NEW YORK – More than 300 boxes of Maya Angelou's personal papers, including letters from Malcolm X and James Baldwin and several scribbled revisions of the poem she wrote to celebrate President Bill Clinton's inauguration, will be made public at a New York library.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture plans to announce the papers' acquisition this week.
Angelou, 82, said she sought out the Harlem institution — a research unit of the New York Public Library — as a home for works that include notes for her acclaimed autobiography "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and the 1993 inaugural poem "On the Pulse of Morning."
Angelou said Tuesday that she revised the poem about 10 times before getting it right.
"I had to continue to go back for the melody of the language," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
"People all over the world use words; the writer comes along and has to use these most-in-use objects, put together a few nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives ... and pull them together and make them bounce, throw them against the wall and make people say, 'I never thought of it that way.'" (AP)
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