it was a dream
but when i woke i knew
somewhere there is a space
in a grandmother’s sleep
if she can sleep
if she is alive
and i want her to know
that the baby is not abandoned
is in grandmothers hearts
and we will remember
forever
after the children died she started bathing
only once in a while
started spraying herself with ginger
trying to preserve what remained of her heart
but the body insists on truth.
she did not want to be clean
in such a difficult world
but there were other children
and she would not want me
to tell you this
haiku
over the mountains
and under the stars it is
one hell of a ride
An American Story
one year
a naked white guy
parked his car
by our elementary school
kids called him
The Nude Dude and laughed
when they told the story
i didn’t believe it
because i was
on the honor roll
until the afternoon
he hopped at me
all pink and sweaty
and asked me
little girl
have you ever seen
a white mans pride
and i replied oh
yes sir many times
many times
God Bless America
You don’t know the half of it, like the old folks used to say
but the half of it is what I do know
What I don’t know is the other
In the middle of the Eye,
not knowing whether to call it
devil or God
I asked how to be brave
and the thunder answered,
“Stand. Accept.” so I stood
and I stood and withstood
the fiery sight.
won’t you celebrate with me:
the poetry of Lucille Clifton
National Book Award winner, Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, children’s books author, mother, memoirist, Jeopardy champion, survivor, poet, and national treasure, Lucille Clifton was at the height of her poetic powers when she died in February 2010.
Clifton’s work is phenomenally varied, and simultaneously of the moment—fresh and forward-seeking. In tracing the roots (and telling the tales) of a black family, her memoir Generations was groundbreaking and could be said to forecast the rise in the attention paid to black genealogy. But Clifton’s work also critiques family and country, mourns and makes known what one book of hers calls “the terrible stories.” She’s as interested in soul as body, her poetry paying “homage to my hips” and providing “wishes for sons”; biblical in her lines as Whitman, she invites an American “I,” this time lowercase.
To mention Clifton’s winning Jeopardy is not to say that Clifton is interested in trivia, but rather, in knowledge. (The win is something she was quite proud of—as well the set of encyclopedias that came with it.) As you’ll recall, the Jeopardy game show provides the answers and contestants (and we at home) provide the questions; in her work, Clifton’s questioning of ourselves adds up to an answer, and in her answering our need for history or pride or praise she also asks a lot of us, too.
At a Poetry Society of America event honoring her in 2004, I called Clifton our Neruda, and I still think this is accurate: like him, she’s interested in the large issues, the human ones, and does them justice in a literal sense. I was going to say that she does so through small things, but looking over her work of nearly fifty years there’s nothing small but the lack of capital letters; instead we have dreams and shapeshifters and elegy and many kinds of visitation, whether from a fox or “the Ones.” Like poet Ted Hughes, she writes of animal and spirit and any number of spirit animals, including “raccoon prayers” and even “yeti poets.” Like Neruda, she writes of love, politics, loneliness, and justice.
She also, like Neruda, crafts odes to her elements (cooking greens), the body (hair, hips), and a large-scale idea of America. One of these includes what it means to be a black woman, something she names, implies, connects with, and calls out from—often to her fellow women poets, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Margaret Walker to Maxine Kumin. It is no wonder that one of her earliest poems, from the 1950s, is “To E.D.”—Emily Dickinson, whose short lines and unique punctuation, or lack thereof, she would seem to, as we say, call kin.
Clifton too should be considered alongside the same company she kept when the New York Times cited her first book among the twenty best books of 1969. As the only woman (and poet) in the “fiction” category, Clifton appears alongside Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and even The Godfather by Mario Puzo. (It was a notable year.) Much like these, Clifton’s debut endures as a modern classic.
In Clifton’s hands, the ordinary, including even punctuation, is transformed—like Superman, who figures in some of her poems, she leaps and soars, crossing bridges as one poem has it, “between starshine and clay.” She is also a poet often engaged with the mystic, whether in the form of dream or the “two-headed woman,” soothsayer and homemade prophet. Her unique perspective is reflected in the ways she talks about, and often speaks for, the family, often in its most invisible arenas—from “the lost baby poem” to evictions, to her regular reflections on her birthday and other significant, life-changing dates. It is no wonder that she would write a suite of public poems after September 11th. If Whitman’s poetic self contained a multitude, often through the metaphor of a burgeoning nation, Clifton’s poetic self embraces its multitude through the metaphor of family.
born in babylon: Early Uncollected Poems, 1965–1969
The early, previously unpublished work of Lucille Clifton is remarkable for its clarity. As in the selection found here, we can see in the early work many of the themes of her mature work, noting the ways that, even starting out, Clifton established a unique, consistent perspective. Before her first book, we can see her distinctive voice: a poem like “Black Women,” which opens the section, reveals not only many of her concerns but also her effective use of the line, its music in its nascent form and suggestive of her future development.
The poems in this first section are found in her archive at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) in a folder she labeled “UNPUBLISHED POEMS.” This type has been crossed out sometime later, replaced with her handwritten note: “Old Poems and Ones that May Not Be Poems at all and Maybe should be thrown away One Day”; and then at another point, simply “Bad Poems.” There are some who would say that the mere presence of such phrases confirms these are “not poems at all” and should indeed be thrown away—to do otherwise is to violate the writer’s wishes, never mind whenever they were made. There are some who would urge us to have burned Kafka’s work, hewing to his instructions after his death, no matter the cost to literature.
But we already have seen such burning of poems by Clifton’s own mother. In a story she would recount both in writing and in person, Clifton’s mother wrote poems—after her husband, Clifton’s father, disapproved of them, Ruby Sayles set fire to her own work, spiting both her husband and herself. Clifton reads this act of self-immolation as a cautionary tale: one that instructs on the limits too often placed on black female imagination; and on the cost of not saying so, the dear price of silence. She is writing poems for a mother whose own life and poems were taken away, too soon and forever.
Clifton protests, questions, and crafts her mother’s self-defeating defiance into a rallying cry for her ver
se. To not include these early yet mature poems she saved despite her shifting labels would seem to ignore such a cry, what later she would call, speaking metaphorically about a fox that visits her, “the poet in her, the poet and / the terrible stories she could tell.” These formerly unpublished poems seem to us—and one suspects, to a Clifton who saved them—“bad” only in that sense of the “terrible stories” they tell. They are terrific in both senses.
What’s more, those who knew and loved Clifton well knew she had no problem discarding work. Indeed, she must have done so regularly, as little work from before the 1960s survives; nor do we have any drafts of the poems in her first book, Good Woman (1969), though we do have versions of its typescripts. It appears at least early on, whenever a poem was finished, Clifton’s practice was to destroy her drafts, letting the last version stand.
Fortunately for us, there are a small number of notebook-page poems, written in a delicate penmanship—one of which is dated 1955—that might be best described as juvenilia, complete with rhyme and inverted archaic phrasing. In other words, nothing like the fifty-some poems in the “Bad Poems” folder, which are rather clean, free from handwritten edits, many even prepared and addressed for submission to magazines. It is clear these previously unpublished poems are ones she worked and reworked: we can see her testing out lines, even recasting them (as she does in “Black Women”) in another poem (“Conversation Overheard in a Graveyard”); on a few occasions she rewrites poems entirely, or subtly (as revealed in the two versions of what one version titles “Miss Ann,” slang for the slave mistress). We have tried to represent the range of this work, its depth and also its vitality: “something / like alive.” As such, we have let the typography of these uncollected gems stand, down to the titles, in order to give a sense of their varied origins. I have begun to think of these as “Bad Poems” in the vernacular sense, bad meaning good—they are revelations of the poet Clifton already is, and predict the powerful poet she would become.
Dating of these poems is more an art than a science: though she rarely dated any poems, the earliest date we have on a draft is found on “Old Hundred,” from 1965. Comparing paper and type, not to mention style, I have placed the poems in a rough chronology. With it, we can see her move from more “public” poems in a broad voice to more personal and, dare I say, profound work, including the remarkable set of Mama “letters” and poems about family—themes that she’d return to and that distinguish her work even early on. Here, in their proper, early context, we can see Clifton work toward the poems that make up her remarkable first book.
Recalling the context of the times makes these poems all the more astonishing. Both the poetry world and the world of the 1960s were in upheaval; the years from 1965 to 1969 saw the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the first human walking on the moon, all of which appear in the poems. There was also a revolution in poetry, especially black poetry, which accompanied, described, and descried the unrest in the streets. The Black Arts movement, which Lucille Clifton found herself a part of and in many ways helped to forge, insisted on poems for and about black folks, establishing a black aesthetic based on varying ways of black speech, African structures, and political action.
In such a context, Clifton’s “Black Women” poem is a breakthrough, but a shared one. Black Arts sought many things but above all a public poetry—one aware of its audience and even pitched at times toward a newfound audience that it was both meeting and making. Clifton’s lasting innovation, which may seem obvious only in retrospect, can be glimpsed in this early work: she would move from a public poetry to a more personal one, crafting poems in sequence that consist of “letters” from Mama, poems to a father and “old hoodoo man” she later will term “old liar old lecher,” and poems bridging the divide of racial lines.
By the end of the decade, if Clifton often speaks for a “we,” she is also establishing the intimate “I”—soon rendered as a lowercase “i”—that would infuse her work.
both nonwhite and woman: Good Woman, 1969–1980
It is with Good Times that Clifton’s poetry would appear to the world in 1969, naming the turbulent times in a way few would. The book’s title contains all Clifton’s optimism and irony. In doing so, Clifton counters any predictable kinds of protest, while also offering a group of poems—without any sections, notably interconnected—that take us on a narrative of family as a form of nation. As in her early poems, Clifton finds the site of both protest and possibility in the family: “oh children think about the / good times.” Clifton suggests that a poem can and should be made of this daily survival as a kind of celebration. In this way, her title poem is a blues.
Clifton shifts the focus of poetry from the streets to the stoop, from worrying about “the Man” to writing about the family—and what once was called “the family of man.” The talk of the poem is just as important as its form, which is also musical, repetitive, spoken; we have here “admonitions”:
boys
i don’t promise you nothing
but this
what you pawn
i will redeem
what you steal
i will conceal
my private silence to
your public guilt
is all i got
Interestingly, the original edition has some uppercasing, mostly of proper nouns—and even, occasionally, the “i.” (This would be regularized in later versions, edits honored in this volume.) An early carbon also indicates that Good Times was once known as “New Thing,” proposed with “Illustrations by Sidney, Fredrica, and Channing Clifton,” three of her six children. Such a “New Thing” (capitalized) is not simply that found in the poem “if i stand in my window”—in which the poet presses “breasts / against my windowpane / like black birds pushing against glass / because i am somebody / in a New Thing”—but was also a term used by black folks in the know to mean avant-garde jazz. The freedom the poem seeks is similar to that of free jazz—and may be read just as politically as the “new thing” was.
Mostly because they are as much music as polemic, much like fellow poet Michael S. Harper’s first book from the following year, the poems and politics of Clifton’s debut still resonate, concerned with humanity in the face of the hurricane.
The words “good” and “woman” recur throughout the titles of Clifton’s first four books, indicating their shared concerns. Her individual book titles seem not just to conjugate but conjure such words up: Good Times (1969), Good News About the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), and Two-Headed Woman (1980), create a kind of extraordinary long poem that Clifton would later gather—along with her memoir Generations—in the collection titled Good Woman. Clifton’s “good woman” is the “poor girl” of Bessie Smith’s blues grown up, triumphant.
This Good Woman sequence of books marks a remarkable epic of the everyday, including several key sequences that still seem as vital as when they were written. Like its predecessor, Good News About the Earth gives “good news” in a time of bad, echoing both the headlines and the black spiritual “Ain’t That Good News”; the book also elucidates a more typical Black Arts pantheon of heroes than Good Times, from poems “to bobby seale” and “for my sisters.” (A set of proofs among her literary papers indicate the book was once termed “Good News About the Earth and Other Heroes” before contracting to simply “Good News” and then to its final form.) The volume starts with a poem “after kent state,” where the shooting of peaceful anti-war protesters by National Guardsmen marked a terrifying transformation in the national psyche. Clifton also reads the event along racial lines, despairing that “white ways are / the way of death.” Clearly Kent State and the difficulties of the 1960s affected Clifton’s work as much as it did the national self-perception.
Despite the title, these are often angry poems—she is giving us good news about “the earth,” after all, which isn’t the same as about race relations, the United States, or the state of things. Rather, she draws power fro
m what some might call an ecopoetics:
being property once myself
i have a feeling for it,
that’s why i can talk
about environment.
what wants to be a tree,
ought to be he can be it.
same thing for other things.
same thing for men.
This sense of “the earth” is one that would and will transform throughout her work, furthering and challenging her concerns.
But this is only one part of Good News—for the book ends with the remarkable sequence “some jesus.” This series of poems in the voice of biblical figures does what mere protest often cannot: it provides a radical perspective made new by the poet imagining an inner life of the saints. (The poems also suggest divinity for the “heroes” of the second section by that name, a not unfamiliar narrative for the martyrs of the civil rights struggle.) Her “calling of the disciples,” from Adam and Eve to Lazarus, suggests not only hope but a kind of liberation theology, ending with a “spring song” in which “the world is turning / in the body of Jesus and / the future is possible.” Hers is a deity in the mode of Santería or James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation”—a personal, prophetic God who speaks in a black idiom. Hers is a Black Madonna, a mother with womanist concerns.
Such concerns would soon find their way in poems about birth and death, “lucy and her girls.” She would express this in An Ordinary Woman in poems addressing “the black God, Kali, / a woman God and terrible / with her skulls and breasts.” Such a God both simultaneously combats the “Gods” of white Christianity questioned in her poem about the “New Thing,” but also embraced by “some jesus.” Clifton’s “i” contains a multicultural multitude. At the same time, her claim in the book is just to be “ordinary,” something bolder than declaring black folks are kings and queens. Such ordinariness is triumphant and transformable: An Ordinary Woman is a book of “bones” and “roots,” of roaches and her thirty-eighth year. It is a book approaching what some might call midlife, the poet meditating on possibly outliving her mother, who died at forty-four. This early death and loss is an anniversary her poems constantly circle.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 Page 23
