Maya Angelou in 1993 (Photo By Clinton Library – William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67072902)

Dear Readers, believe it or not I read the first book of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’  not  long after it had been published in 1969, so I was only about 9 years old myself. It tells of Angelou’s childhood, which included rape and a period during her adolescence when she was electively mute, following the murder of the man who raped her. Strong stuff for a child, but I was I loved it much more than most of my other reading material (‘1984’ by George Orwell, for example). She filled me full of hope, and a sense that troubles would come, but could be overcome.

In all there are seven volumes of autobiography, and she needed it because she had an extraordinary life: Wikipedia tries to sum it up with:

“She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership Conference coordinator, and correspondent in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. Angelou was also an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Angelou was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.”

I am particularly interested, however, in her writing routine, which makes me scratch my head about my own. Clearly I need to go to bed with a bottle of sherry, instead of hunching over my laptop.

Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same “writing ritual”for many years. She would wake early in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Bible, and would leave by the early afternoon. She would average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.She went through this process to “enchant” herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, “relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang“. She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences such as her rape in Caged Bird, to “tell the human truth”about her life. She was quoted as saying: “The way I deal with any pain is to admit it – let it come.” Angelou stated that she played cards to get to that place of enchantment and to access her memories more effectively. She said, “It may take an hour to get into it, but once I’m in it—ha! It’s so delicious!” She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in “telling the truth”.

If you haven’t read any of Angelou’s books, I would highly recommend them – she has a very distinctive voice and nobody can tell a story better than she does. But for me, there’s something about ‘Still I Rise’ (which I blogged about yesterday), and one of my poetry-loving readers, sllgatsby (thank you!) pointed me towards this short video of her reading her poem. There is such power in it, and I suspect that’s what many of us need as the world goes to hell in a handbasket. See what you think. If you don’t watch anything  else today, make some time to watch this.