POETIC JUSTICE, `DELTA'-STYLE; ANGELOU BRINGS `A LOT OF STUFF' TO HER FILM DIRECTORIAL DEBUT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

She enters a room quietly, speaks with the utmost cordiality, takes care not to raise her naturally resonant voice above a certain polite volume.

All that considered, Maya Angelou commands your complete, undivided attention. ``Have you met her? It's pronounced An-jell-oh, and you'd better learn it quick,'' laughs Alfre Woodard, the acclaimed actress who headlines Angelou's feature directing debut, ``Down in the Delta.'' ``She commands space, and she's very clear and certain about how she sees things.

``And she's very poetic and descriptive in communicating those things to you,'' Woodard adds, a bit unnecessarily, about the author of such lyrical works as ``I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' and ``On the Pulse of Morning.'' ``Every director has a different way of talking to you, but hers makes a perfect line from out of who she is as a poet, a writer and a thinker. Being directed by her is just like spending the evening with her.''

During an interview at a West Hollywood hotel, Angelou describes herself in less formidable terms.

``I don't think about filling a space,'' she says with the precise enunciation that is one of her many trademarks. ``I do think about being present. I mean to be totally present, so that when I came in this room, there was no other room, there was nothing before, there is nothing after. All my stuff is here.

``There's this commercial where a 9-year-old girl is talking to her 6-year-old sister about the properties of soap,'' Angelou adds, pirouetting from the lofty to the mundane with the most convincing of ease. ``The 6-year-old is just amazed, and finally she looks right into the camera and says, `She's old. She knows lots of stuff.' ''

Angelou laughs heartily.

``So, when I bring my stuff in here, it's a lot of stuff!''

Did we also mention that Angelou can be a master of understatement?

The 70-year-old poet, who currently teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, has been a professional dancer, actress, journalist, editor, school administrator, civil rights leader, screenwriter, producer, composer and theater director. Fluent in more than half a dozen languages, she is, of course, best-known for her poetry (``Pulse'' was composed for President Clinton's first inaugural ceremony) and such riveting autobiographical essays as ``Caged Bird,'' ``Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas'' and ``Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now.''

Along with the accomplishments, there's sad stuff, too. Raped when she was 7, mute for five years afterward, a single mother at 16 and survivor of several failed marriages, Angelou's distinctive voice may be the product of exceptional talent, but it's been forged by a good deal of pain.

Her long and varied journey helped Angelou tune into ``Delta,'' an uplifting story about a poor, troubled Chicago woman (Woodard) who gets her and her young children's lives re-ordered during an extended visit to an uncle's rural Mississippi home. The impressive cast also includes Al Freeman Jr. (``Malcolm X''), Mary Alice (TV's ``I'll Fly Away''), the recently deceased Esther Rolle (``Good Times'') and Wesley Snipes, who was also one of the film's producers.

A child of St. Louis, San Francisco and rural Arkansas - in that last place, where she was sent after the assault and the subsequent murder of the man who raped her, a grandmother taught the silent little Maya to seek her lost voice by reading the world's great poetry - Angelou knows something about the healing properties of the Southern countryside.

So, even though ``Delta'' was written by a white man from Georgia, Myron Goble, she had no doubts she could make an authentic movie from the script.

``The writer loved his work and wasn't in love with it,'' says the director, who wrote her own scripts for the 1979 TV adaptation of ``Caged Bird'' and the 1982 TV movie ``Sister, Sister.''e ``Which means, he didn't hold on to everything for dear life and let his ego be a barrier to the enriching of the work. So, when I'd ask him for something, he was so cooperative. And he trusted me.''

Conversely, when it came time to shoot the film, with Ontario substituting for Chicago and Mississippi, Angelou had to learn to trust her actors. She was, after all, trying to create something that could not be wrought by her most dependable tools - words and that signature voice.

``It challenged everything,'' she admits. ``I know that's a word that has too much frequency, too much use currency nowadays, challenging. But it did ask me for everything I have, to translate myself into another medium. I know poetry and prose, but to use a camera and actors to tell a volume without a word spoken was very strange. You know, I can't write a book and leave four pages empty.''

Of course, with her multifaceted resume, there was little doubt Angelou could make the transition from words to pictures.

``She's done everything else,'' producer-star Snipes says. ``She was a professional singer, professional dancer, of course a professional writer, she's directed theater before. So, it just stands to figure: Why not give it a shot? We put enough people around her to assist in the new venue, but we were never worried about her failing. That's like thinking Paul Robeson is going to fail.''

Now that she's gotten the hang of it, Angelou is fired up to do more filmmaking. She's developing a movie version of James Baldwin's play ``The Amen Corner,'' a project in which she hopes ``to use Harlem as a character, much as I used the South as a character in `Down in the Delta.' See, we've never seen Harlem, we've seen only its underbelly. But there was a climate so rich, out of it came Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Betty Grace, Father Divine, Duke Ellington . . .

``So rich, the Harlem Renaissance. Good lord! I want to show that part of it.''

Angelou is not as rapturous about the richneess displayed by African-American cinema over the last several years. But she certainly finds it worth celebrating, even if some artistically ambitious films such as Oprah Winfrey's recent production of ``Beloved'' indicate that the audience for such movies is not very large.

``I thought it was majestic,'' she says of ``Beloved.'' ``And I think African-American cinema is burgeoning. Look at the movies that have done well - `Waiting to Exhale,' `Soul Food,' `How Stella Got Her Groove Back.' I was sorry about `Amistad,' but `Amistad' was more a story about John Quincy Adams; we weren't really told the story of the African Cinque.

``I would like to see pictures like `Delta' really cross over because it's such a good story,'' she adds. ``It's such a good human story about rising and going on and making it over and redemption and all that. I'd like to see people in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in an all-white neighborhood, lined up around the block to see it.''

Now there's a visual. But then, Angelou has always had a knack for the bridging word picture, the phrase that spans and connects the differing sides of any number of social chasms: race, class, gender.

Bridge-builder; yet another job description. And as President Clinton's erstwhile, designated poet, never more so than now.

``I haven't spoken with him - he hasn't asked me and I haven't tried to - since the impeachment scandal broke,'' she says. ``But I don't regret my close association with the president's administration, not at all. My feelings haven't changed about the man as a president; but like all Americans, Republicans and Democrats, I am really saddened by all that behavior. Really; surprised and saddened.

``I do hope and pray that there will be censure rather than removal. I really don't want to see anybody removed from office for activities that really should have been kept private between consenting adults. I don't like it, but I don't think it's a crime.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) POETRY IN MOTION

Maya Angelou goes from verse to screen in `Down in the Delta'

(2--Cover--Color) no caption (Wesley Snipes and Alfre Woodard)

(3) ``She's done everything else ... We were never worried about her failing,'' Wesley Snipes, with Alfre Woodard in ``Down in the Delta,'' says of Maya Angelou's directing debut.

(4) `I know poetry and prose, but to use a camera and actors to tell a volume without a word spoken was very strange. You know, I can't write a book and leave four pages empty.'

Maya Angelou, right

with Alfre Woodard on the set of ``Down in the Delta''