When Poets Speak of Life and Speak in Prose

Reviewing Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ and Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Maud Martha’

In Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Knife, he contrasts the worlds of novelists, poets, and memoirists and how one can shade into another. “The journey across the frontier from Poetryland into Proseville often seemed to go through Memoiristan,” says Rushdie. That was true for poet Maya Angelou, who published her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969…