Fordham professor: Maya Angelou gave us permission to 'love ourselves'

Celebrated poet and essayist Maya Angelou died Wednesday at the age of 86.

As a poet, educator, historian, best-selling author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director, Angelou was hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary literature.

Though she never made an appearance at Fordham, Angelou wrote a closing poem for a book edited by Kevin M. Cahill, director of the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs.

Angelou wrote, “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” for Even in Chaos:Education in Times of Emergency (Fordham University Press, 2010), a book that focuses on the need for humanitarian workers to place education on an equal footing with medical care in refugee camps, and to protect camp schools from attacks by militias.

"I told her, 'I want you to get me back to the innocence of the children,' and she gave the book a beautiful ending," Cahill told Fordham in 2010.

In 2008, Angelou gave a speech at nearby Pace University in 2008. Alumna and poet Liz Bowen (FCLC '11), then the editor-in-chief of The Observer, Fordham’s student newspaper for the Lincoln Center campus, covered the talk.

We asked one of our faculty members to share her thoughts on Maya Angelou:

“As a middle schooler in Cincinnati, Ohio, I was bombarded with images, words, and ideas that rarely reflected my experience. When we (Black girls and boys) discovered Maya Angelou, we found a way to write ourselves in, we were given permission to love ourselves despite the ways we were silenced and unseen. She revealed that the blueprint for loving all human beings could be found in our ability to live our lives without fear. May she rest in the beauty and power she created,” said Aimee Meredith Cox, culture anthropologist and assistant professor of performance and African American Studies.

-Gina Vergel

Revisiting the Relationship of a Lifetime

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s most most recent book of poems, Waking My Mother (Word Poetry, 2013) tackles the complexity of the often fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. O’Donnell, the associate director of the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies,

grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania in a family of working-class Italian-Americans. Her mother, however, would “never submit to the yoke the old Italians typically placed on their women.”

Widowed at a young age with five children, Marion Salvi Alaimo took on some destructive habits, O’Donnell said, that led to emotional and financial hardships. “We essentially grew up in a household in which the parent-child relationship was adversarial and in which the children play the role of adults.”

Many of the poems in O’Donnell’s book reflect those years, in which she and her siblings often clung to each other in absence of any family stability parents are normally tasked with providing.

Alaimo said she wrote most of the poems four years ago when her 82-year-old mother took a turn for the worse after breaking her hip. “For 48 days, she was bed-bound in a Florida hospital, nursing home, and, finally, hospice room,” wrote O’Donnell. “During that time, my sisters and I cared for her. Ours had never been conventional mother-daughter relationships. Our mother had been a difficult person to live with, and we had had more than our share of bitter disagreements over the years.  But these 48 days proved to be a kind of Kairos time for us.  Her suffering broke us all open, enabling us to practice mercy, obtain mutual forgiveness, and experience healing of old wounds.”

She says the poems in Waking My Mother are an attempt to redeem the brokenness that characterized her relationship with her mother, “but consolation comes only through desolation.”

“The book tells our story—but it also tells the story of every family that has endured hardship and division yet still, somehow, has managed to remain whole.”

Poem on Waking (by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell)

Today I woke to talk with my mother.

Her face appeared clean as a dream,

erased of age and any trace of grief,

my mother as I wanted her to be.

She seemed to long to speak to me of love,

and I of mercies I had lately learned.

Her eyes smiled, although her mouth stayed closed,

as if all that need be, might be said through those.

I searched my purse and palmed my silent phone,

touched the icon box marked with her name—

then saw the stranger living in her house

and knew that she was gone, once again.

The voice I’m waiting for, still unheard.

For all my life, not one more word.

Doing Donne -- Molly Peacock with Nigel Smith on Feb. 13

Molly Peacock, an acclaimed writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, will appear on Feb. 13 at the next Poets Out Loud event, which will highlight the connections between modern poetry and the work of canonical English poet John Donne. 

Peacock will read Donne’s poetry along with some of her works that were influenced by Donne, said Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., holder of Fordham’s Reverend John Boyd S.J. Chair in Poetic Imagination and director of Poets Out Loud, the poetry community based at the Lincoln Center campus.  

Also appearing will be Nigel Smith, a professor of early modern literature at Princeton, who will perform musical settings of Donne’s work. 

“In general, I think it’s wonderful when people do read the earlier and contemporary poetry together, because there are so many connections, and Donne is of course one of the great love poets and great religious poets of our language,” Dubrow said. 

It will be the third in a series of events, initiated and co-organized by Fordham, that show how Donne’s work is linked to that of today’s poets. Barnard College and the New York Public Library have held similar events, and another is coming up April 15 at the Helix Center in Manhattan. Also, Poets Out Loud collaborated with the John Donne Society to incorporate this theme into the society’s conference in Baton Rouge, La., later this month. 

The event will be held Thursday, Feb. 13, at 7 p.m. in the 12th-floor Lounge/Corrigan Center, Lowenstein Center, at the Lincoln Center campus. It is free and open to the public. 

Molly Peacock’s most recent book is The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delaney Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (Bloomsbury USA, 2010). She is the author of six books of poetry, recipient of numerous honors, and one of the creators of Poetry in Motion, seen on buses and subways across North America. 

Smith will perform musical settings—co-composed with Andrew C. Lovett—of poems by both John Donne and Paul Muldoon. 

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc., with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

--Chris Gosier

Music and Poetry to Come Together in Annual Concert at Lincoln Center Campus

Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., built a distinguished scholarly career around the relationship between his two passions, music and literature. So it was only a matter of time before he would come up with the idea for the event that will be held Saturday, April 28 at the Lincoln Center campus.

 

He was chatting with colleagues about the University’s Poets Out Loud program a few years ago when the conversation turned to music. “This sort of light bulb went on in my head,” said Kramer, Distinguished Professor in the Department of English.

The result was a series of concerts that combine poetry readings with performances of the poems’ musical versions. The third annual event in the series, Voices Up: New Music for New Poetry, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge of the Lowenstein Building. The concert was organized in conjunction with Poets Out Loud. Admission is free.

The event will feature original works by several prize-winning artists. A cellist, violinist and vocalist will perform new works by composers Paul Moravec—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—and David Dzubay, who wrote music for poems by Julie Choffel. Choffel, a member of the faculty at the University of Connecticut, will read from her book The Hello Delay, published by Fordham University Press. The book was the winner of the Poets Out Loud book competition for 2012.

The accompanying music will be performed by violinist Madalyn Parnas, cellist Cicely Parnas, and soprano Sharon Harms, all of whom are students at Indiana University, where David Dzubay teaches. Because their lineup includes the premiere of a piece by Kramer, who is a prize-winning composer, he will read the poetry he wrote as the song's lyrics. In addition, a work by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, comprising fragments from the work of Franz Kafka, will be performed.

This year’s event departs from the standard voice-and-piano format of classical song. The combination of violin, cello and voice “creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, which we’re eager to explore,” Kramer said.

He noted that the event belongs to a centuries-long tradition of marrying poetry with music. He cited the example of prolific composer Franz Schubert, an avid reader of poetry and friend of many poets, who wrote his songs using their poems as lyrics as soon as they were published.

 

“That’s the way it works in the world of classical song,” he said. “The idea is that you create a relationship between musical expression and poetic expression.”

 

Because it can be distracting for audience members to follow the poet’s words on paper, he said, the format includes no copies of the poems. Audience members will only listen: First they will hear the poem read, and then they will hear it sung.

 

“What happens is the expressive additions that come about by putting it to music become more available to people, because they’ve heard the poet reading the poem in the poet’s own voice,” he said. “That really has an impact, we discovered.”

 

                                                                                                                            -- Chris Gosier

Arts Spotlight: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

May is apparently The Month of Angela.

This month, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, associate director of Fordham's Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, published her fourth collection of poems, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems, with Word Press.

St. Martha

"She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord's feet, listening to His word." Luke 10:37

A silly child she ever always was-
our mother said so a thousand times-
her quick eye caught by the flight or buzz
of some pretty creature's mastering wings.
Lazarus tried to keep her out of sight,
to spare his clever sister women's tasks.
I hauled the water, rose before first light,
set bread upon the board before they asked.
The day You came to us our prayers were granted.
My hands obeyed the rhythms of my labor
while Mary sat beside You like a man,
embraced within the circle of Your favor.
I stood apart, Your beauty kept from me,
and only when You left us did I see.

Her essay, "Seeing Catholicly: Poetry & the Catholic Imagination" has been published in The Catholic Studies Reader (Fordham University Press, 2011), edited by Jim Fisher and Margaret McGuinness. The book is the inaugural volume in the new Catholic Practice in America Series at Fordham University Press.

Her poems, "Circling the Inferno" and "Letters to My Heart" were published in the spring issue of Saint Katherine Review, a new literary journal published by Saint Katherine's College; and "Our Mother at the Nursing Home," was published in the spring 2011 issue of Christianity and Literature.

O'Donnell has also recently published poetry in Windhover: A Journal of Faith & Art; The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative; and Tiferet magazine. The poem in the latter is part of a series of ekphrastic pieces O'Donnell has written in response to paintings by Holocaust survivor Martin Spett.

Finally, O'Donnell presented a lecture/poetry reading, "Making Saints: The Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters of the Church," for The Women's Guild of Saints John & Paul Church at the Larchmont Shore Club, on May 12.

Visit Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's website for more poetry, reviews, photos, videos, articles, and event information.

New Fordham Poetry, Make That Times Three

Congratulations to three members of Fordham University’s Department of English, who have each published a new volume of poetry—all within a month of each other (more or less).

The authors are Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination (left), Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., associate professor of English and Women’s Studies (center), and Janet Kaplan, Fordham's poet-in-residence (right).

Dubrow’s book, Forms and Hollows (Cherry-Grove Press, 2011), includes poems in a range of forms as well as free verse. Its subjects also range widely, including the death of a parent, the cities of Paris, Sydney, and New York, and the everyday topics of teaching and food (herbs, bread). The publisher states that “Dubrow writes with a quiet, intimate sensibility that hits similar notes whether she is writing a dramatic monologue or a personal lyric.”
You can read more at http://www.cherry-grove.com/dubrow.html

Frost’s debut collection of poetry, All Of Us, (White Pine Press, 2011) is described as “narrative prose poems that explore misfires of communication, gaps in memory, and the simple limitations of language that cause frustration and isolation. The title poem explores a cityscape where community is vertically compressed, and strangers – who are also neighbors – appear eye-to-eye at the peep holes of their locked doors.”

For more on the book visit http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781935210238/default.aspx

Lastly, poet Janet Kaplan has published a third collection of poetry, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (Notre Dame, 2011), which won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, sponsored by the creative writing program at Notre Dame.. The poems and sonnets are “packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet’s ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation,” the publisher writes. The award is given annually to writers who have published at least one volume of poetry. For more information visit http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01472


Perhaps these talented poets will show up on Thursday, March 24, when Poets Out Loud hosts its Fordham Faculty Reading at 7 p.m. in the 12th Floor Lounge of Lowenstein Center.

—Janet Sassi

Angela O'Donnell's Moving Words

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's book of poetry, Moving House, is moving critics. Peggy Rosenthal, writing in The Christian Century, says, "I know of no other poet so immersed in human mortality yet without the least morbidity. The boundary between mortal and eternal life is porous for this poet, and it is at this boundary where her poetic imagination is comfortably placed."

"Moving House is a deeply affecting book. It balances hard truths with a sweetness of spirit that is, if not singular, rare in our time, especially in contemporary poetry," according to America magazine.

Rattle says, "Moving House ranges through a heady mix of topics against an autobiographical backdrop, the bleak days of O’Donnell’s childhood through the quiet chronology of a move in her maturity."

Finally, Barbara Crooker, writing for The Pedestal, says, "O’Donnell’s poems echo with the delights of well-employed language. She has taken up her pick, put on her miner’s helmet, and descended into the shaft of the past, finding these gems of poems and bringing them to the light. Let’s hope that more books quickly follow this ambitious debut."

O'Donnell, who says, "I've been ridiculously lucky in getting reviews as books of poems often go completely unnoticed," is the associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, and serves on both the English and American Catholic Studies Faculty.