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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
medium-paced
no
trumpets gloried
prophecies of fabled fame.
yet harmonies waited in her stiff throat. New notes
lay expectant on her stilled tongue
Failure?
I'm not ashamed to tell it,
I never learned to spell it.
Not failure.
Clarity and exactness in simplicity / clear distinct triad sections (preferred the honesty and ominous nature of Travelling) / loved Phenomenal Woman but feels gender essentialist / incredibly lyrical - structured refrains mimicking songwriting / mantras, levity, cheekiness and lightness in Section 3 / precise structure - predictable but comforting
Fav poems: Willie; To Beat the Child was Bad Enough; Kin; Still I Rise; Life Doesn't Frighten Me
fast-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
hopeful
informative
inspiring
relaxing
medium-paced
I already find myself going back to certain poems, wanting to feel them again; there’s still so much to sit with and understand better, but that’s literally ig the point of poetry..
This collection includes poems that span a life, from youthful exuberance to age-old weariness and even despair - throughout though Maya Angelou's unceasing love of language shines through, she glories in using the perfect uncommon word alongside the perfect common parlance, to great effect.
I bought this book new in 1988 and have kept it with me through many changes of life, it is short but mighty, and I feel her pain, her joy, her fatigue, her anger still in its pages.
I bought this book new in 1988 and have kept it with me through many changes of life, it is short but mighty, and I feel her pain, her joy, her fatigue, her anger still in its pages.
The first book of poetry I've actually read, that being a shameful blind spot in my reading repertoire. I breezed through the pages in one sitting, which may feel impertinent—but so would anything, and more so the performative opposite of going 'hrmm' at the end of each stanza; I can think and read… simultaneously! Maybe drawing such a strong line between poetry and prose is a nonsense categorisation issue and clearly there exist many works which trivialise this distinction. Nevertheless there is a difference in form/convention which must account for why people read stories much more willingly than they engage in the same even abstracted slightly. The catalyst of narrative engages the public more than does metaphor and appreciation of form in themselves; a comparison could be drawn to the other non-visual art, music, where love of tunes dictate that people enjoy songs a lot more than symphonies. And, even where philistines such as myself endeavour to read poetry or listen to symphonies, they look foremost for something narrative or tuneful rather than a more complete understanding of the structural devices. (And even acknowledging this, when reviewing a book I focus almost solely on plot and subtext. I suppose there would be something ironic about criticising prose using poor prose; luckily film and music criticism does not require meeting the artist at their own terms, as it were.)
Connotations are a principal barrier. Poetry—again, like classical music—is perceived as highbrow and therefore weighty and requiring thought and expertise. Reading an anthology book can be like walking around a museum: peering and pondering, sometimes smiling and often shrugging. Which is okay! Trite as it is, one's emotional experience should be valued first, and indeed sold as an entry-point into deeper appreciation before any notion of aesthetics or artistic movements and the like need even be considered. But I risk digressing further than I have already into a treatise on Absorbing Fine Art. The fact remains that infinitely more people listen to Bob Dylan than read Dylan Thomas (say). And while the obvious response to this is that the first Dylan isn't poetry—which is well and true, in that his singing makes at least half of the artistry—perhaps it indicates a level of abstraction in the purest written word which the spoken word alleviates. The historical record of poetry, through Homer etc., is profoundly tied to music, after all. Yet this reverts to prior discussion of lacking 'deeper understanding': through performance the architecture of the language and punctuation (etc.) is lost to the euphemism chosen by the performer. For this reason the poetry of pop-music lyricism differs clearly from traditionally written poetry.
(I'd like to interject at this point and say that perhaps Bob Dylan isn't all that popular anymore. Why is it that people don't read poetry? Well, they do; maybe the question really being asked is, Why has the poetry people actually read regressed from Allen Ginsberg to Rupi Kaur (to make an example of the span of Bob's career)? Answers on a postcard.)
Anyway. While the above ramblings related to the (unformed, unoriginal) thoughts I've been processing on poetry and wider arts, it should be pertinent that I mention at last the spoken word and musicality vis-à-vis Maya Angelou's poetry in particular. Because of her particular vernacular and sense for meter and rhyme, born of a rich cultural heritage, much of her work leaps off the page—or out the head—with the sense that it should be preened, hushed, or shouted; as much as the excellence of "Phenomenal Woman" speaks for itself, I would rather that she spoke for it rather than, implicitly, myself as reader. (I was going to quip that naturally I picked for my first poetry book a collection of protests and celebrations pitched specifically through the lens of a civil-rights activist/feminist writer, a woman of colour; me, a white man—you get it, it's cheap. But of course one of the appraisals on the back cover was a quote from 'President Bill Clinton'!) Angelou's writing breathes her voice, and her voice aloud elevates her writing. Musicality is the right word, actually: Angelou was previously a calypso nightclub singer and toured with Porgy and Bess in Europe, 1954-55, as Ruby. (She appears in Preminger's 1959 film adaptation, too.) This audible vivacity, I think, accounts for why she is among the only truly popular post-war poets. Which should be celebrated in vacuo—an avenue into what poetry can do, and crucially worthy in itself!
Forgive the haranguing. TL;DR I liked it quite fine. "Through the Inner City to the Suburbs" was probably my favourite, for what it's worth. Also the poem that praises hot dogs.
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
"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."
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise."