And if you're Black, it's almost as bad as the day the Great Mandela died.
Maya Angelou's caregiver found that she had died. Some caregiver. I haven't read the details, but apparently Angelou was well enough not to need constant attention. Or so she thought. Well, people do drop dead, and not just because somebody asks them to. Which I didn't. In this case. I just wished she'd shut the fuck up.
Maya Angelou was to poetry what the Whitman sampler is to candy. Maya Angelou's poetry was a lot like Bill Cosby's sweaters...sadly garish without any real distinguishing taste. At best, you might say her poetry was like Marc Chagall's paintings...gruesome, overdone, overbaked, very kitschy, but acceptable because her people, like Chagall's people, needed somebody to brag about. Although with Chagall, there actually were a lot better Jewish painters and artists to choose from. A lot.
Because she was Black, with a capitol B, Angelou was given the honor of reading a poem at Clinton's inaugural. Bear in mind, that NO POET except Robert Frost ever got such an honor. The idea of a "poet laureate" seemed to have been brought back just to accomodate Maya Angelou, Black Poet.
Let's be charitable; poetry went down the toilet with the death of Sandburg and Frost. It turned into an "anyone can play" field of pretenders and pseudo-intellectuals. There were a few exceptions...beat poets who were playful if not artistic (Ginsberg, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, Hollo). Sadly, poems, like modern art paintings, became like an elephant's anus, a stinky but dry area located SO high up as to be far above the ordinary person. So when the ordinary person reads bad poetry, or looks at a canvas of splotches or a soup can and says, "what assholes did this," the answer is, "oh, you're so BENEATH the assholes you don't recognize that this is really good shit..."
Pick up any issue of "The New Yorker," one of the few outlets that pays and prints poetry, and you'll read God-awful drivel, most of it making absolutely no sense. The major poetry magazines? The same. Early in my career, I published some poetry...sort of to my surprise, because my poems did make sense, and were pretty good...and most of what else was in each issue was mystifyingly obscure and worse...boring. Since I was usually paid in copies, or given what they called an "honorarium," (token payment that might be enough to buy dinner for me and a date), I moved on to more lucrative writing.
"They" (professors, intellectuals, clique-ridden editors) have taken all the joy out of poetry. They've taken all the challenge out of it, too, but then again, after e.e cummings and Vachel Lindsay and Ginsberg, what the fuck else could poets do except be kitschy like Angelou, or just be obscure and turn poetry into something akin to a bad Scrabble game.
America, for right reasons and wrong reasons, began to advance "colored people" in the 40's and 50's. Mostly it was up to white Liberals...to promote Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson and Leontyne Price...proving that blacks didn't just have to sing and dance (Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr.) to be considered artists. In the literary world, James Baldwin was tabbed for his guilt-producing books like "Blues For Mr. Charlie," and he was right on the shelf with the white Mr. Griffin's "Black Like Me," an expose of cruel (and I'm not being sarcastic) white society in the South.
So how about the white poetry world? Let's have some color. Let's have a Negro. Maya Angelou was a perfect choice with her Miriam Makeba hats and dignified scowl. That she had some skills, corny as they could sometimes be, helped her become one of the country's most respected black females (till Oprah came along).
No kidding...before Oprah and her sad-but-uplifting story of a bad childhood and all the rest of it, there was Maya Angelou, who began writing autobiographies about herself and setting herself up to be a perfect example of the long-suffering and now triumphant African-American. A highlight for readers, was her recollection of being raped at the age of eight, and then going mute for five years. Little Marguerite Ann Johnson grew up to have a child at 17, take menial jobs from streetcar conductor to prostitute to fry cook, and became just another song-and-dance Negro (easily cast in any production of "Porgy and Bess"). In an age of "exotica," and albums by Yma Sumac and others, the ex-Johnson, now MAYA ANGELOU, put out a record called "Miss Calypso," and continued her show biz career through the 50's.
She wrote as well, and was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild and eventually had her big break in the Civil Rights late 60's, when she published her first autobiography, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," and became the darling of the respect-and-feel-sorry-for-her white community. She also sold to the small but growing black community that looked for their own literary culture figures and resented the notion, still gruesomely popular, that Negroes did not read. Or know how to read. Maya Angelou became the country's most visible black female writer. Then she started tossing "poetry" around and that was swallowed, too...although some critics stood firm that her autobiographies were ok but her poetry wasn't. But even a best-selling writer isn't that secure financially, so she found her way into Academia and happily accepted a lifetime position at Wake Forest University...teaching, lecturing, and of course writing more and more poetry...which sure as hell is less time-consuming than novels.
It's really the poetry that's led to this screed. Writing self-serving autobiographies that made her a legend in her own time...fine...that's an American tradition. And people love sad stories of misery and triumph. But the damn poetry. Damn! And it's that doggerel, the platitude-filled sappy misuse of easy and corny symbolism about trees and rivers...that people have been simpering about on Twitter and Facebook and in the press. Oh, that uplifting poetry...more enduring than McKuen and more profound than Gibran...
No doubt in the days ahead, America will raise the bar in dutifully mourning the Greatest Poet of the Past 50 years, and daring anyone to say otherwise. "She, like Jackie Robinson, broke the color line, and fought the good fight, and paid the price..." Sure. Like Michael Sam broke the "hetero line" in the NFL. No, he did it because he was adequate, and the St. Louis team owner, not gay, thought it would be a Liberal thing to do and the right to do, and it would get him a lot of publicity. What I'm saying is that all the screaming and knocking on the door would have done Jackie and Maya and Michael no good at all, if people were still backward and racist and refusing to open the door. Whites opened the door. Carrie Nation broke down doors with an ax...Maya didn't. Malcolm X didn't even do that.
Why is it nobody reveres Branch Rickey? This was a white fat cat (literally) who decided he'd risk the ire of ignorant fans by putting a black guy on his wonderful Brooklyn Dodgers. HE broke the color line as much as Jackie Robinson did. But let's not go there, black girlfriend...
Now back to THIS black girlfriend.
Maya's most poetic line might be the title of her book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." It's right up there with such profundity as "Arms too short to box with God." But it's not terrible. There's little of that kind of thought or original symbolism in the irritating inaugural poem/screed/editorial that all the simpering Liberals stood around nodding their solemn heads to on a cold day in Washington, D.C. This...IS her most famous poem! She even won a Grammy Award for her recitation.
And it's so bad. SO bad.
PS, when I was first eligible to vote, I registered as a Liberal. As much as I make fun of some of their stereotypical wimpiness, I still identify with Liberals, over the tea party and Limbaugh and other idiots. But that doesn't mean I buy at the Liberal Kool-Aid counter, and accept bad taste and watered down foolishness all the time, including the notion that Maya Angelou is any kind of great poet.
You can judge for yourself.
Here's the "GREAT" poem:
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words
v
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
It says come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers--desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot ...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours--your Passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, and into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
It's possible "Good morning" was just her way of getting off stage, and isn't the end of the poem. I really couldn't care less.
Come on:
"The singing River and the wise Rock..." that's like 3rd rate Shel Silverstein.
Some will excuse some of this utter shit as "African" shaman-wisdom-primitive-spirituality, and not hooey. These are the simps who insist that childish pottery from Native Americans is art...because Native Americans did it. If an elementary school kid did it...it would be, "Why don't you learn to paint?" Same way we marvel at Egyptian art where every man and woman has two left feet and there's no sense of three dimensions. Christ, there's also a bad excuse for idiots who can't paint...the term being "Folk Art" or "Naive Art" or whatever...like shitty singers could pretend they were "New Wave." Mediocrity has many names, doesn't it?
You can just imagine some witless school teacher saying, "Now children, did you notice how Maya brought rhythm to the poem by suddenly rhyming a few lines? Jew and Sioux?" "Yes teacher. So why didn't she rhyme the whole thing?" "Because...she's a genius and is combining different forms of poetry in this one awesome work." "Teacher, do YOU write poetry, and do you have any idea what your talking about or why you're making excuses for a mediocre half-editorial half-children's book loaded with platitudes that would be irritating on a MEME?"
The bottom line is that nobody cares about this poem or reads it or celebrates it as they do with the truly classic poems, or even silly little experiments like Sandburg's "The Fog." Sandburg's "Chicago" is more revered, even if people get fed up after the first 8 lines.
It's only in the now Black-dominated public schools that a few weary old white teachers and a huge number of semi-literate Black and Latino ones, force kids to read Maya Angelou, and urge them to be just like her, and "Give birth again to the dream."
Fortunately that dream won't happen. We don't need another Maya Angelou. The point's been made. Poetry is awful and dated and boring and pretentious and now that we have equality and have carved Maya Angelou's visage onto the ivory tusk of "great American poets," we can all go back to listening to rap.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.