I copied this from Wanda Coleman’s recent article in the LA Weekly concerning the furor over her criticism of Maya Angelou’s most recent book.
I posted this to the slam list as well…I think it’s a good encapsulation of one of the key issues regarding slam/performance poetry today: the apparent unwillingness to honestly critique each other’s work.
Would love your thoughts…
“ALL LITERARY CRITICISM, AT ROOT, IS BIASED because each reviewer
must bring to the act his or her individual world-view and aesthetic
sensibility.
Each must decide if the social values of a text as a political record
are more important than its literary values…
But fostering an illusion of excellence where none exists, regardless
of the writer or subject matter, is to do a democratic readership the
ultimate disservice.
Saying amen to the going cultural directives, minus a true analysis,
is as morally suspect as any bigoted criticism — whether done out of
guilt, fear, or the desire to compensate the author for the social
ills that shaped his or her existence.”
— Wanda Coleman
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12:00:
And within minutes, I had been told that my posting this “as a white man” was dangerous because I resembled those white Republicans who claimed to understand how Martin Luther King would react because they’ve taken individual comments out of context.
Y’know, I really ought to let my dad know that I’ve been promoted to “white”.
Dark Matter 
December 20th, 2003 at 1:48 pm
Re: Couple of (long) things
1.
Oh, I understood that, Scott — but I still thought that one point resonated strongly in regards to the slam community’s current postition regarding honest critique. I still do.
2.
I was trying to make a point that the statement applied regardless of ethnic considerations. I didn’t do that very well. I should have made that more explicit. That it went elsewhere — ah well, my fault. I should have expected it, and I will not make that mistake again.
3.
Why bother?
December 20th, 2003 at 5:45 am
Re: The Review (part 2)
“Song” opens with Angelou’s return to the United States from Ghana in 1964, a time when she looked to plunk herself into the sociopolitical fray. She spends time in San Francisco, in Hawaii and in L.A. (west of the Harbor Freeway, where whites were the majority) before moving to New York City, living above the concerns of a new generation of angry young blacks.
With unflinching piety, she skips her days as a dancer and restyles herself as a militant, fostering the illusion that she was at the core of the civil rights and black power movements. Rather than substantiate this, Angelou plays the adolescent game of being the first to tattle on others when one is guilty: “The same people who don’t give a damn now will lie and say they always supported him [Malcolm X].” Throughout “Song,” Malcolm’s name is a mantra as Angelou smokily extols “the importance of his life and of his death” without exposition. She has forgotten the swift reliability of the 1960s underground grapevine. Had she joined the Organization of African-American Unity (I belonged to the Compton branch), it would have been news coast to coast. The dead (including Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, who died tragically in June 1997) cannot contradict her–which may partly explain the 16-year lapse between “Shoes” and “Song.” Meanwhile, Angelou artfully plays the race card, like the muse Euterpe or Sister Flute, coochie-cooing admirers out of shirts and socks, transforming bigots into simpering ninnies and academic cowardice into five-figure honorariums.
If “Caged Bird” put Angelou at the fore of those braving fiction’s devices to enhance their truths, in “Song” she regresses, making it a textbook example of the danger inherent in that technique: misinterpretation. For example, taken alone, Chapter 19 might approximate any single woman’s search for work on hostile turf but, when wedded to Chapter 25, it becomes a “choose” in street parlance–straight out of novelist Iceberg Slim–making Angelou, in her 30s, seem less the ingenue ward and more the procurer when setting up her benefactor with a lady friend.
Ever age-conscious, Angelou relies on innuendo and inference to blur time, avoiding dates, locales and other details, thus muddling events, as in “Caged Bird” when recounting the excitement generated by a Joe Louis fight. Angelou scrambles Louis’ June 25, 1935 bout with Primo Carnera (she was 7) with his June 22 championship bout with Max Schmeling three years later. Likewise, in Chapter 9 of “Song,” the book’s lengthiest, Angelou bizarrely mangles the Watts riots of August 1965. After exclaiming “the cry of ‘burn baby burn’ was loud in the land” in 1964 (the phrase was the signature of KGFJ disc jockey Magnificent Montague, unheard nationwide until after the riots), she patronizingly defends residents with whom she is unable to identify, tiptoeing down to Watts to see the devastation.
In writing that is bad to God-awful, “Song” is a tell-all that tells nothing in empty phrases and sweeping generalities. Dead metaphors (“sobbing embrace,” “my heart fell in my chest”) and clumsy similes (“like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting time”) are indulged. Twice-told crises (being molested, her son’s auto accident) are milked for residual drama. Extravagant statements come without explication, and schmooze substitutes for action. Her most intriguing character, “The African,” is underdeveloped. She softly decries racism in between snipes at those who marginally offended her during her “rise” (Eldridge Cleaver, a white woman at a party). Tiresomely, she repeats her mother’s homilies when not issuing her own. There is too much coulda shoulda woulda.
Unfortunately, the Maya Angelou of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven” seems small and inauthentic, without ideas, wisdom or vision. Something is being flung up to heaven all right, but it isn’t a song.
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See how using the original review instead of the recap vastly changes the argument at hand? One is ethnographic, one is art criticism.
December 20th, 2003 at 5:44 am
Re: The Review (part 1)
To wit, the original review:
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Coulda Shoulda Woulda; A SONG FLUNG UP TO HEAVEN By Maya Angelou
WANDA COLEMAN. The Los Angeles Times. Apr 14, 2002
While many American poets have languished, regardless of race, creed, color or excellence, the savvy and ever-seductive 74-year- old Marguerite Johnson, a.k.a. Maya Angelou, has parlayed statuesque looks and modest talents as actress-dancer-singer into a 30-year role on the literary stage that is, indeed, phenomenal. In 1993, at the behest of President Clinton, she became the second poet in U.S. history to recite an original poem at an inauguration. Few poets can spark a smidgen of the controversy generated in 2001 by Angelou’s undisclosed cut of the estimated $50-million in sales for writing greeting card verse, a pursuit for which she is superbly suited. Purportedly the final installment of her serial autobiography, “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” appears only a few months after the first of her Hallmark card line and seems calculated to encompass celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, African American history month, National Women’s month as well as her 74th birthday this month, National Poetry Month.
It might be assumed that Angelou would take her honorary doctoral degrees, make a graceful bow and retire from the literary round table with celebrated reputation intact. Alas, a dignified departure is not the trait of the greedy when one more traipse to the trough is offered. Once again, Angelou dips into her past to offer up an emotional repast that would starve a skeleton.
I vented my bias against celebrity autobiographies at the outset of a favorable review of Angelou’s “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” (Book Review, Aug. 13, 1986), in which I stated that I usually find them “self-aggrandizements and/or flushed-out elaborations of scanty press packets.” Relieved, I summarized “Shoes” as “a thoroughly enjoyable segment from the life of a celebrity!”
No can do with “Song.”
“Song” is a sloppily written fake, bloated to 214 pages by large type and widely spaced chapter headings, more than half its 33 chapters averaging two to four pages. Powers exhibited in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” have deserted her in “Song.” Her titillating confessions and coquettish allusions come off as redundant and hollow old tricks. She not only engages in her usual name-dropping but shockingly makes that the book’s content. Shamelessly, she cannibalizes the reputations of three major black figures: Malcolm X (Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), James Baldwin and King Jr., using them as linchpins on which to promote her specious pose as an activist.
……
December 20th, 2003 at 5:42 am
Couple of (long) things
A couple of argumentative thoughts on the matter that seem mightily appropriate here if nowhere else:
1) The article related to the posted (on the listserve) link has less to do with the overall issue of household names or the quality of Angelou’s poetry than the original Coleman review of the book (and poet) in question. It is, in fact, why the conversation has spiraled out of the original question: by itself, it was not designed to address what you are attempting to address.
2) The recap article speaks primarily to the issue of Black Art and the right to critique said art on a qualitative, social and political level.
Anyone should be allowed to speak on the matter, regardless of ethinicity, but not regardless of personal agenda, intelligence (or lack thereof) or a desire to change the subject because it is beyond their depth (though possibly fully within their emotive field of vision, ie. “Some of my best friends are Black people, which justifies the next 3 pages of my platform…”).
3) You should have handed Solis his ass for calling you white. Period.
Okay, not “period”:
Anyone who questions the right of people to hold critical opinions solely (or damn near it) on the basis of their (perceived; !) ethnicity without dissecting the merits of their publicly stated position and fashioning a case that might somehow prove how their ethnicity MIGHT tie into that criticism is not arguing fairly, nor well.
But what do I know: I was practically pilloried as Clarence Thomas for being a Black man who disliked derivative Black poetry at Finals night. Boo-hoo.
December 20th, 2003 at 1:02 am
I just find this whole discussion hysterical because Wanda is a friendly acquaintance. I think she’d look at the whole thing with perplexed amusement.
December 19th, 2003 at 6:12 pm
Thanks, Jeremy…
you cockeyed optimist, you.
December 19th, 2003 at 6:11 pm
I appreciate your post and the eloquent context that Wanda offers, though I’m not surprised that the slam list conversation may be derailed into a series of misunderstandings.
I met Wanda at the Northwest Spoken word Lab a couple of years ago, and I was deeply impressed by both her artistic vision and her thoughts on social frameworks in poetry and performance.
Your selected quotes are entirely appropriate to the current slam culture. Thanks for offering this opportunity for further dialogue, Tony; I only hope we can all get past the polemics and toward something more constructive and unified.