People drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas. “The winner and still the heavyweight champion of the world. Then that voice husky and familiar came to wash over us. Let’s get the microphone over to the referee. The fight is all over ladies and gentlemen.

There were a few sounds from the audience but they seemed to be holding themselves in against tremendous pressure. Is the contender trying to get up again? All the men in the store shouted “No!” Eight. Babies slid to the floor, as women stood up and men leaned toward the radio. The referee is moving in but Louis sends a left to the body and it’s an uppercut to the chin and then the contender’s dropping.

Transcipt (edited lightly for length and clarity):Īngelou. Our special program, Take Time Out begins with reading by Angelou from her memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” It’s a remembrance of the time the African American boxing champion Joe Louis defeated a white challenger. Maya Angelou died in 2014 and yet, through an act of poetic imagination, Sierra Leone and Maya Angelou had a lively conversation across the years. Last year, Dayton poet Sierra Leone heard that amazing voice in the WYSO archives – and as she listened, found herself talking TO the tape.

Somehow a copy of that reel-to reel-recording ended up in the WYSO collection, and ten years ago it was digitized. Among the hundreds of recordings in WYSO Archive, there’s an interview between the American poet Maya Angelou and an interviewer named Lin Harris from radio station WBAI in New York made in 1975.

Some of maya angelou poems