Poetry Passion: The Legacy of Maya Angelou

RIP to a "Phenomenal Woman" - and one of the great poets of the 20th Century!

NPR Obituary of Maya Angelou, May 28, 2014

Poet, performer and political activist Maya Angelou has died after a long illness at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86. Born in St. Louis in 1928, Angelou grew up in a segregated society that she worked to change during the civil rights era. Angelou, who refused to speak for much of her childhood, revealed the scars of her past in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of a series of memoirs.
Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., and Stamps, Ark., she was Marguerite Johnson. It was her brother who first called her Maya, and the name stuck. Later she added the Angelou, a version of her first husband's name.

. . . Joanne Braxton, a professor at the College of William and Mary, says Angelou's willingness to reveal the sexual abuse she suffered as a child in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was unprecedented at the time. The critical acclaim and popularity of the book opened doors for both African-American and female writers.
"Maya Angelou brought about a paradigm shift in American literature and culture," Braxton says, "so that the works, the gifts, the talents of women writers, including women writers of color, could be brought to the foreground and appreciated. She created an audience by her stunning example."

Michelle Obama's tribute to Maya Angelou http://t.co/96QxtG4UMy pic.twitter.com/AOrrpwE03U

— Chicago Sun-Times (@Suntimes) June 8, 2014

Reading the Inaugural Poem for President Bill Clinton
"On the Pulse of Morning"

Remembering the life of Dr. Maya Angelou, an American icon: http://t.co/joBeDqcapg pic.twitter.com/EDrPIkHrhP
— ABC News (@ABC) May 29, 2014

From the New York Times Obituary

In a statement, President Obama said, “Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” adding, “She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.”

. . . she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from “Oprah” to “Sesame Street”; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.

In February 2011, Mr. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.

I'm speechless with awe and amazement: 15 other jobs of Maya Angleou http://t.co/X6gwR17bWH
— Chernynkaya (@Chernynkaya) May 28, 2014

The most poetic interview in history:



On Sesame Street with Elmo:



With Oprah Going Down Memory Lane:

Yesterday, the caged bird sang the blues. RIP #MayaAngelou.
— Paul Lander (@paul_lander) May 29, 2014

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
~ Maya Angelou

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

~ Maya Angelou

When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.

Our eyes, briefly,

see with

a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words

unsaid,

promised walks

never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

~ Maya Angelou


Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,

The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.

Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.

I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand

Just why my head’s not bowed.

I don’t shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.

When you see me passing,

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It’s in the click of my heels,

The bend of my hair,

the palm of my hand,

The need for my care.

’Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

 ~ Maya Angelou

R.I.P. Peter Matthiessen

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

The most "Zen" of authors has left this world for a new adventure: Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, Far Tortugas, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and many more. His love of the earth and his philosophical musings on our place here had a major influence on all of us growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Obituary in the LA Times

Matthiessen, the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, was both an elegant novelist and a rugged naturalist, a traveler known for his graceful yet spare descriptions of the wildest places on Earth.
Over six decades, he produced acclaimed volumes of natural history based on his treks through East Africa, New Guinea and the Amazon. He chronicled the plight of disappearing tribes. He wrote books about Cesar Chavez and Native American activist Leonard Peltier. He became a Zen devotee and wrote of a painful spiritual journey as he hiked through the Himalayas in "The Snow Leopard." At the same time, he wrote fiction; four of his novels centered on a respected and reviled sugar-cane planter who was killed by his neighbors in the Everglades.
He also helped found the Paris Review, the renowned literary magazine, which he used as a cover during his brief career as a spy for the CIA.

. . . Matthiessen traveled to remote corners of Alaska, Siberia, Peru, East Africa, Nepal and elsewhere. In central New Guinea, he was part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody expedition that chronicled a Stone Age tribe, the Kurelu. Michael Rockefeller, the son of then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared on the same expedition.
Matthiessen's most controversial work was "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," a critical look at the conviction of Leonard Peltier in the 1975 murders of two FBI agents. Lawsuits filed by an FBI agent and South Dakota's former governor, Bill Janklow, were dismissed in 1990.

Remembering Gore Vidal

Prolific writer, playwright, historian and politician, Gore Vidal has passed away at the age of 86.

Perhaps his best legacy are his many witticisms, earning him the moniker "The American Oscar Wilde." Here are some of his literary quotes, many more here.

• You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
• American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
• Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
• To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
• Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

From the New York Times

He wrote for most of the shows that presented hourlong original dramas in the 1950s, including “Studio One,” “Philco Television Playhouse” and “Goodyear Playhouse.” He became so adept, he could knock off an adaptation in a weekend and an original play in a week or two. He turned “Visit to a Small Planet,” his 1955 television drama about an alien who comes to earth to study the art of war, into a successful Broadway play. His most successful play was “The Best Man,” about two contenders for the presidential nomination. It ran for 520 performances on Broadway before it, too, became a successful film, in 1964, with a cast headed by Henry Fonda and a screenplay by Mr. Vidal. It was revived on Broadway in 2000 and is now being revived there again as “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.” Mr. Vidal’s reputation as a script doctor was such that in 1956 MGM hired him as a contract writer; among other projects he helped rewrite the screenplay of “Ben-Hur,” though he was denied an official credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of his friend Tennessee Williams’s play “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

. . . In the years to come his greatest successes came with historical novels, especially what became known as his American Chronicles sextet: “Washington, D.C.,” “Burr” (1973), “1876” (1976), “Lincoln” (1984), “Hollywood” (1990) and “The Golden Age” (2000). He turned out to have a particular gift for this kind of writing. These novels were learned and scrupulously based on fact, but also witty and contemporary-feeling, full of gossip and shrewd asides. Harold Bloom wrote that Mr. Vidal’s imagination of American politics “is so powerful as to compel awe.” Writing in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said, “Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with.”

But Mr. Vidal also persisted in writing books like “Myron” (1974), a sequel to “Myra,” and “Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal” (1992), which were clearly meant as provocations. “Live From Golgotha,” for example, rewrites the Gospels, with Saint Paul as a huckster and pederast and Jesus a buffoon. John Rechy said of it in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, “If God exists and Jesus is His son, then Gore Vidal is going to Hell.”

In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His collection “The Second American Revolution” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982. About a later collection, “United States: Essays 1952-1992,” R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Vidal the essayist was “so good that we cannot do without him,” adding, “He is a treasure of state.”

Irish Novelist Maeve Binchy Gone at Age 72

The Irish authoress of Light a Penny Candle, Tara Road and Circle of Friends is dead at age 72.

From the Irish Times

In all she wrote 16 books, two of which, The Lilac Bus and Echoes, were made into TV films while Circle of Friends, Tara Road and How About You were made into feature films.

She wrote four collections of short stories altogether, a play for RTÉ Deeply Regretted By, which won a Jacob’s award in 1978, and the novella Star Sullivan.

It has been estimated that her books have sold 40 million copies in 37 languages.

In 1999 she received the British Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

In 2000 it was a People of the Year Award in Ireland. In 2001 she won the WH Smith Book Award for Fiction. In 2007 she received the Irish PEN/AT Cross Award and in 2010 it was a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Book Awards.

. . . She once said she would like her motto to be: “We have to make our own happiness.” It was probably her greatest achievement that she did just that and despite illness in later years.

As she told this newspaper on July 3rd last: “I’ve been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.” In Binchy’s case the description “a national treasure” is that rare snug fit.

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images via Slate

Maurice Sendak has died at the age of 83.
Obituary from Reuters

Sendak died in Danbury, Connecticut, from complications from a recent stroke, the Times was told by Sendak's long-time editor, Michael di Capua. Sendak had lived in nearby Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Sendak, who was born in Brooklyn in 1928, illustrated more than 50 books during his career and won a number of prizes for his drawings. The Swedish government awarded him the Hans Christian Anderson Award for children's book illustration in 1970.

He was a genius of children's literature although he proclaimed that he merely wrote for himself and never thought about the audience, and that's probably why kids of all ages found his books to be refreshing and profound.


I found this great quote on Goodreads

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

He was interviewed at length by Bill Moyers for PBS back in 2004 - full transcript here - and spoke of many things including the background of Where the Wild Things Are. I've always found this fascinating because it is counterintuitive to what most people consider the "nice" thoughts one needs for writing a children's classic:

 MOYERS: Why did you write WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE?

SENDAK: I don't know. I don't have an answer. Let me tell you of its origin — it's brief. I had done a series of books and in those days back in the '50s, you couldn't do a picture book unless you'd done a number of books that paid off somewhat or at the very least showed that you had more talent. And you can move onto the next.

There's not much money back then. I don't think Madonna would have been interested in writing a book in the '50s, okay? So, it was my turn. I had earned my 10 years apprenticeship of doing any number of books. Now, I could do a book. And my editor's name was Ursula Nordstrom. And she without equivocation was the best.

She was this torrential woman, passionate woman, who could spot talent 10 miles away. I had no education. I did not go to art school. My drawing was so crude. I had shines on shoes like in Mutt 'n' Jeff in Walt Disney. And she saw through that monstrous crudity and cultivated me, really made me grow up. And then, it was time to do my own picture book.

And I came to her with a title that was "Where the Wild Horses Are." And she just loved that. It was so poetic and evocative. And she gave me a contract based on "Where the Wild Horses Are." And then, it turned out after some very few months to her chagrin and anger, I couldn't draw horses. The whole book would have to be full of horses to make the book make sense.

And when I tried a number of things, I remember the acid tones. She said, "Maurice, what can you draw?" Okay. Cause she was investing in a full color picture book. That was an enormous thing back then.


And so, I thought well things, things. Could be anything I could draw without negotiating things I can't draw. And then, we were at… someone had died. My brother, sister and I were sitting shiva, the Jewish ceremony.

And all we did was laugh hysterically. I remember our relatives used to come from the old country, those few who got in before the gate closed, all on my mother's side. And how we detested them. The cruelty that children… you know, kids are hard.

And these people didn't speak English. And they were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying. Nose… unraveling out of their hair, unraveling out of their noses. And they'd pick you up and hug you and kiss you, "Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up."

And we know they would eat anything, anything. And so, they're the wild things. And when I remember them, the discussion with my brother and sister, how we laughed about these people who we of course grew up to love very much, I decided to render them as the wild things, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins. And that's who they are.


MOYERS: So, the wild things are your extended…

SENDAK: Relatives. They're…

MOYERS: Jewish relatives.

SENDAK: Jewish relatives.

MOYERS: With the WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, it created a big sensation. I mean, librarians would not put it in the… in fact, there's one librarian who said, "This is not a book you leave in the presence of sensitive children to find in the twilight."

SENDAK: Yes. There was a torrent of, "Keep this book away from children. This is…"

MOYERS: Why?

SENDAK: I think probably it was the first American children's book — God knows I didn't set out to do this, it was my first picture book. But, I was talking about kids I knew and me. A book, an American book, where the child actually daunts his mother and threatens her.

No way. No way. And then on top of that, she puts him in a room and denies him food. No way. Mamas never do that kinda thing. Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of. And the worst offense, he comes home. She leaves food for him. And he's not punished. Not punished.

MOYERS: When you had Max get mad at his mother knowing… did you know that this was going to enrage people? That they…

SENDAK: No. My mother got mad at me all the time. It didn't seem an extraordinary thing at all. I mean, it seemed to me she was always mad. And in Yiddish, she called me the equivalent of "wild thing" and chased me all over the house.

We used to hide in the street and hope she forgot before I crept up in the evening. It was all natural as your father took swipes at you that you dodge. And your mother was rough, rough, rough.



MOYERS: Were you ever sent to bed without supper?

SENDAK: I often went to bed without supper cause I hated my mother's cooking. So, to go to bed without supper was not a torture to me. If she was gonna hurt me, she'd make me eat. That's true, too.

But, it was a really unkempt, unruly small apartment, three children, father who worked so hard, mother who had problems emotionally and mentally. And we didn't know that. Your mommy's supposed to be perfect.

She should be there for you, love you, kiss you. Every movie we ever saw, Claudette Colbert hugging her children. We knew what it should be like. And it wasn't. And we had no sympathy at all.

MOYERS: What I hear you describing is not a story that you just made up. It's a story you experienced.

SENDAK: Yeah. Well, that's what art is. I mean, you don't make up stories. You live your life. And I was not Max. I did not have the courage that Max had. And I didn't have the mother that Max had. Who would give you, love you and you know this little scene which is so trivial. It happens at everybody's house, happens every Tuesday and Thursday.

He has a fit. She has a fit. It'll go on till he's about 35, goes into therapy, wonders why he can't get married, okay? Cause people often say, "What happens to Max?" And it's such a coy question that I always say, "Well, he's in therapy forever. He has to wear a straitjacket when he's with his therapist."

Sendak, in spite of his humble beginnings or perhaps specifically because of them, was a unique grown-up who still remembered everything about childhood, and that touched a chord in all of us. He gave us some of the most memorable books of childhood: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Chicken Soup with Rice. Over his long career, he also collaborated as an illustrator on many other books.

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak. I will picture you sailing away to Where the Wild Things are and becoming their King Supreme. No child-at-heart will ever forget you!