How does she do it? It helps to be a brilliant writer, with books of timeless appeal. "Caged Bird" spent 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists.

But Ms. Angelou is not content to rest on her backlist. The two million in royalties is just her base. According to her agent, quoted in Forbes, Maya Angelou "moves like a CEO." Three full-time assistants manage her speaking engagements, which, at $30,000 each, add up pretty quickly.

Ms. Angelou’s windfall got me to thinking. We both do about the same thing. String words together and sometimes read them aloud. (This is like saying McDonalds and Chez Panisse are both restaurants, but bear with me).

I do a little freelance writing. It is piece work. I write an occasional column for my local afternoon paper, the San Francisco Examiner. Given the newspaper'’ largesse, I’d have to write 57,333 columns a year to match Ms. Angelou’s salary.

So far I’ve stuck with prose, but I’ve been thinking maybe I should give this poetry thing a shot. (I did once rhyme "quotidian" and "non-Euclidean" in a poem I wrote for a going away party).

Hey wait a minute – 4.3 million and Maya Angelou’s poems don’t even rhyme!

Does this sound like sour grapes? It shouldn’t. In an era when black women earn, on average, less than two-thirds of white men make, we should cheer the exceptions – although it does seem that Ms. Angelou may be trying to bridge that gap all by herself.

In fact, now that word is out, can’t you just picture all those budding investment bankers throwing over arbitrage and leveraged byouts for haiku and iambic pentameter? And wouldn’t our country be better off?

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

When it comes to poets,

No one beats Maya Angelou.

She’s top of the heap,

Cream of the crop,

With her stanzas and speeches,

At thirty thousand a pop.

Do I sound jealous?

Well maybe just a trace,

In San Francisco,