Angelou on Burns (1996) BBC

Angelou on Burns.pdf

#poetry #mayaangelou #robertburns
#solidarity #passion #connection #shamelessness #shame

Connection across time, space, culture, experience - feeling of intense solidarity and shared humanity.

That impulse towards freedom, the love of it, the love of humanity and the drive for passion.

I'm supposed to be thinking my own thoughts on this.

What do I think about it?

pressure to have thoughts about it.

what excited me?

it's the connection - it's the shared feeling across experiences. Angelou's passion for what Burns gets across. I think as well the group she was visiting - the joy people find in singing and sharing and celebrating a body of work and the body that worked it.

Something about art, music, poetry - a reaching across, a stretching, a passion - what does art feel like to create when it is being created for passion rather than performance/ acclaim? or created with the surety that it will be met genuinely?

Angelou made the connection with materially poor but love rich childhoods - I'm stuck in that attachment envy? The having of a loving figure - Burns' father, Angelou's grandmother. Is that where the confidence to create and share and be vulnerable in your passions comes in? Is this a kind of separating comparison - I didn't have that, so I can't accept/ relate/ integrate/ appreciate?

I think what's beautifully absent here is shame - shameless love, shameless passion, shameless connection and joy. Angelou's muteness, childhood sa, poetry as a rescue, as a return of voice.

When we let shame go, leave it aside, we can be fully passionate about the world and what we put into it. I think passion is something I need to rediscover to get outside of myself. What am I passionate about? What animates me?

Shame - Nanette (2018) Hannah Gadsby "when you soak a child in shame ... it becomes as natural as gravity"