Maya Angelou And Her Stamp

Here.

What Maya Angelou specialized in were greeting-card sentiments, presented as poems, though the sentiment that she most liked to quote, seldom with attribution, was a line not she, but another, had written, something about a bird that sings because it has a song to sing.

Now Maya Angelou and that line she liked are together on a Forever stamp, possibly to be used on the envelopes that will contain those greeting-cards that were her true metier, and forever linked — stamped, in posterity’s view — to a concolorous writer, Joan Walsh Anglund.

In 1993 Angelou was asked by Bill Clinton to write and deliver a poem at his inauguration, and she did so. You can read that poem, and an accompanying comment, here.

You can find out more about the inspirational sentiments of Joan Walsh Anglund, one of which has now been printed on a Forever stamp, ascribed there to Maya Angelou, the lady who loved it so, a stamp that instead of honoring anyone or anything, forever holds up to mockery that line, and both the lady who first wrote, and the lady who later quoted, it and, perhaps most of all, the American Postal Service itself, and the government for which it stands, right here.