I can't help feeling that Maya Angelou's career has suffered from the interest her publishers have in mythologizing her. Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well is such a painfully untalented collection of poems that I can't think of any reason, other than the Maya Myth, for it to be in print…. All this is especially depressing because Angelou … is a stunningly talented prose writer, whose marvelous I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings has quite properly become a contemporary classic. Why should it be necessary, then, for her to represent herself publicly as the author of such an embarrassing tangle as

            I'd touched your features inchly
              heard love and dared the cost.
            The scented spiel reeled me unreal
              and found my senses lost.

And why, instead of encouraging Angelou, didn't some friendly editor Block (as The New Yorker would say) the following Metaphor:

              A day...