Tuesday, May 04, 1999
Angelou extols power of poetry
Says verse can help summon courage
BY PERRY BROTHERS
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Like warmed maple syrup, Maya Angelou's voice oozed across the Aronoff Center for the Arts on Monday night, filling that space with her love for life and her passion for the poetry that taught her to “run on/see what the end is gonna be.”
Ms. Angelou — poet, professor, screenwriter, director, actor — walked onto the Procter & Gamble Hall stage to a standing ovation at the sold-out final presentation in The Cincinnati Enquirer's “Unique Lives & Experiences” Women's Lecture Series.
She received another standing ovation from the crowd of 2,700 after she used pieces of song and poetry — her own and others' — to quilt a performance about finding the courage to push on when fear, pain and life's many obstacles block the way.
“There is in each of us, the ability to press ourselves beyond what we believe we can do,” she said. “Poetry is a piece of the survival apparatus.”
Saving the spirit
Slipping verses of a 19th-century slave song into her performance, Ms. Angelou, 71, illustrated how those who shun poetry should understand that song is poetry. And that poetry, those songs, saved the spirit of African slaves.
I'm gonna run on
See what the end is gonna be
Won't turn back no
I open my life to the Lord
And I won't turn back no
All writers speak of finding their voice. Ms. Angelou did so, literally, through poetry.
As a child shuttled between St. Louis and Stamps, Ark., she was in love with the words of Langston Hughes, Edgar Allen Poe and William Shakespeare. (She had 60 of his sonnets memorized by age 12.)
But she had been raped by her mother's boyfriend as a young girl. She told her brother the name of the man, who was then arrested. He spent a night in jail and then later was found dead on the streets of St. Louis, apparently kicked to death, Ms. Angelou said.
“I thought my voice had killed the man,” she said. “So I refused to speak.”
Years later, she was living with her grandmother, “Mama,” and her Uncle Willie in Stamps. Mama advocated her love of poetry.
“"Sister,'” Mama had told her, “"poetry will put the starch in your backbone.'” But another woman in town pushed the 12-year-old to stop her self-induced silence. For six months the woman pressed her, saying “"You will never love poetry until you speak it.'”
“I found that I had left my voice,” Ms. Angelou said.
Facing fears
Thus, she began a life of writing and speaking that has led to lectures and poetry readings across the globe, including a reading of her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the 1993 inauguration of President Clinton.
Before she came to Cincinnati, illness caused her to cancel some of her speaking engagements with the Women's Lecture Series tour, which is held annually in a dozen North American cities with alternating female speakers.
Ms. Angelou said when she was in the hospital with pneumonia last week, she had to call again on poetry to get back on her feet.
“I wanted to come, but I had to call up some courage,” she said.
This time, she called on early 20th-century poet Edna St. Vincent Millay's verse:
I will die but that is all I will do for death.
“I call on that poem whenever I have to face something that I am fearful of,” Ms. Angelou said.
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