Like the Protestant hymn and like the blues, Angelou’s poems often introduce a major clause that is repeated throughout the remaining stanzas. Music historian Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka) once defined the blues as a “verse form” having a specific social context that includes “love, sex, tragedy in interpersonal relationships, death, travel, loneliness, etc.” (1963, 50). Angelou uses blues themes throughout The Complete Poetry, for example, in “No Loser, No Weeper” (CP 12) and in “Now Long Ago” (CP 68).
In Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie Angelou began experimenting not only with African American musical patterns but also with the creation of a persona through whom she could express her emotions. The “I” of “No Loser, No Weeper” is not Angelou but a jealous woman who addresses a rival. Similarly, her famous “phenomenal woman” is not necessarily the poet but a universal woman who exhibits feelings of strength and overwhelming pride.
“Phenomenal Woman” (CP 126–27) is one of Angelou’s best-loved poems. The persona or narrative voice is a large, heel-clicking female of unspecified race, although most readers would assume her to be black. The poem consists of four stanzas of more than a dozen lines each, with each stanza divided by the words “I say,” followed by a recital of female attributes—flashing eyes, riding breasts, arching back, clicking heels, and so forth. Angelou had recited and recorded “Phenomenal Woman” so often that critics assume that the poet is the subject, the “I” of the poem. I would argue instead that although the subject has certain predominant African American features, “Phenomenal Woman” can be convincingly performed by a dynamic woman of any race and of smaller stature.
“Still I Rise” (CP 159–60) has a similar hypnotic power. The boastful narrator taunts a “You,” who appears to be white. The poem begins in ballad form; it then changes tempo in the eighth and ninth stanzas, becoming a series of couplets punctuated by the words “I rise.” Metaphors reveal that the narrator is black (“I’m a black ocean”) and female (“I’ve got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs….”) The word rise appears ten times in the poem and is a constant rhyme word. The accumulation of rising sounds creates an upward movement, a worldly resurrection. Both in her poetry and in her prose Angelou was captivated by the notion of rising, an idea that is implied in the UP-word of her 2002 autobiography, A Song Flung Up. Her concept of rising seems to echo the Old and New Testaments, the Baptist Hymnal, the Negro spiritual, and other sources.
Unfortunately, Angelou’s poetry is not always pristine. Too often she employs large words unnecessarily, for example, in “California Prodigal” (CP 137–38), where words such as phantasmatalities and fulminant are inaccessible to the casual reader. This occasional use of pedantic language contrasts sharply with Angelou’s more direct and intense lyrics, especially “The Traveler” (CP 153), an eight-line ballad that addresses the theme of loneliness, and “When Great Trees Fall” (CP 258–59), a moving poem about lost souls.
If Angelou had written only this collection of poems she would still have had a dedicated following, especially among college audiences, where she would entrance the crowd with her sharp wit and her vibrant poetry. By the time she was in her sixties she had become a television personality, known for her earlier role in Alex Haley’s Roots (1977), for her 1993 Grammy Award for Best-Spoken Word Album (Essence 2014, 109), and for her numerous appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show. In addition, her popular lectures on university campuses gave Dr. Angelou a visibility unusual among American poets. An aware public immediately recognized her expressive face and her deep voice.
However, she received her greatest public recognition when, at the age of sixty-five, she read “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1993 inauguration of William Clinton. Many critics think that Angelou’s ultimate greatness will be attributed to two achievements: her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” works in two different genres written more than two decades apart. It was not only the inauguration poem itself; it was also the vitality of her performance, as she used skills gleaned from years of acting and speaking to arouse the nation.
Before Angelou, only one other American poet, Robert Frost, had read an inauguration poem, at the swearing in of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Angelou was the first black, the first woman. When Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning,” she bathed in the magic then surrounding the new administration. The poem, like the incoming president, offered the dream of hope—for Native Americans, gays, the homeless, Eskimos, Jews, West Africans, and Muslims. It is a long poem, over one hundred lines, televised on satellite and delivered electronically around the world. Clippings and reviews on file at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—from Spain, New Zealand, the Netherlands, England, and Vatican City—confirm the ode’s positive reception throughout the modern world.
Angelou’s theatrical rendering of “On the Pulse of Morning” is above all a return to African American oral tradition, when slaves like Frederick Douglass stood on platforms in abolitionist meeting halls to register their concerns about the slave system. The ode also echoes the rhetorical grace of the African American sermon, as practiced and modified by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan.
“On the Pulse of Morning” (CP 263–66) is a poem rich with contemporary references to toxic waste and pollution—the subjects of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. References to mastodons and dinosaurs suggest the prehistoric beasts of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Jurassic Park. In these and other instances Angelou writes with passion about contemporary concerns.
The inaugural ode is also influenced, as are the autobiographies, by numerous African American poets through the oral tradition of spirituals like “Roll, Jordan, Roll” and the written poetry of Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and others—influences that I have addressed in greater detail in my essay published in the commemorative issue of College Language Association Journal. In addition, “On the Pulse of Morning” contains echoes of modern African poets and folk artists such as Kwesi Brew and Efua Sutherland, artists who helped Angelou make contact with African religious beliefs and contemporary African poetry. Finally, “On the Pulse of Morning” is a semiautobiographical poem, one that emerges from her conflicts as an American; her experiences as a traveler; her achievements in public speaking and acting; and her wisdom, gleaned from years of self-exploration.
In the next sixteen years Angelou further demonstrated her strength as a poet/performer in front of mass audiences. Her achievements include “A Brave and Startling Truth” (June 1995), written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations; the “Million Man March Poem” (October 16, 1995), read before a huge crowd in Washington, D.C.; “Amazing Peace” (December 1, 2005), a poem that celebrated the lighting of the National Christmas Tree; “Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me,” a mass-marketed poem in praise of her mother, Vivian Baxter (2006); a prose/poem in honor of Hilary Clinton published in the London Observer on January 20, 2008; an elegy, “We Had Him,” written by Angelou but recited by the actress Queen Latifah at the funeral of singer Michael Jackson in July 2009; and “His Day Is Done,” an elegy for the South African leader Nelson Mandela (December 10, 2013). These poems, many still available on YouTube and other audio and visual sites, are assurances that Angelou’s fame, like Michael Jackson’s, will outlast their deaths. The 2015 Random House edition of her poetry contains the long poems listed earlier, as well as a poem on Oprah Winfrey’s fiftieth birthday: a poem written for the Children’s Defense Fund; a poem about her ancestors; a poem celebrating a boy’s Bar Mitzvah; a vigil to the Creator; a prayer to “Father Mother God”; and a poem on the occasion of the 2008 Olympics. The elegy to Michael Jackson is not included.
Each of Angelou’s commemorative poems befits a poet laureate—one who is singled out for a significant achievement, especially in the arts or sciences. In England, poet laureates William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyso
n were appointed to write verse on grand occasions. In some American jurisdictions, in the state of Maryland, for example, there is a state laureate, an office that African American poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2012) held for several years. Clifton was the author of many compassionate poems, including “Miss Rosie,” a blues tribute to a haggard “wet brown bag of a woman” who had once been the prize of Georgia. Angelou cites “Miss Rosie” in Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997, 121–22), feeling that the poem explains how the poor and lonely are still able to stand up and reach for a higher place in society.
The United States has had a national poet laureate since 1986, when Robert Penn Warren was the first person to be bestowed with that honor. The position is attached to that of the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, with the poet laureate a spokesperson for the arts who is required to give at least one public reading a year. Angelou, so closely connected to the African American tradition represented by Lucille Clifton and by former American laureate Rita Dove, was always exploring her own desire to create meaningful art, what she calls “art for the sake of the soul” (Stars 119). Yet despite Angelou’s increasing productivity and her performances at national and international celebrations, and although she had many fans who thought she really was the country’s poet laureate, Maya Angelou was never appointed to that official position (Armenti 2014).
Musings
In a 1986 essay, “My Grandson, Home at Last,” published in the popular magazine, Woman’s Day, Angelou traced the efforts to rescue Guy’s son, Colin, who had been kidnapped by Guy’s estranged wife. The story, written from a grandmother’s perspective, describes Guy’s pain as a parent and reminds the reader of Maya’s own anxiety as she tried to recover Guy from his own kidnapping by Big Mary Dalton, related in the powerful sequence of mother-loss in Gather Together.
The delicate personal essay in Woman’s Day seems to be the antecedent of two books of prose reflections, what Angelou’s publisher labels on the dust jacket of Even the Stars Look Lonesome a “wise book.” A wise book; a collection of informal essays; a series of musings, observations, meditations, or reflections, often interspersed with poetry—each term aptly describes the unconfined genre that Angelou had selected for her more casual prose writings.
The first of the two reflections, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993), is dedicated to her close friend, the prodigious talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey. The title is from a Negro spiritual, part of which Angelou sang during the “Icon” interview. “It’s such a great song, you know. It’s a song from slavery. It’s got the most amazing kind of spirit.” Then, without a pause, Angelou started to sing: “I’m on my journey now / Mt. Zion…And I wouldn’t take nothin’/ for my journey now” (“Icon” 1997).
Although the title suggests that the book will develop the theme of the journey that dominates her autobiographies, the journeys that occur between its pages are more contemplative than narrative, reminiscent of traditional Asian poetry or of the kind of short meditations dating back to the Analects of the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC). Whereas the Confucian reflections were told by a male to males, Angelou alters the traditional gender expectations in both books of musings, rendering her advice from a woman’s perspective.
Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now is a tiny book, consisting of a mere 139 pages. Nonetheless, Angelou manages to say a lot within the scope of the text, on topics that range from instructions on how to be creative with fabrics to profound issues dealing with death, racism, Christianity, and West African religious beliefs. There are also solid representations of Angelou’s quoted sayings, including the well-known statement: “Human beings are more alike than unalike” (11).
The book is at its best when it is autobiographical—when it recounts episodes involving Maya’s brother or son or mother or grandmother, or when it presents a separate episode consistent with the Maya character of the autobiographies. The section, “New Directions,” for instance, further relates the heroic story from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings about how Annie Henderson saved her family during the Great Depression by selling homemade meat pies to area factory workers. Other segments involving Annie Henderson include a fantasy in which Maya sees her grandmother standing “thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible” (74). This exaggerated description of Annie’s physical and spiritual power is reminiscent of similar scenes in Caged Bird, although the mystery of Annie’s faith seems less convincing here because it is treated briefly and outside the broader autobiographical framework.
In a comparable sketch, Angelou creates an engaging portrait of her Aunt Tee from Los Angeles, an old woman who had spent almost sixty years working for white families and observing the sadness of their lives. As her employers began to age and no longer need her services, Aunt Tee started to throw parties every Saturday night, with fried chicken, dancing, and card playing. One night she discovers her elderly employers peeking in at the party, begging to be allowed to just sit and watch. The Aunt Tee vignette is effective, although Angelou uses it not as a narrative in itself but as a springboard to reflect on life and art and money and power, a typical technique in constructing an essay. This kind of sketch, interesting as it might be, demands the structural cohesion of the longer, autobiographical work to make it part of a larger pattern and not a mere snippet.
Of the various autobiographical moments in Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, the one that seems to sustain itself most effectively is “Extending the Boundaries.” The seven-page story is sufficiently developed to convey a narrative sense; it also gives us a Maya with the three-dimensional sophistication of character that we find in The Heart of a Woman, in All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, and in A Song Flung Up to Heaven; she is a woman admired for her achievements but pitied for her inappropriate behavior and faulty conclusions.
In “Extending the Boundaries,” Angelou describes being honored in the late 1960s at Terry’s Pub, a bar for “the black and hip in New York City” (107), after having been named the New York Post’s Person of the Week. The regulars toast and cheer her and then eventually go back to their accustomed patterns. Having drunk at least five martinis and desperately in search of a partner, she interrupts a group of African American journalists and begins a litany of her skills in housekeeping, cooking, languages, and lovemaking. She demands to know why, with all of those qualities, she isn’t acceptable to them. In a painful moment of self-awareness, Angelou realizes that she had “overstepped the written rules which I knew I should have respected. Instead, I had brazenly and boldly come to their table and spoken out on, of all things, loneliness” (111). She starts to cry.
Later she is escorted home by a sympathetic but critical male friend, who leaves her at the door. After she sobers up, she begins to reflect on her marriage to Tosh Angelos and on her sexuality in general. Because the marriage to Tosh had failed, she has been determined not to look for love except among African Americans. Her experience with the black men in the bar, though, had somehow changed her opinion. If a man came along, whatever his race, she would “not struggle too hard” as long as he was sincere and could make her laugh (113).
This mini-episode, seemingly detached from the autobiographies, is nonetheless related to them by way of her needs, her aggressiveness, her lack of control. Similar in tone to the embarrassing quarrel with her husband’s mistress in The Heart of a Woman and to the angry exchange with a man who tries to pick her up in a bar in A Song Flung Up to Heaven, “Exceeding the Boundaries” reveals a narrator more distraught and misguided than would be expected in a more conventional self-portrait. The pervading autobiographical content saves Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now from its tendency to sermonize on proper conduct or virtue, as in the sermon on death (“Death and the Legacy”) or the several paragraphs on the morality of planting and cultivation (“At Harvestime”).
Even the Stars Look Lonesome was published in 1997, four years after Journey. It is similar in emphasis and layout, al
though the text is six pages longer. At the time of our interview, Angelou was proofing the final copy and confidently anticipating the release of Stars: “I think it’s the best writing I’ve ever done” (“Icon” 1997).The book of reflections candidly discusses her mother Vivian Baxter, her husband Vusumsi Make, her son Guy, and other people prominent in the autobiographies. It also contains excellent discussions about African history, West African art, and aging.
Two of the most enjoyable essays are, first, “Art for the Sake of the Soul,” which begins with Lucille Clifton’s “Miss Rosie” and recollects, among other things, an impromptu concert in Morocco that occurred during the original Porgy and Bess tour in the mid-1950s. A dancer and not a singer, Angelou was called on to perform. Unable to offer an operatic rendition, she sang Momma Henderson’s favorite spiritual, “I’m a poor pilgrim of sorrow,” to the shouting and clapping of the almost five thousand people in the audience. The essay moves from her autobiographical experience to a statement on the universality of art, ending with a strong plea for governmental funding of projects in the arts.
In a provocative 1955 interview with Ken Kelley of Mother Jones magazine, she spoke out against conservatives in the government who want to stop funding for the arts: “The conservative right has decided that artists are apart from the people. That’s ridiculous! I mean, at our best the writer, painter, architect, actor, dancer, folk singer—we are the people” (1995, n.p.). She advises artists to sing, dance, and perform in public places so that the young do not have to surrender their dreams.
The second recollection in Stars that has tremendous vitality is “Rural Museums—Southern Romance.” Also concerned with art and the preservation of culture, “Rural Museums” is a grim recounting of Angelou’s journey to a slave museum in Louisiana, not far from Baton Rouge. The artifacts included a depressing statue of a bent figure, “Uncle Jack,” the exemplary Negro slave; an overseer’s house; a slave collar; nineteenth-century carriages being buffed by an African American male; and some still-standing slave cabins, very neatly furnished. In Angelou’s view, the museum captured in its orderly presentations “the romance of slavery” while eliminating any real sense of the brutality, the beatings, the cramped hovels, the exhaustion, the hunger. Missing from the reconstructed scene was “our historical truth” (94), truth being just what a museum should uphold. Having visited this same historical site in 2012, I strongly agree with her conclusions.
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