The death of a poet always reminds me of other poets. Poets who were also friends. Strangers who nonetheless discovered me, in pubs or lecture halls or books. I remember not their faces, not the corporeal body so transient in being, but their words and the sounds of their words from their lips or mine, breaking through what Franz Kafka called "the frozen sea within us". The death of a poet always recalls the memories of other poets and their poems, my small yet necessary community, working against amnesia, the petrification of feeling. RIP Maya Angelou.





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