The Organic Life of Birds: Maya Angelou 1928-2014

 Photo by Chester Higgins, Jr.

I***** I asked my neighbor and friend in Somerville, Mass., the acclaimed poet Afaa Michael Weaver to write a piece about the the late Maya Angelou. Weaver, a journalist back in the day in his native Baltimore came through right on deadline. Weaver recently won the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and won a Pushcart Prize for his work in  Ibbetson Street, a Somerville-based literary journal. Weaver is a professor of English at Simmons College in Boston.

The Organic Life of Birds

Maya Angelou

1928-2014

                                                                                                                        —- by Afaa Michael Weaver

            On May 28th, Dr. Maya Angelou made her transition.  She was eighty-six years old.  Poetry was her first love as a writer.  Her life as an artist and activist embodied some of the most significant events in world history during the twentieth century.  She befriended James Baldwin in France, worked for Dr. Martin Luther King, met Malcolm X, lived in Africa, had an enduring friendship with Nelson Mandela, and more.        She inspired several generations of people.

            Her fame as a writer took hold with her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” where she revealed a life filled with a wellspring of energy rooted in the culture and traditions of African Americans.  It was published in 1969, the year of her forty-first birthday, and in the recounting of her life she revealed having been abused as a seven year old, a child barely beyond her formative years.  After her abuse she was a “voluntary mute” for seven years, a period of silence during which she said she wrote.  She wrote and she listened.  When she began to speak again, she had connected to the internal power that would make her a figure on the world stage. 

            Maya Angelou broke an unwritten code for black Americans, namely that child sexual abuse was seldom discussed, certainly not outside the black community.  Much of that has to to with the necessary coping strategies of a world built in segregation, but what makes her story and her life especially remarkable is that her healing took place within the tradition of her culture.  She held onto the truthfulness of a love and spirituality carved in the rough terrains of slavery and its aftermath.  It is that energy that made her a humanistic icon for many people.

            She was also a dancer, singer, actor, an film director.  She lived with the dynamic energy of a well-rounded artist.  As director of the 1998 film Down in the Delta, she gave the gift of her organic wisdom, her vision of African American culture through the prism of her own experiences.  In the film a black family with roots in Mississippi find that their southern home is their healing place, the place where they can retreat and draw the sustaining power of the community, its love and its meaning.  A silver candelabra is the family heirloom, passed down from slavery when the patriarch of the family was sold in exchange for it.  After the Civil War his son took it in remembrance of his father who was sold away.  The candelabra is an icon to mark the miracle of survival much like the miracle of Angelou’s own recovery from abuse in the context of a love she maintained for her family and culture.  In that she found a power.

            I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the year immediately after it was published.  I read it alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  The two books were the lenses that helped me envision myself as a black man and a poet.  In the wake of my own recovery from having been abused as a child, I look back at Dr. Angelou’s autobiography and remember how deeply I was moved.  The secret of her incredible spirit and presence was in her faith in African American culture, in her own people and emanating outward from there to the whole world. 

            Maya Angelou walked in the world without apologizing for her identity or life as a black woman, and that is, I believe, a lesson for anyone.  She walked with an openness that allowed her to see herself in Shakespeare, and to love his art as her own.  She treasured the fact of being able to be touched in the spirit by someone so far from her, and in her life she did the same for people born in cultural places so far from her own.

            She so much loved the poem “Sympathy,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar that she applied it to the title of her first autobiography.  The poem takes on the subject of confinement and freedom, and so I close with her own lovely and inspiring poem about how the captivity of a bird and its longing for freedom is so much of what life is about for everyone. 

Caged Bird

            by Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind  

and floats downstream  

till the current ends

and dips his wing

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and  

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings  

with a fearful trill  

of things unknown  

but longed for still  

and his tune is heard  

on the distant hill  

for the caged bird  

sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams  

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream  

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied  

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings  

with a fearful trill  

of things unknown  

but longed for still  

and his tune is heard  

on the distant hill  

for the caged bird  

sings of freedom.

after that By Kathleen Aguero

after that
    By Kathleen Aguero
    Tiger Bark Press
    Rochester, NY
    75 Pages

Review by Myles Gordon

    Kathleen Aguero’s exquisite collection, after that, begins with a devastating punch: a dozen poems focused on a mother’s dementia and eventual death. The pieces are unflinching, forcing the reader into the illness’s visceral circle of despair.

    When she chews the napkin mistaking it for hors d’oevre,
    when she eats the teabag that rests by the side of her cup,
    I want to be the one to gently take the plate away,
    to give her something tastier for lunch…

begins “Leftovers,” capturing the stark, physical reality of the psyche’s diminishing. The title poem, “after that,” presents a laundry list of worsening symptoms, ending with the knock-out:

    She ripped her good dress into pieces
    and cut her father’s photograph in half.
    We didn’t know how to think of her after that.

So powerful is this opening series, one wonders how to approach a book that has hit its emotional peak in its first fifteen pages – the rest of the poems musings on more standard fair such as motherhood, growing up and literally wrestling life’s mysteries in a section devoted to pubescent sleuth, Nancy Drew. But that’s precisely the genius and point of the book: we can’t pick and choose when life’s devastations will occur, and often have to maneuver through the relatively mundane aspects of our experiences “after that.”
    The book, then, covers largely common, and shared experience. It succeeds because of Aguero’s facility with the language. There are no wasted words, and conversely no lines thirsty for nourishment. Her delightful “Aubade” wakes readers to a magical, lyrical landscape of a morning.

    Sheen of wet sand,
    smooth back of a whale the world rests on.

    Pearl gray, blue gray,
    the mauve tinged gray east.

    Gray thread of bird song
    spinning clouds overhead

    where the mass, gray underside
    of a vast bouquet of flowering white…

This is fine free verse, tinged with an almost Zen-like Asian descriptiveness. Many of the poems spring at us like lyrical gifts, as in the start of “Landscapes.”

    How pleasant to imagine a figure in a Chinese scroll
    spending a summer’s afternoon among the mountains and mists.
    I could be the man standing in a boat dwarfed by the cliff,
    my large hat flapping as I let down my net…

    This dreaminess isn’t just confined to descriptions of far-off vistas. It penetrates close to the heart. In “Inward Dive,” the protagonist is a mom at her son’s diving meet. Watching him test the board with a few mild bounces she must now prepare herself for the part of the launch for which she’s never prepared: the diver’s need to descend with his head just inches from the board, to receive the highest total of points. But, as always, she can’t look, imagining the worst:

    In that instant I could glimpse
    the soft moon of your face
    just before it goes under, but with eyes closed
    I see you unconscious, bloody, in the water.

    That mother’s protectiveness lurks everywhere in the collection. In “Bird Seed,” birds “contra dance” on a table that serves as a feeder, angling position for scattered seeds. Soon, the scene turns grim as two birds

            …face off.
    She’s standing her ground
    though that jay must seem big as Aeneas
    who said to Achilles:
    Our parents – one pair or the other will mourn
    a dear son today…

Then the conceit is lifted. The poem pulls back to reveal a literature professor who has just learned that one of her students, a member of the military, has just been called up to serve in a war overseas.  The professor impotently muses:

    Hey! We have a syllabus!
    I wanted to shout, flapping
    like that small bird at the feeder.

One can almost see her, like a slow pull back in a film, grow smaller and less significant as the student departs to a dangerous, uncertain future.
    Perhaps this realization of lack of control leads the book to its second, and final section: twenty poems focused on pre teen girls’ detective hero, Nancy Drew. Life, by nature, can often be unbearable, and eminently unsolvable, but maybe Nancy Drew can set things right. In “Mystery Of The Girl Sleuth, a poem written on Drew’s fiftieth birthday,” a confident tone acknowledges the mystery, though painful to tackle, can be figured out:

    Although you wish you’d never started on this quest
    for the missing map, you must follow it
    to the message in the hollow oak, across
    the haunted bridge to face the wooden lady
    and the statue whispering what you do not
    want to hear.

But as the sequence continues, the pain remains, but the confidence diminishes. Toward the end, the book comes full circle, as Nancy Drew is drawn into the riddle of a mother’s dementia, in “The Case Of The Impersonator.”

    Another clue –
    I tell her I want to talk
    about something important.
    Sex? she snickers. My mother
    never used that word with me.
    But when I say, Going to the doctor,
    no, she snaps, in my mother’s voice.

Sadly, this is a mystery that neither Nancy Drew, nor the poet, can solve. A beloved mother sinks into dementia before diminishing into death, and, “after that,” she must still live the life that unfolds.




Myles Gordon is author of Inside The Splintered Wood (Tebot Bach), and the upcoming Until It Does Us In (Cervena Barva)

What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell

Author Bonnie ZoBell

What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell ( Press 53 Winston-Salem, NC)  $17.95

Review by Doug Holder

The North Park section of San Diego, the setting for Bonnie ZoBell’s novella and collection of short stories titled: What Happened Here  is not unlike Somerville, Mass. It is an artsy, offbeat section of the city that like our town (Until gentrification digs its claws in) houses stories about artists, beautiful losers, misfits, teachers, and other eclectic types. But unlike our burg these people live in the shadow of the 1978 airline crash that decimated the city. I noticed that the title What Happened Here doesn’t have a question mark. This may be true because the denizens of this neck of the woods are painfully aware of their tragic history. In one harrowing passage in the title novella, Lenora, the narrator of the story, tells us about the destruction and carnage:

“ A few neighbors who happened to look up when they heard a loud crunching sound and saw the out-of-control jet careening to the right, fire and smoke shooting out from behind before the plane slammed into the earth at 300 miles per hour just behind my house. The explosion was instantaneous—an enormous fireball whooshed into the sky, a mushroom of smoke and debris. Scraps of clothing leaped onto telephone poles, body parts fell on roofs, tray tables scattered across driveways. Airplane seats landed on front lawns, arms and legs descended on patios, and a torso fell through the windshield of a moving vehicle.”

Behind this backdrop of tragedy—the small everyday struggles of ordinary folks continue.  The neighborhood and its people slowly heal, but the open wound is just beneath the scab. Having worked as a mental health worker at McLean Hospital (Outside of Boston) for the past 30 years or so I admired the way ZoBell portrayed John, Lenora’s husband—a manic depressive journalist deeply mired in a clinical funk as he researches the disaster for the newspaper he writes for. ZoBell has Lenora describe the cycling down of her husband with clinical and emotional acuity:

“… the monster had swallowed my husband whole. He couldn’t sleep, concentrate, get food down, remember, or forget. When we went out to dinner, he didn’t speak. I dragged him to a play, but he couldn’t follow the plot….He kicked one of the dogs. Suddenly he slept thirty-six hours straight…

He took solitary walks around North Park to get his endorphins going. ‘It’s weird,’ he told me when he got back. ‘It’s like I can’t tell the difference between me and the outside world, like the same problems out on the street are going on inside me. A spiraling vessel shrieks to the ground, the trees are burning, fruit sizzles on the branches. Hands are hanging from telephone poles… the smell, faces missing, the earth churning like an earthquake. I can’t tell whether I’m awake or in a dream.”

Throughout the novella ZoBell has fully fleshed characters in a fully fleshed neighborhood striving to find a modicum of peace.

One of the short stories that I thought was beautifully rendered was “Sea Life.” Here we have Sean, a young man newly graduated from college and decidedly adrift. Again with ZoBell’s genius for setting, she has her character adrift at sea, on a surfboard, guided spiritually by a school of dolphins. If we are aware—nature signals us all the time—but we have to unplug our earphones, all the complicated wires, and look, listen and feel. And in this story the dolphins seem to signal something about simplicity, and following one’s own path. Here Sean describes a mother dolphin and her calf as they follow him and offer him insight and a bigger picture of the world than he can see now with his tunnel vision:

“She glides away, then back—and the calf does, too, in concert. Like any mother in the wild, whenever her calf drifts too close to Sean, she shepherds him away. But then she turns back and clacks and tattles and clicks, making creaking sounds, whistles. Every time her head surfaces and he can’t see, she’s got that dopey smile on. Guiless. Ridiculous. Sincere.

He feels honored, a diplomat to the sea. He knows that this isn’t common, that dolphins don’t careen up to human beings to visit unless they feel utterly safe. The dolphin must know he’s a good person, that he only wants peace. Simplicity, Freedom. He reaches his palms into the liquid velvet, launches himself and his board further away from what he knows, toward the horizon, realizing this dolphin is less menacing than many of the humans he knows.”

I think ZoBell is a poet of sorts of her city—the common man and the yin and yang of existence.

Highly Recommended.

Susan Tepper: A writer with one foot in New York City and the other in Somerville, Mass.

Susan Tepper

By Doug Holder


I have known Susan Tepper for a number of years now, and she has not slowed down an iota. She is a consummate New Yorker--she moves fast, talks fast and thinks on her feet. I have read for her at the KGB FIZZ series in the lower east side of NYC, have been on a small press panel she organized for a literary festival at Hunter College and I have published her poetry in The Somerville Times and the Ibbetson Street magazine. Tepper will be in Somerville, Monday June 16 7PM, to read from her latest book The Merrill Diaries, which is a novel told in stories that link one to the next. She will be reading in Gloria Mindock's Cervena Barva Press Art Space located in the Somerville Arts Armory building. It's a gathering of writers and poets published by the Cervena Barva Press and the MadHat Press.



Hundreds of Tepper's stories, poems, essays and interviews appear worldwide in print journals and online venues. Her bi-monthly MONDAY CHAT Interview column ran on the Fictionaut blog for more than a year and is archived on that site. Tepper is host of the reading series FIZZ at KGB Bar in New York City. She has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize. Deer, the title story of her collection, was nominated for NPR Selected Shorts. Her novel WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G (with Gary Percesepe) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Doug Holder: Can you give me a brief history of your experience in Somerville? 

Susan Tepper:  My first experience of Somerville was several years ago when my collection ‘Deer & Other Stories’ came out from Wilderness House Press which is located in northern MA.  I had been invited to do a TV spot in Somerville with a certain Doug Holder(!)  I found Somerville to be diverse and charming.  After the TV interview, a small group of us had a lovely dinner outdoors (I believe you had the salmon, Doug).  I always remember what people eat.  It’s bizarre.  I also remember it was a balmy night in early fall.  My 3 city MA book tour.  You try and cram in as much as possible since you are paying for hotel nights.  I also taught a fiction workshop at Grub Street in Boston which was delightful, and I read at Four Stories Reading Series in Cambridge.  It was a whirlwind few days in MA!

DH: How did your life journey lead to writing?

ST: Becoming a writer was not in my game plan.  I’d been an actress since I was seventeen, and that was my primary focus.  To make money I sang with the bands, any gig I could land.  Six sets a night was standard.  Hard times require hard measures (or some such thing).  I was young and that made all the difference.  I didn’t start to write until I hit forty.  I wrote a story, took it to The New School and watched it get massacred.  Then the teacher told me it was a good story and that I should keep writing.  Green light!  I was waiting for something new and there it was.  That class was life-changing.  I became a writer.

DH: Can you describe your involvement with Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva Press? 

ST: Gloria published my poetry chapbook Blue Edge, as well as a novel I co-wrote with Gary Percesepe called What May Have Been, which traces a fictional account of a love affair between the surrealist painter Jackson Pollock and a made-up young woman.  Gloria and I became great friends and I was her assistant editor at the Istanbul Literary Review for a few years.

As for my current book The Merrill Diaries, which I’ll be reading from, that was published by Pure Slush Books http://pureslush.webs.com/atasteofmerrill.htm  out of Australia.  The novel begins in 1976, at the end of the Vietnam War.  I grew up during those years, and the time period, though tumultuous, was also one of great personal expansion and change for many.  It fascinates me to think back on those days.  The Merrill Diaries spans ten years and follows the main character, Merrill, over two continents, two marriages, and quite a few quirky relationships.  Merrill, like me, is a traveler.  Life for her is about seeing and acquiring new adventures. 

DH: Is there a recurrent theme in your work?

ST: A recurrent theme in my work is the search for love.  I find love to be mostly elusive.  Not just romantic love, but familial love, friend love, all of it is transitory in my experience.  It’s around for a while then it can do all sorts of unpredictable things.  It can hide like a bear in a cave, or take a long walk off a short pier.  In essence, love is not a static thing.  Love cannot be depended upon to bring you happiness.  You have to get that on your own.  And so it comes into my prose and poetry with regularity.  I examine love as if I was a scientist and it was a smear on a slide. 

DH: Do you think women writers still get the shaft in the literary world?

ST;  There is a lot of controversy over male vs female writers, who gets which prizes, which gender is favored over which.  I don’t buy into that.  If you write a really good story or book that takes risks, you will get it published and possibly even win a prize.  Or at least be nominated for one.  A lot of women writers feel the men are being favored.  I don’t agree.  I conduct author/book interviews and I will be dead on honest here when I say that I have a hard time finding really good novels written by contemporary women authors.  The ‘mommy books’ that are popular amongst the 40-something readers leave me cold.  I end up mostly interviewing women about their story collections or poetry books (I can feel the rotten tomatoes being hurled).  But, seriously, there is a reason certain books get prizes and nominations.  Women need to break out of traditional themes and go where the men go.  Risk Risk Risk.  An example of a fabulous woman novelist is the late Susan Fromberg Schaeffer who wrote the Vietnam book ‘Buffalo Afternoon’.  Now there was a woman who understood risk in writing.  I think it’s the best book ever written about the Vietnam War.  And by a woman who never served as a soldier!

For more information about the reading go to:Cervena Barva Press