my dream about the cows
my dream about the second coming
my friends
my mama moved among the days
my poem
new bones
new orleans
news, the
new year
night vision
1994
note to myself
November 1975
oh antic God
old man river
ones like us
out of body
Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival
photograph
poem beginning in no and ending in yes
poem for my sisters
poem in praise of menstruation
poem to my uterus
Poem To My Yellow Coat
Poem With Rhyme
poem written for many moynihans, a
poet is thirty two, the
praise song
quartz lake, Alaska
roots
Rounding the curve near Ellicot City
running across to the lot
rust
salt
sam
sam, jr.
samson predicts from gaza the philadelphia fire
shadows
shapeshifter poems
she lived
shooting star
slave cabin, sotterly plantation, maryland, 1989
6/27/06
so close
some dreams hang in the air
some points along some of the meridians
somewhere
song
song of mary, a
sonora desert poem
sorrows
sorrow song
speaking of loss
SPRING THOUGHT FOR THELMA
stop
study the masters
surely i am able to write poems
take somebody like me
tale shepherds tell the sheep, the
telling our stories
testament
the bodies broken on
thel
the light that came to lucille clifton
the mystery that surely is present
there
there is a girl inside
the thirty eighth year
this belief
this is for the mice that live
this is what i know
this morning
times, the
to black poets
to joan
to merle
to ms. ann
to my friend, jerina
to my last period
turning
visit to gettysburg, a
walking the blind dog
water sign woman
“We Do Not Know Very Much About Lucille’s Inner Life”
what comes after this
what the mirror said
when i stand around among poets
whose side are you on?
why some people be mad at me sometimes
wild blessings
wind on the st. marys river
won’t you celebrate with me
Acknowledgments
It was a great privilege and responsibility to edit this Selected of Lucille Clifton’s work. I am immensely grateful to the Cliftons and my editor at BOA, Peter Conners, for trusting me to do this impossible work. I thank both Peter and my partner, Rassan Salandy, for questions they added to my questions and the marveling they added to my marveling.
This book would not be at all without the devotion that is The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton edited by Kevin Young and Michael Glaser. I am ever thankful to them both for carrying such a work into being.
I give thanks to the Rose Library at Emory University, especially Head of Research Services, Courtney Chartier. I thank Ricky Maldonado who sent me recordings of Clifton reading at the 92nd Street Y, one of them from 1969 after she won their Discovery contest. I thank the 11 wonderful thinkers who met with me in a cloud of a room at Pratt where we, around a candle and a packet of materials, thought together about the mysteries and the concrete of Clifton’s work. Thank you: Nicole Valdivieso, Ericka Hodges, Tina Zafreen Alam, Jaylen Strong, Dianca London, Jessica Angima, Shayla Lawz, Isa Guzman, Amanda Hohenberg, Charlotte Seebeck, Aliera Zeledon-Morasch. I also thank Andrea Bott, Patty Cottrell, and Beth Loffreda of the Writing Department at Pratt for supporting such a workshop and for coordinating much appreciated photocopying support. My deep thanks especially to Beth Loffreda for the year that helped me to devote such time to this work.
I thank the editors of Paris Review for publishing two of the previously uncollected poems: “bouquet” and “Poem To My Yellow Coat. Along with The Estate of Lucille T. Clifton and BOA Editions Ltd., I thank Copper Canyon Press for permission to reprint selections from The Book of Light in this volume.
And to these compasses I touch my forehead: Sonia Sanchez, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Ross Gay, Kamilah Aisha Moon. And those who talked with me over the mysterious light of the internet: Eisa Davis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Patrick Rosal, Ama Codjoe. They each answered my questions so generously and candidly—with clarity and depth of insight, and with the secret gift of informality, as was the nature of our correspondence. Such exchanges added to my thinking and listening as I made my final selections.
Here is Cheryl Boyce-Taylor about Clifton’s work: “Her work appears pure and simple, but man, oh, man. So deadly and deep and honest. She pulls you out of your lies in her work. There’s nowhere to tell those lies in your work. You just have to be truthful.” And later: “I think her work is political … I find her poems open-mouthed just like Sonia.”
Here is Eisa Davis: “I think about how truly difficult it must have been (I haven’t read her talking about it and perhaps you have) to have written poems about her father violating her. I mean, what did that do? that’s emotionally complex and political and fierce for sure.
“I think she had to find a way to keep herself safe, in her mind. so in her poems I feel her drawing a circle around us while smelling a wolf. there’s safety to be made, and a leakage of that safety. since the poems are lyrical, especially in the ohs she uses, it’s a new gospel I hear …she’s laughing. a lot. she tells the children to say she’s a poet, she don’t have no sense—and this means to me that she must have plenty. sense above sense, outside of sense. she writes poems in one movement, about one piece of sense. she survived her father and returned to us as the moon.
“of course that’s not all of her work. but then she goes through menopause and cancer and kidney transplant and writes about all that, generously, powerfully, without indulgence … she’s really the second part of Baraka’s ‘Fuck poems / and they are useful …’ she’s truly showing us how to make it through life.”
Here is Kamiliah Aisha Moon on what Clifton’s work makes possible: “Permission to be and keep it real. To be shameless, unabashed. To be vulnerable as a show of strength. To wonder and to be amazed. To decipher dreams. To rage eloquently and elegantly. To claim and proclaim.” And on the things she thinks of in, to borrow from Rita Dove, Clifton’s “thingful” work, Moon writes: “Brooms, knife, kitchen counter, bowls, boats. Tools that clear the way, pare; things that allow for making, that carry.”
Here is Rachel Eliza Griffiths: “Clifton’s work has pushed me away from believing that what is ‘simple’ is also ‘easy,’ which is to say, that Clifton has guided me into a tense space of belief, love, and labor. Clifton’s faith is chiseled into what is both spoken and unsayable. Her work also asks me to leap and to remember, as Morrison wrote, the natural and earned elements that might be defined as ‘freedom.’ Clifton’s work is the opening in the water and the water, the flight and the brutal symphonic wind the wings make as they lift the body to which they belong. And, too, Clifton’s work is a space where the word ‘belonging’ opens and opens for me. She belongs to herself, to her family, to poetry, to us, and whatever is beyond that. Her work then is also about the autonomy of langua
ge, about whom and which words are spared. It is also about whom language, memory, justice do not spare.”
Here is Patrick Rosal: “I remember reading ‘homage to my hips.’ And I think then and throughout my life, that was one of the clearest poems of understanding what the world says you should love and the thing you actually love and care for can be really, really different. And that your own body can be a thing that you care for and love because much of the world doesn’t (or doesn’t seem to) was something I knew in my experience of being in my own skin and with other folks whom I know were not loved publicly and mythologically. Here was this small poem, also a mythology—of love, acceptance.”
Here is Mendi Lewis Obadike on what she learned from Ms. Lucille who was her teacher: “That being a writer has to do with being a part of a community, learning to touch another.
“And poetry is a way of wondering that involves other people.”
Here is Ama Codjoe: “Clifton made space for my body in poetry/in the world. My black body. My hips. My histories. My contradictions. My desires. And there are so many mysteries in her writing too. […] There’s more to say but for that I’d want sun spilling through a window, her books around me like a skirt, and you and me with cups and cups of tea.”
About the Author
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936–February 13, 2010) was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry collection Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA, 2000) won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA, 1987). In 1996, her collection The Terrible Stories (BOA, 1996) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Among her many other awards and accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and an Emmy Award. In 2013, her posthumously published collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael Glaser (BOA, 2012), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.
About the Editor
Aracelis Girmay (December 10, 1977) is the author of three books of poems: the black maria (BOA, 2016); Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of a GLCA New Writers Award; and Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing and with her sister collaborated on the forthcoming children’s book What Do You Know? (Enchanted Lion, 2021). For her work, Girmay was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and in 2015 received the Whiting Award for Poetry. In 2018 she was also selected by Elizabeth Alexander to receive the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Girmay is the mother of two and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.
BOA EDITIONS, LTD. AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES
No. 1
The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 2
She
M. L. Rosenthal
No. 3
Living With Distance
Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
No. 4
Not Just Any Death
Michael Waters
No. 5
That Was Then: New and Selected Poems
Isabella Gardner
No. 6
Things That Happen Where There Aren’t Any People
William Stafford
No. 7
The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980
John Logan
No. 8
Signatures
Joseph Stroud
No. 9
People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983
Louis Simpson
No. 10
Yin
Carolyn Kizer
No. 11
Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada
Bill Tremblay
No. 12
Seeing It Was So
Anthony Piccione
No. 13
Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems
No. 14
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980
Lucille Clifton
No. 15
Next: New Poems
Lucille Clifton
No. 16
Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family
William B. Patrick
No. 17
John Logan: The Collected Poems
No. 18
Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems
No. 19
The Sunken Lightship
Peter Makuck
No. 20
The City in Which I Love You
Li-Young Lee
No. 21
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990
Lucille Clifton
No. 22
John Logan: The Collected Fiction
No. 23
Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays
Delmore Schwartz
No. 24
Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard
Gerald Costanzo
No. 25
The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems
Barton Sutter
No. 26
Each in His Season
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 27
Wordworks: Poems Selected and New
Richard Kostelanetz
No. 28
What
We Carry Dorianne Laux
No. 29
Red Suitcase
Naomi Shihab Nye
No. 30
Song
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
No. 31
The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 32
For the Kingdom
Anthony Piccione
No. 33
The Quicken Tree
Bill Knott
No. 34
These Upraised Hands
William B. Patrick
No. 35
Crazy Horse in Stillness
William Heyen
No. 36
Quick, Now, Always
Mark Irwin
No. 37
I Have Tasted the Apple
Mary Crow
No. 38
The Terrible Stories
Lucille Clifton
No. 39
The Heat of Arrivals
Ray Gonzalez
No. 40
Jimmy & Rita
Kim Addonizio
No. 41
Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum
Michael Waters
No. 42
Against Distance
Peter Makuck
No. 43
The Night Path
Laurie Kutchins
No. 44
Radiography
Bruce Bond
No. 45
At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties
David Ignatow
No. 46
Trillium
Richard Foerster
No. 47
Fuel
Naomi Shihab Nye
No. 48
Gratitude
Sam Hamill
No. 49
Diana, Charles, & the Queen
William Heyen
No. 50
Plus Shipping
Bob Hicok
No. 51
Cabato Sentora
Ray Gonzalez
No. 52
We Didn’t Come Here for This
William B. Patrick
No. 53
The Vandals
Alan Michael Parker
No. 54
To Get Here
Wendy Mnookin
No. 55
Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems
David Ignatow
No. 56
Dusty Angel
Michael Blumenthal
No. 57
The Tiger Iris
Joan Swift
No. 58
White City
Mark Irwin
No. 59
Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999
Bill Knott
No. 60
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988–2000
Lucille Clifton
No. 61
Tell Me
Kim Addonizio
No. 62
Smoke
Dorianne Laux
No. 63
Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems
Michael Waters
No. 64
Rancho Notorious
Richard Garcia
No. 65
Jam
Joe-Anne McLaughlin
No. 66
A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems
Edited, with an Introduction by Michael Waters
No. 67
Small Gods of Grief
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
No. 68
Book of My Nights
Li-Young Lee
No. 69
Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies
Charles Harper Webb
No. 70
Double Going
Richard Foerster
No. 71
What He Took
Wendy Mnookin
No. 72
The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
Ray Gonzalez
No. 73
Mules of Love
Ellen Bass
No. 74
The Guests at the Gate
Anthony Piccione
No. 75
Dumb Luck
Sam Hamill
No. 76
Love Song with Motor Vehicles
How to Carry Water Page 11
