This obit is cynical and funny and nasty, and totally inappropriate for the death of a national treasure, which naturally makes it my kind of article.
But as much as I enjoy a bad attitude expressed well, I don't really feel the same way about Maya.
Oh, yeah, she didn't have the originality and scholarship of Keats or Blake or T.S. Eliot, and maybe she was overrated, but her heart was generous, and she was pretty much the only living poet that anyone can name. The author makes her sound like a female Rod McKuen, but I would compare her instead to Robert Frost. Like Frost, she wrote in the voice of the people and accomplished the unlikely feat of keeping everyday Americans aware of poetry for a while. Maybe that's an achievement that will pay some dividends in the future, when somebody inspired by Maya becomes the next Dante.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Maya Angelou died today
Maya Angelou died today
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Personally, I think if you stripped her poetry of her voice and her image, it would be revealed as not worthy of comparison to the works of the master, McKuen. Even "The Simpsons" pointed out how easy she is to parody. I agree with this writer about her, but I admit it's not a very polite time to bring it up. So I'll just refer you to the write-up of the Clinton Inaugural in the American Spectator in 1992, when R. Emmett Terrell was the only writer who didn't genuflect to Maya Angelou, but instead pointed out how blindingly awful and pedestrian her poem was.
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