views on the self-publishing website Medium in less than a month.

In the poems, Fidel talks about his parents, who suffered from addiction, and about five family members and close friends who died violent deaths over an 11-year period. Four were murdered and one (the poet’s 7-year-old brother) was pulled from a burning house and died days later.

He writes about how the losses of people he loved sent him down a spiral of suicidal thoughts and self-destructive binges.

“There are two Baltimores,” Fidel writes in 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 without sugarcoating harsh realities — not an easy balance to strike.

“I think Kondwani is one of the best poets we have seen in a long time,” the author and screenwriter D. Watkins, a friend of Fidel’s, wrote in an email to The Baltimore Sun.

Watkins and Fidel were two young men with talent and determination who fought their way up from the bottom, a background that Watkins said often produces truth-tellers.

“Kondwani is hungry to tell that truth,” Watkins said. “He has a talent for peeling back the layers of the negative to show the beauty in our city.”

It wasn’t until Fidel temporarily left Baltimore at age 18 and enrolled at Virginia State University that he began to gain perspective on his hometown and to figure out how he might champion it. He refused to let classmates from Los Angeles and New York, people who had never been to “Down Da Hill” in East Baltimore, dis his city.

“Every city has its s—,” he said. “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 performed his poetry before an audience for the first time and knew he’d found his calling.

“We’ve never before had full control of our own narrative,” he said.

“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 with his despair.

Watkins said that in the years after Fidel graduated from college, people from the poet’s neighborhood that he had grown up with began getting national attention for their art, from the photographer Devin Allen to the writer Sheri Booker to Watkins himself.

It helped that Fidel began meeting top Baltimore decision-makers who thought he had something important to say. He became involved with Visit Baltimore in 2018, when the agency brought local artists on a tour of convention trade shows. It was through Visit Baltimore that Fidel was introduced to the Orioles in early 2020.

“It was evident that this guy was very talented,” Hoffberger said. “We knew immediately that we wanted to collaborate with him.”

Visit Baltimore CEO Al Hutchinson became a mentor of Fidel’s.

“Kondwani stood out,” Hutchinson said. “He did not come up with a silver spoon in his mouth. He grew up in a neighborhood that many people do not 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 remarkable, he is convinced he is not unique. Baltimore’s poorest and most challenged neighborhoods are chock-full of unrecognized talent, he said.

“There are so many Kondwanis out there that we need to find and invest in,” Hutchinson said, “so many who have not been part of the stories about Baltimore we traditionally have told.”

Fidel is just beginning to shine a spotlight on the Baltimore he knows — at Camden Yards, on the walls of the National Aquarium, and inside a classroom at Coppin State University, where he is 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 said. “It still seems 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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