![]() Over the works of Maya Angelou, these loves are articulated and explicated. Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Imagesįor the self, for kin, for the other, for nations, and against time. HER CELEB FRIENDS ARE (PROBABLY) BETTER THAN YOURS ![]() The destiny in the distance for those before us is where we stand now, still looking at that horizon. ![]() Poetry is the vehicle to witness injustice, to live with it, reconcile it, advance from it without forgetting. The conditions of human history in relation to the images in nature that are both real and symbolic - part of the ongoing dance between myth, allegory, and truth in our existence. I will give you no hiding place down here. She demonstrated that truth in the first two stanzas of "On the Pulse of the Morning":īut today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, From the “Caged Bird” to “On the Pulse of Morning,” her ability to speak in the vernacular of the public without cliché illuminates the subtle prowess of poetics, and the larger human truth - that the poetics are there in any given form to illuminate the content at the center. Maya Angelou is a reminder, though, that poetry is an act of social anthropology, an act of public voice. There are books of poems and poets who require different muscles and organs to experience the singing. Poetry often gets a bad rap for being too difficult, too strange, too unrelatable. HER WORKS REMIND US THAT POETRY IS FOR ALL The world may never see freedom for all in a given moment, but the hope for it will always have a song. It is the singing we pass on, and the singing-the practice of it, the trill of suffering turned into song, that we give to others. And those to come, too, will be caged birds. In much of Angelou’s work, though, the “I” never appears. It enacts how poetry forces us to expand our capacity for empathy, for loving, and for suffering. One must assume the “I”-the intimacy of which leads us, always, to believe so deeply that the reader, writer, and speaker are one. Which we readers are manipulated into feeling, always, as autobiography. Her life as a young black woman coming into selfhood, civil rights in America, multiple marriages, apartheid South Africa, decolonization in Ghana, and the rest are reborn in every page of her seven autobiographies. How, on top of that, you turn it all into brilliant literature, for keeps, is another feat altogether. It’s one thing to be, to act, to perform at all moments of your life in its narrative and history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |