With great appreciation, I'm considering the life of Maya Angelou.

More than many writers, perhaps most, Dr. Angelou recognized the healing action of poetry. Throughout her life, she recognized and acted upon that potential in how she consciously projected her voice and her words into the creative, troubled, dynamic, gritty, diverse racial and ethnic culture of America and beyond it into the planetary community.   

In ways that focused on making it accessible to others, she spoke up for poetry; acknowledging its sustaining and significant place in our lives:

We humans are at our best when we enjoy poetry. Sometimes all you need is to reflect in your mind one poem that says, 'I can make it through.'

~ Maya Angelou

Yet, on this occasion of her recent death at the age of eighty-six, I am in grateful acknowledgment of her, reflecting on an even deeper connection for me.  

When Maya Angelou read her poem On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's first inaugural on January 20, 1993, I felt a sea-change happen in poetry in America.

I saw this especially over the next few years. There was a rising arc of interest, participation and other generative activity in poetry and especially within community. It was within this time frame that anthologies appeared, such as Cries of the Spirit and The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart that were organized more in thematic ways--not the themes of academia but much more attuned to the uses of poetry for meaning and healing.

Twenty-one years after the fact, I don't know that I could make a factual case for this deeper weaving of a poetry of community into the fabric of our culture because of her reading that poem, but I believe we were, at that time, dipped into a rich, beautiful dye, and that a sturdy shuttle was drawn through us and the loom of our country.   

I know this: Maya Angelou speaking out loud occurred at a time of great ferment for me with regards to aligning with my calling to poetry as healer.  She said to America and the planet:

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 stone were one.

John, circa 1992

It was that same year, 1993, when I was hired to teach poetry therapy in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at John F. Kennedy University. I was recommended to that department by the wonderful Anin Uttigaard (a founder of the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association) after she had invited me to give a
talk at Fort Mason at the wharf in San Francisco. Rhonda James at JFKU interviewed me that spring and I was hired on the spot. Looking back, I don't really know if this even matters--I had no Ph.D., not even an M.A., and yet charged I was with the responsibility in September of teaching graduate students in psychology and showing them the potentials of poetry as healer. I taught at JFKU from 1993-2012. 

Something back then was moving for me and the entire country! I gathered everything I could find for a poetry therapy course reader for my class scheduled for autumn 1993. 

Then, late summer, in a story that has many dimensions, and with great thanks to Jim Fadiman, I was connected with Jeremy P. Tarcher and his publishing company. In either late '93 or January of 1994, Jeremy and I met at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. Jeremy and I talked about me writing a book about poetry as healer. Soon thereafter, in the mid winter, I signed a contract to write Finding What You Didn't Lose.

If revelation is too strong a word here, then, I can say this: to be true to life, I need to speak to that place where roads diverge, and because of that, where choices are asked to be made. In this case, a choice I made because of where spirit called me.  

This acknowledgement of revelation/trueness is also a matter of starting off a journey on the right foot--with gratitude and the transparent sense of walking through the open door.  

So with that acknowledgement, the first chapter of my book (titled Return to the Most Human) begins with words from On the Pulse of Morning. 

There were many literary critics who, while they "praised" Maya Angelou, panned the poem. I feel these critics represented the limiting voices that failed to understand the tremendous quality of love this poem, On the Pulse of Morning, expressed. I've always felt gladness to quote this poem as the very first note I struck. Revelatory act that I believe the poem is, it feels as right now as it did then.  

One could even say that in this day and time, with Maya Angelou's passing on, with climate change banging at all of our doors (as I write this President Obama just made a powerful policy statement about carbon emissions) the themes and gifts of this poem (including its drum-beat naming of Native American cultures) are more needed than ever and that it is itself, highly prophetic.  

By reading her poem now, listening to her read it, you might recognize this as prophecy and call to both heightened consciousness and action. 

I wish blessings upon the free soul of Dr. Maya Angelou and upon her son, Guy Johnson. I am aware and grateful how her words and life made a deep difference to young women and young men and to children and elders and to "everyday" people and "prominent" people and anyone and everyone who had ears to hear, to me.   

Maya Angelou receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, February 15, 2011.

I'll close with this: if you need to, please "reflect in your mind one poem that says, 'I can make it through.'"

Sincerely yours,

John

To view the reading at the Clinton inaugural, click here.

For a PDF of the poem On the Pulse of Morning, click here.

To view Maya Angelou reading at the United Nations, 1995, click here.

For Maya Angelou's obituary in the New York Times, click here. 

 ~

Return to the Most Human

The Need for Poem-Making In Our Lives

Across the wall of the world,

A River sings a beautiful song. It says,

Come, rest here by my side...

... Lift up your eyes

Upon this new day breaking for you.

Give birth again

To the dream.

~ Maya Angelou

    from On The Pulse of Morning 

Return to the Most Human

These lines from the poem On The Pulse of Morning by Maya Angelou are a reminder: being open to the language of your heart is a pathway to seeing life anew. The process of writing invites us to draw near to this river of inspiration. Your poetic words can give expression to all that you are. They can reach down into your dark hours, whisper the direct or mysterious language of your truth, reveal your tenderness and joy, shape a new consciousness through your creative imagination.  

Rather than eliminating life's contradictions, poetry helps us integrate sorrow and joy, horror and humor with compassionate awareness. With its condensation of language, poetry guides us to an understanding of the underlying unity in opposites which permeates our existence. And the sounds of poetry reach us at a depth that cognitive thinking cannot reach.

Through poetry we enter spiritual passageways to the essence of what we feel. Your poetic voice can help you find your way, through dark and light. May Sarton speaks of this paradoxical journey in her poem, Santos: New Mexico:

... We must go down into the dungeons of the heart

To the dark places where modern mind imprisons

All that is not defined and thought apart;

We must let out the terrible creative visions.

Return to the most human, nothing less

Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,

The torn mind to accept the whole of its duress

And, pierced with anguish, at last an act of love.