In the Name of Maya Angelou

The Editors’ Blog occasionally features online exclusives by Poetry’s contributors. This installment comes from Rachel Jamison Webster, whose poems recently appeared in our March 2013 issue. Past exclusives can be found here.

Maya Angelou was the first poet who taught me to acknowledge the ancestors. When she read her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning,” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, she went back to the very beginning of this continent, incanting the names of the Apache, the Seneca, the Cherokee, the Ashanit, the Yorubu, the Kru, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot. Later, in an interview about that day, she said could feel the ancestors were there with her on stage, that the place felt crowded with them.

I was eighteen years old and a poet myself, watching the inauguration on TV of the first president I had voted for. “Our inauguration,” Bill Clinton said when he referred to it in those years, suggesting his wife as an equal partner in a way that the world was not ready to hear. The only other poet ever to read at a Presidential inauguration had been Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s, years before I was born. Frost had lost sight of his page in the glare of the sun and had to recite what he remembered of his poem. “The land was ours before we were the land’s,” he began—a sentence that, though lovely in its repetitions, has always seemed to me backward in its meaning, a suggestion of Manifest Destiny in a poem whose central repetition is “possession,” a staking of ownership over the continent that we depend upon to feed us.

I see now that Maya Angelou’s inauguration poem, “On the Pulse of the Morning,” could be read as a response to Frost’s poem, “The Gift Outright,” but on that day in 1993, I was just happy to see a powerful black woman take the stage. I could hardly believe her courage. She had acknowledged the others within and behind us. She had named the feeling that, to me, is poetry, that sense that we are not just ourselves but a fountainhead of those who came before, a brief suspended cresting before we split and spawn into the myriad drops of humanity that will come after. It would be years before I’d have my own words for it, but it had already been my experience that to be a poet is to have a long sense of time, to see patterns in the past, present, future. It is to hear echoes in the words and lines, as well as in the humanity of others, including those who have passed on but are present as feelings or guiding spirits.

Maya Angelou became her own kind of guiding spirit this August when Apple released an ad featuring her voice reading her poem “The Human Family.” The poem repeats the lines, “We are more alike, my friend, than we are unalike,” over a series of portraits shot on an iPhone 6. It aired during the 2016 Summer Olympics and seemed the one advertisement that captured the spirit of that occasion amid reports of pollution, prevarication, and corruption in Rio. But where was Maya Angelou’s name? Her voice was not attached to her life or body of work, so it echoed out over the air as if the corporate entity of Apple had come up with such a succinct and human sentiment.

That was not the voice of a corporation. It was the voice of a woman, filtered through the body of a life bravely lived, and so the ad fell short in its declarations of humanity as it made the old mistake of exploitation. It also became a reminder of a particular danger of our time—that we give up our humanity to corporations, and in doing so, we forget what humanity really means. Maya Angelou, who died in 2014, was one of those rare poets who never forgot what humanity means, who expanded what we think of as possible for a single human life. She survived rape as a child, teen pregnancy, abduction, racism, and abandonment to travel the world, sing, act, and write 33 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, including her beloved, widely read memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She acknowledged her personal and cultural traumas but treated hardship not as an identity but as an opportunity for transcendence, eloquence, and connection. She put her daily work of consciousness in the service of others, acknowledging unalikeness and likeness in a way that was profound and personal. “History, despite its wrenching pain,” she said in that inaugural poem, “cannot be unlived, and if faced/with courage, need not be lived again.”

Apple was on the wrong side of history not to credit Angelou, or on the wrong side of the corporate/human divide, which Apple, more than any other company, tries to blur. If they had named her voice, viewers could have sought out Angelou’s books and read her wisdom and hope in this moment when we sorely need both. Apple made a different choice in 2014, when it released its “Your Verse” ad for the iPad, featuring the voice of Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, who says, “in the words of Walt Whitman” before he quotes Whitman’s poem. Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign, on the other hand, featured a recording of Whitman’s voice without ever naming him. The fact remains that some writers are more vulnerable than others to becoming “anonymous,” and Maya Angelou, for all of her fame and prolific output, falls into two of the most “anonymous” categories as a black woman. “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which is, among other things, a failed quest to find female literary ancestors. Women could not sign the poems because they were not authorized to write. And women of color? They could be killed for such a thing, just as some women are still, like Afghani poet Nadia Anjuman who was stoned to death in 2005 for the transgressive and transformative act of writing poetry.

Poetry ads tend to garner praise, because to hear poetry amid all the other flotsam on TV really is a pleasure, a reminder that the techniques of parallelism and anaphora that ad executives use to hypnotic effect were invented and developed by the bards. Poets follow a path of no guarantees and tend to operate via the gift economy versus the capitalist machine, and it is ironic when their words are used for corporate gain and mass consumerism. And yet who can deny that they always do their work of enlarging the moment, connecting it to more facets of the human? Because of this, I would not request that ad agencies stop this practice, because, ideally, poetry would enter every human sphere. But I do think we should demand that ads credit their poets, connect us back to the names and bodies of these resonant voices. It would help viewers to understand that these insights came from people, who left books for us to read. It would help our common culture to invest in raising consciousness and not just the pleasure-principle of consumption.

When Maya Angelou stood on that podium with the Clintons, she was connecting to the enduring current of humanity, the humanity that springs from the earth and lives in its bosom, but she was also listing names, rescuing people from the unacknowledgement that plagues the powerless of this world. “Today the rock calls out to us,” she said, “You who have crouched too long in the bruising darkness,” she said, “Across the riverside a river sings a beautiful song,” she said, “I call you to my riverside if you would study war no more.”

I listened to this poem again tonight for the first time in 23 years—it echoed in me powerfully, with its images of the rock and the river, and its invocation of the indigenous tribes of our continent. I had just returned home from the Standing Rock reservation, where people from hundreds of North American tribes are gathered to protect the Missouri River from Energy Transfer Partners, a corporation that has begun construction on a pipeline of fracked oil. This 1,200-mile pipeline threatens to destroy sacred burial sites of the Sioux people and pollute the drinking water and aquifers of millions of people in the overlooked states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Tribes that have not gathered for 150 years, or who have never gathered together at all, are camped in prayer, peace, and protection of our shared land and water. Men and women are keeping the fires going all night, people of every skin color are gathered in conversation, Native Americans are reuniting with relatives, and non-Natives like me are finding themselves humbled and grateful to be invited into the fire circles. Just to look around the camp is to see how braided our identities have become; it is to marvel at our singularity, the unalikeness of each one of us, alongside our likeness, and our recurring desire to connect.

There is no internet or phone access at the encampment, and only one hill overlooking the camp where people can use their phones or post to Facebook, and this is part of what makes the place so extraordinary. Everywhere you hear people sharing food, information, solidarity, and stories, opening up in laughter. I felt a deep sense of recognition, the kind I sometimes feel in poems. “Here we are again,” I thought with relief, “doing what humans have done for thousands of years.” And I realized how long it had been since I’d heard so much conversation, because usually people are on their phones, looking down, startled and embarrassed when they are spoken to.

My daughter and I were sad to leave Standing Rock, mournful as we drove the four hours to the airport to fly back to our suburban life, but determined to hold onto the sense of purpose and community that we felt there. In the line to return our rental car, I said something to the man in front of me, and the clerk assumed that we were a family. “We’re not together,” the man said sharply.

“Oh, I assumed you were because you were talking,” the clerk said.

We have entered a moment in history when it is rare for one person to talk to another even when they are standing three feet away from one another in a line. We have entered a moment when our suspicion of one another threatens to overtake our recognition of one another. Maya Angelou foresaw this alienation, and she ended her inaugural poem for the Clintons with a very simple call to action. “Here on the grace of this new day, look up, look into your brother’s eyes, and say with hope, ‘Good Morning.’”

“Good Morning,” I said to the pregnant black woman who was loading our bags onto the conveyer belt. “Good morning,” I said to the white, heavily pierced teenaged girl working at Subway who was patient with my daughter as she chose her sandwich toppings. “Good morning,” I did not to say to many others because I was tired, and had pulled out my phone to text my friends, and because they themselves were hunched over their phones, caught in webs of media communication, or fallen braindrunk into Candy Crush Saga.

I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and in the weeks after Maya Angelou’s ad aired I read tweets and blog posts by poets who were celebrating that a poem, a poem! had made it onto the air. A good thing, but do we think so little of poetry’s power that we poets are happy with anything, with lines leveraged in the service of corporate gain, detached from their root systems, cut from the work of the poets who spoke them? Have we forgotten to say thank you to the poets, or to our own ancestors, to remember their names? And is it safe to say that our alienation from the living past is a disavowel of our own full power as poets and as people? Our failure to stand up for the human being who dared to speak, the person who comes from the earth and returns to the earth, can only symptomize other failures of remembrance. And what the best poets teach is that a failure of remembrance is simultaneously a failure of imagination, a less honest and inclusive vision of the future.

“Our national expectations have diminished,” Maya Angelou wrote.

Our hope for the future has waned to such a degree that we risk sneers and snorts of derision when we confess that we are hoping for bright tomorrows. When did we relinquish our desire for a high moral ground to those who clutter our national landscape with vulgar accusations and gross speculations? Are we not the same citizens who struggled, marched, and went to jail to obliterate legalized racism from our country? Didn’t we dream of a country where freedom was in the national conscience and dignity was the goal? We must insist that the men and women who expect to lead us recognize the true desires of those who are being led.... If we tolerate vulgarity, our future will sway and fall under a burden of ignorance. It need not be so. We have the brains and the heart to face our futures bravely. Taking responsibility for the time we take up and the spaces we occupy. To respect our ancestors and out of concern for our descendants, we must show ourselves as courteous and courageous and well-meaning Americans.

Now.

This passage comes from Angelou’s book, Letters to my Daughter, which was published in 2008 but seems to speak directly to our moment. It was not written to a biological daughter but to all the women who would come after her. This is what it is to be a poet, I think, to have a participatory sense of time that moves both forward and back. The poet speaks to the future but remembers the past, not because the past is some romantic, escapist myth, but because it is a living, human source that is with us still, echoing, needing reparation and healing, helping us to create a better present. I experienced these poetic time-echoes on Standing Rock with people who were struggling, taking responsibility for the times and spaces we occupy. We were the land’s and the people of the land’s, and we were not alone.

Maya Angelou, who was both an artist and a civil rights activist, has become one of those ancestors who is present with us in this time of change. The first documentary about Angelou, “Still I Rise,” debuted this year, winning the 2016 Audience Award from the American Film Institute. The film enjoyed a successful September run in Chicago, then opened on October 14 in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. It is a remembrance of one of the greats who came before, and a reminder of what is possible when we acknowledge that there is work to do here, that it is ours now to do.