Slam Queen vs. Inaugural Poet

The Village Voice ^ | 09/04/02 | Thulani Davis

[What Is Ain't]

Interesting battle.

[jackbill]

Sounds like one black illiterate talking about another black illiterate. I think that I'll just move on.

[Cicero]

Maya Angelou is a dreadful writer. There, I've said it!

[lelio]

and clumsy similes ("like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting times")
Jeez, just what is that sound? And what on earth would sound like it?

[MinuteGal]

I've been saying it since Angelou delivered her incoherent poem on January 20, 1993 at the Klinton inauguration ceremony in DC.

Her creation, "A Rock, A River, A Tree" was just another disjointed anti-war, sob-sister, touchy feely, aging hippie piece of regurgitation. Ya know, the type of blather Hillary and Bill would have orgasms over.

Good for you, but watch your back, Mizz Coleman. When you attack Bubbas's personal "poet laureate", you attack him and all his limousine liberal and artsy-fartsy pseudo-intellectual friends.

If Maya you roast
You'll be toast!

Leni

[RepoGirl]

Maya Angelou is a dreadful writer. There, I've said it!

I'd say as a poet, you're dead on. Maya Angelou is the WORST sort of sentimental, drippy crap. Gad, she is awful (or should that be spelled offal?)

However, I will maintain that her autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is a beautiful book. I can't say much about her other memoirs, I tried to read one and just couldn't get five pages in (perhaps that's critique enough).

Her poetry, I agree, is all kinds of bad.

[catonsville]

You are being too nice to Angelou.
She is worse than dreadful, she is embarassing.

[OldFriend]

Angelou is a vicous bigotted witch. When I learned that she had a collaboration with Hallmark I vowed to no longer buy any Hallmark products AND I HAVEN'T AND I WON'T.

[Soaring Feather]

Maya Angelou, was at best once upon a time a pretty good poet. Then as we all know Bill Clinton came along with his pandering to the Blacks and elevated Maya to a semi-goddess position. Oh,that horrid poem she wrote for Clinton's Inauguration! Oprah Winfrey couldn't give Maya enough face time on her TV show with the mentor thing.

So I would say some people are stuck with "Angelou of writing a book full of "empty phrases and sweeping generalities . . . dead metaphors ("sobbing embrace," "my heart fell in my chest") and clumsy similes ("like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting times"). And "Maya has obviously made her choice. If you come and you make even the racists feel comfortable and you aren't asking for any fundamental [social] change, you're going to get a fat check," she told the Voice.

IMHO, we have here at Free Republic, The Poetry Branch of Free Republic, far better poets than Maya Angelou, who can't hold a candle to anyone of the poets here!

She could have done so much to help Black people, now she panders with the others, shame, dirty shame. Money is green, is green, is green.

[Miss Marple]

Oh, I am SO glad you brought that up!

From the Hallmark website:

Between Friends "Coffee for Two" Gift Set

Nothing warms the heart like time spent sharing hopes, dreams, and laughter with a good friend. Each mug in this gift set features a friendship quote by Maya Angelou, who believes that friendship is one of life's many great and nurturing gifts. This gift set includes 2 bricks (2 oz. each) of gourmet vanilla hazelnut coffee from Cheryl&Co.

Two ceramic mugs, each 18 oz. Sentiments read:

Nobody can ever take a friend's place - nobody. Maya Angelou
Only equals can be friends. Maya Angelou

Mugs are dishwasher and microwave safe.

With compassion and candor, Maya Angelou's work speaks to the heart, inspiring us to love life, to persevere through its challenges, and to share our gifts with others.

© 2002 Maya Angelou

Price: $19.95 plus delivery cost

[Paul Atreides]

When I hear of stories such as this, I think of the liberals, pompously proclaiming that the Republican Party has a litmus test that must be passed, in order to be accepted.

[Timesink]

ping!

[Paul Atreides]

I'll never forget seeing Bubba, ever the panderer, wiping away a fake tear when she was blathering at the podium.

[nothingnew]

"Kill my landlord...Kill my landlord..."

Eddie Murphy(?) SNL too long ago to remember...

FMCDH

[BluesDuke]

Coleman has a similar beef with those academics who are reluctant to examine the craft of writers like Angelou. "I've been called into classrooms to say 'amen' to her as a poet," she said. "I hate having to come in and disillusion a classroom full of youth, and say, 'This is not poetry, or at least it isn't good poetry.' You're called in during Black History month, not to illuminate anything but really to say 'amen' to whatever is going on at the moment. Instead of archetypes, we're getting new stereotypes."

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for politically incorrect courage, Wanda Coleman would win it in a walk. For a woman whose primary reputation is supposed to be as a poet, Maya Angelou has achieved, really, nothing but one very good and at times haunting memoir (you know the one as well as I do) and a catalog of poetry that would be, in saner ages, dismissed as somewhere between glucose goo and cheap aspiring broadsides chopped into pseudoverse even in Rod McKuen's living room.

[Irene Adler]

"Angelou is a vicous bigotted witch. When I learned that she had a collaboration with Hallmark I vowed to no longer buy any Hallmark products AND I HAVEN'T AND I WON'T."

Thanks for the tip. Now, I won't, either.

[Bubba_Leroy]

"Do you want to make lots of money, drive a big pink Cadillac and kick ho's in the butt? Send for Velvet Jones' new book, How to Make Lots of Money, Drive a Big Pink Cadillac and Kick Ho's in the Butt."

Eddie Murphy, SNL, 1982.

[IronJack]

Maya Angelou's latest book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven,

The best-selling sequel to her popular "A Lunch Flung Up from My Stomach" and "My Spleen Thrown Up by Intense Vomiting." She calls this her "Reverse Peristalsis" series.

[nicollo]

...described by poet Marilyn Hacker as someone who "displays a verbal virtuosity and stylistic range that explodes/expands the merely linear, the simply narrative, the straightforwardly lyric, into a verbal mandala whose colors and textures spin off the page."

That'd play real well on a cereal box, or a hotel brochure. Can writing really do this? I need to change brands of hooch.

[And yes, I had to look that one up:

Man-da-la Oriental Art. a schematized representation
of the cosmos, chiefly characterized by a concentric
organization of geometric shapes, each of which
contains an image or attribute of a deity.

I get it: she writes in concentric metaphors. Dizzying.]