THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9503300602
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
I CONFESS TO some initial irritation at the publication of Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women (Random House, 22 pp., $10), No. 9 on last week's New York Times best-selling fiction list.
It had nothing to do with the poems, which are OK, if few.
But a sawbuck for a 5-by-6 3/4-inch chapbook containing about 10 lines to a page and roughly the size of a cigarette case?
Worse than that. Random House was billing this slender volume as a ``collectible hardcover edition.'' Here was a book that achieved the status of an artifact when it came into print instead of after it went out.
Plus, Random House, as recently as last October, had already published The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, containing the same four poems and all the others; now that was a book.
So why this one?
I'll discount the author's expressed hope about women giving copies of these assertive verses to poetry-impaired men on the occasion of Women's History Month (March) to let them know ``what we're about.''
``I'm a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / That's me.''
Well, I'm a man. / Nominally. / Abominable man, / That's me.
I'll also discount Angelou's observation, in a national teleconference call publicizing the collection, that a lot of people won't open a big book of poetry, ``having been traumatized by it when very young.'' So small books are, in the argot of the times, more user-friendly. But people who were traumatized early by poetry aren't about to fork over 10 bucks for 22 pages of feminist narcissism, either.
I felt, at bottom, hustled. In fact, Random House was, in the most blatant manner, and with Angelou's permission, making financial hay out of her accelerated celebrity on being selected as Bill Clinton's inaugural poet and reading ``On the Pulse of Morning'' at the swearing-in ceremonies.
Random House is the same outfit that just presented the public with another instant artifact, Jimmy Carter's collected poetry, which makes the Hallmark card look like literature.
So I was miffed.
Years ago it had been said of Angelou, now 67, that she wrote like an angel who paid her dues in hell.
Raped at 8, mother of an illegitimate child at 16, manager of a bawdy house before she was 20, Angelou set forth her harsh experience in best-selling installments of an autobiography that began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and made her one of America's most popular black female authors.
She had sincerity.
``It is a serious matter to decide that one is going to be a writer,'' Angelou told me once. ``A writer, especially a black American writer, has a tremendous responsibility to make these yet-to-be United States more than they are. A writer must really go into the veins of a situation and make the language bounce like a ball so it sounds fresh, new, with this intent: to celebrate the fact that there is something in the human spirit that will not be done down, even by death.''
Now she has not only respectability but sanctity.
The woman who never went to college is a Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. She has been nominated for Emmys, Tonys, National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes.
I thought about that, and I got less grumpy about Phenomenal Woman.
Because publishing is, after all and above all, a business. And for years the publishing industry in this country dictated that books by or about blacks couldn't make money, so we didn't get many of them. Then along came Angelou, and Toni Morrison and Chester Himes and others, who showed that they could make money, in fact quite a lot of it.
So I don't begrudge Angelou reaping the same blatantly commercial and cynically hyped rewards that, say, Harold Robbins, Kitty Kelly or the ``V.C. Andrews'' committee receives routinely.
But it is not the kind of equality she worked for or needs. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
DWIGHT CARTER
Maya Angelou's ``Phenomenal Woman'' : 4 poems, 22 pages, 10 bucks.
Is it worth it?
by CNB