Maya Angelou views poetry as soul’s medicine

Maya Angelou has 71 doctorate degrees, more than 4 million Facebook friends and said she loves Shakespeare so much she’d swear he was a black girl.

“I took him to my friends and said, ‘He’s a black girl. I don’t care what they say,’” Angelou said, drawing laughter from the audience. 

Angelou, who has received the Presidential Medal of Arts and three Grammy Awards, spoke to the roughly 500 people who filled the William Pitt Union’s Assembly Room on Tuesday night about the impact poetry has had on her life. She also told Pitt students to seek out poetry as a means of fulfillment in their own lives. During the hour she spoke, she relived stories of hardship that occurred during her 85 years of life and said poetry is her means of “knowing that somebody has been there before.”

 At the age of 7, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After her brother convinced her to speak about what happened, her rapist was arrested and later found murdered one day after he was released from jail. Angelou didn’t speak again for six years.

“My 7-year-old logic told me that the man was dead because of my voice,” she said. “Once I started talking at age 13, as you can see, I’ve hardly stopped talking.”

She questioned how some poets, such as Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer, Mary Evans, Shakespeare and others, are able to quantify what it’s like to be abused and feel worthless. For Angelou, poetry is healing.

“It is my blessing to have studied all the poetry I could get my hands on,” she said. “My own encouragement to you is to find poetry that will make you laugh, make you find beauty.”

Though Angelou said she has many children of all races, genders, shapes and sexualities, she passed her affinity for language and poetry to her one biological son, Guy Johnson. Johnson is paralyzed from the neck down because of complications from a car accident. 

Angelou said that once he had to have more than 100 stitches removed from his back. After he came out of surgery, Johnson called his mother and asked her to recite “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. Both Angelou and her son know the poem by heart because, to her, the brain is “the initial computer.”

“I count [on] the mind to do so much,” Angelou said, “especially as I grow older.”

Angelou’s friend of more than 20 years, Dr. Peter Jannetta, a former chair of neurobiology at Pitt’s school of medicine, attended the lecture. Jannetta says he has nothing but respect for Angelou.

“Whatever she does she does well,” Jannetta said. “She’s what, 85 years old? And she’s like a kid. She’s one of the smartest people I know.”

Angelou interjected with the poetry of others, as well as reciting her own works throughout the lecture. As she emerged on stage, the WPU Assembly Room erupted in applause and screams. Angelou said she was happy to return to Pitt and that the University is “a rainbow in the sky.” Angelou last visited Pitt to give a lecture in 2005.

Angelou also advised students to forge a relationship with poetry in times of trouble and to recall it from memory as an anthem to persevere. Ana Taylor, a sophomore bioengineering major, said that Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman” is her favorite to help her get through tough situations. 

“It kind of makes you proud to be a girl,” Taylor said. “[It has] all the things that make us strong and beautiful, like pride and confidence.”