University Professor Emeritus Edwin Coleman has known Maya Angelou — who will speak and recite poetry at the University on Sunday night — since the 1950s, when both were performing at the Purple Onion.
Though they parted ways after she left for New York to perform on Broadway, every time the famed poet, actress, playwright, historian and activist visits the Northwest, the two get together to talk about the past.
“We always talk about San Francisco, North Beach and the Purple Onion,” Coleman said.
The connection between the poet and professor goes back further than San Francisco. Both were born in towns in Arkansas, and Coleman said they had similar experiences.
“I can identify with her,” he said. “She is not bound or restricted by one particular art form.”
Angelou’s poetry, Coleman said, is extraordinary because it speaks to everyone but still focuses on the experience of black Americans.
University Professor Karen Ford, who is currently teaching a course on African American poetry, compared Angelou’s poetry to that of Langston Hughes and said both wrote for the masses.
“I like poets who bring a lot of readers into it and aren’t only writing for the academy,” she said. “But that’s not to say her poems are always easy.”
Ford said her favorite Angelou poem is “I Still Rise,” because of its incantatory — magical — style. She said the first stanza of the poem brings out a very powerful irony:
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
“You think you’ve stomped them down in the dust — but dust rises,” Ford said. “It’s an answer to oppression and hatred.”
Both Ford and Coleman agreed that Angelou’s poetry is meant to be read out loud, and that certain elements must be in place for a poet to be so skilled in expressing feelings that range from pity to love to anger.
“These things don’t happen in a vacuum,” Coleman said. “You don’t get to be that kind of poet without having that experience — she lived it.”
Ford has seen Angelou recite poetry before and said the artist does not attract attention to herself, but rather to other poets and the people she wrote about.
“She’s so intellectually generous,” Ford said. “The light that falls on her she tries to spread on other people.”
UO Cultural Forum members have worked for more than a year to bring Angelou to the University.
“Out of all the people we brought this year, this is the person who has generated the most response,” said Cultural Forum Program Director Justina Parsons-Berstein.
Coleman agreed, adding that students should take advantage of the opportunity to hear a poet of Angelou’s caliber.
“She’s a multi-talented, multi-dimensional talent of the best kind,” he said. “This is a rare opportunity for Eugene and the University.”