Clifton often writes poems of anniversary and commemoration, especially around the anniversary of her own birth. We can see this even in her early work, as in “the poet at thirty two.” At the risk of interrupting the sequence of Clifton’s books we consider sacred, we have included here a small number of such occasional poems found in her papers or given to friends, placing them in the chronology of the Collected. Several are from a manuscript that seems to have been dispersed after Ordinary Woman, or have been subsumed by later projects—perhaps explaining the timeframe and transformation between the woman as “ordinary” and “two-headed.”
With Ordinary Woman, Clifton is not so much a poet of elegy or public memorial as of loss anticipated, remembered, refused:
in the thirty eighth
year of my life,
surrounded by life,
a perfect picture of
blackness blessed,
i had not expected this
loneliness.
What a sense of upending expectations of blackness and blessedness—rhyming with “loneliness” instead. There is, as in the sound of Charlie Parker’s horn, the plaintiveness of John Coltrane, the blues of Bessie and Billie—all the heroes of Black Arts, “blessed” but dying young—an almost overwhelming yearning. Rather than refer to, or merely describe this yearning, the repetition and chorusing of Clifton’s poems earn and enact it. If Dante’s epic begins “in the middle of life,” Clifton’s epic pauses there—fearing the tale will remain in an ordinary purgatory.
For Clifton’s title Ordinary Woman is both a wish and wishful thinking: to be “ordinary” is a respite and a calling, is a way of staking a daily poetry, but also a poetry that brings the extraordinary within grasp. The book ends with an evocation of the poet as “lucy one-eye,” the nickname itself a prophet’s:
i was born in a hotel,
a maskmaker.
my bones were knit by
a perilous knife.
my skin turned around
at midnight and
i entered the earth in
a woman jar.
i learned the world all
wormside up
and this is my yes
my strong fingers;
i was born in a bed of
good lessons
and it has made me
wise.
As a maskmaker, the poet is herself perilous, filled with yes and with strong fingers, all which she will name further in her next book.
With Two-Headed Woman, Clifton finds herself at the height of her powers—and makes such powers literal. The “some jesus” sequence—like the informal one before it in Good Times that evoked kinfolk “tyrone” and “willie b”; like the early “Mama” poems—establishes an “i” that is as American as it is eternal, as biblical as it is black. From here forward, Clifton’s books, while made up of individual poems—many of them showstoppers—would also include discrete and informal sequences, often about the world of spirit. Two-Headed Woman would return to Biblical settings, evoking Mary as well as a tremendous series “to the blind” and “to the lame.” By aligning with such figures as those in need of mercy and the traditional Christian mother of mercy, Clifton evoked not just an “environment” but a humanity that needed voicing.
Taken together, Clifton’s spiritual poems, crossing her entire poetic life—and even its afterlife, included here—form a sustained devotional of remarkable clarity and complexity. The result is reminiscent of the work of her friend and fellow poet Denise Levertov and the Unholy Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom Levertov wrote on), not to mention The Temple of metaphysical poet George Herbert. To my eye, her lowercase litanies and questioning catechisms remain as shaped and sprung as her predecessors who saw the radical forms of their verse enacting the challenges of faith.
Facing such a challenge, Clifton’s personal pantheon would give way to a myth of self. Two-Headed Woman finds a metaphor for what might be called Clifton’s womanism, or black feminism, but also for the poet herself. The “two-headed woman” is that conjure woman of legend and tradition, the hoodoo practitioner not to be trusted but to be admired and even feared; she is the artist incarnate, filled with secrets which she also reveals and revels in. A still-uncollected poem, “the two headed woman blues,” found in her papers (but not this volume) makes this connection perhaps too explicit between the conjure woman and the blues:
her four eyes notice
in all directions.
her ears overhear
what she’s not listening for.
For Clifton, such power is not just folklore, but is embodied in the fact of her being born polydactyl, with twelve fingers. This “witchy” birth both marks and connects her to the other women in her family, including her mother, born with this genetic trait. Extra fingers are a sign of Clifton being an artist, but also of loss; the poet recasts the myth of being “born in a hotel”—a place, like the crossroads, of transition and mythic transfer—with the fact of being “born with twelve fingers.” One makes a legend of the self; the other makes the fact of the self into a legend. Two-Headed Woman is autobiography as epic.
We might remember too that a “dactyl” is a form of a poetic line (whose name from the Greek means “finger”) with one stressed syllable, followed by two unstressed (or “short”) ones. While not strictly syllabic, Clifton’s verse at this time has a many-fingered music:
i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter.
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and
dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn’t understand
the powerful memories of ghosts. now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter and me
through our terrible shadowy hands.
These “shadowy hands” are also the shadow book of her mother, long ago sacrificed. They also contrast with the body Clifton praises in classic poems like “homage to my hips” and “homage to my hair.” These poems of praise are both funny and serious, shadowy and showy.
After Good News and An Ordinary Woman came Generations (1976), Clifton’s memoir of her family. Edited by Toni Morrison, the memoir also evokes the “Dahomey woman” of her grandmother, crafting yet another tradition her book inhabits. Clifton would gather Generations, along with her first four poetry books, in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980, effectively ending the first phase of her mature writing. One-eyed, two-headed, twelve-fingered, Dahomean, and good—even when she’s bad—this woman is a creation as remarkable as Whitman’s American “I,” ordinary in her extraordinariness and extraordinary in what she calls and makes ordinary.
what did i see to be except myself?: blessing the boats, 1988–2000
What would be next for Clifton, appearing the same year as Good Woman, was a book aptly titled Next (1987). Starting with a section declaring “we are all next,” the book is filled with an array of “us”: Crazy Horse and “history,” leukemia and shapeshifter poems. A sequence of dreams record an array of ancestry, philosophy, and even “my dream about being white.” The poems also reckon with “the death of fred clifton,” her husband who passed from cancer in 1984 at the age of 49. Just as her mother speaks in one poem about her own death, reminiscent of dream, her late husband speaks from beyond:
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.
This is not just a description of the afterlife, but the life Clifton’s poems seek. It is a poetic life—and line—that takes William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things” and heads inward, and upward.
In a confessional era, Next is made up not of
confessions so much as dreamscapes, a strategy which paradoxically turns them not less real but more immediate, haunting. Clifton writes of enduring and surviving cancer herself, leukemia transforming into “dream/ritual,” “white rabbit,” and even in one unrealized poem found in the archive, “leukemia as race.” Poems also invoke the “shapeshifter,” a menacing male presence suggestive of abuse. No wonder then the body is the seat of struggle and praise. What’s more, for Clifton there’s no split between the body, the spirit, and the intellect: no ideas but in the body.
Next was followed by Quilting (1991), a book that took the title’s “women’s work” as its galvanizing force, sharing the quilters’ communal strength and sophisticated structures. In the title poem, Clifton makes quilting a female inheritance that’s part of an “unknown world” too often ignored; the book is not mere complaint, but a reckoning with “wild blessings.” There are poems “in praise of menstruation,” “to my uterus,” “to my last period”: “well girl, goodbye, / after thirty-eight years.” One of my favorites is “wishes for sons,” both a blessing and a curse:
i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.
i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.
I’ve read from and taught this poem a number of times and am always struck by its generosity and humor, something we can lose sight of given Clifton’s directness, her bravery in saying the unsaid. There’s also a temptation to overlook the sophistication of her craft, whether in the pacing or the deadpan lines, not to mention the thoughtful paradoxes (and double negatives) of the poem’s end:
let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.
In Clifton’s hands, the double negatives add up to a wild blessing.
With her next book, Book of Light (1993), Clifton’s first name is again something she writes about and through. Lucille means “light,” something she earlier evokes in the poem “the light that came to lucille clifton” (which once had been the title of the whole of Two-Headed Woman). Such a light involves the visitations for ill and good that she evokes often in her work, from a “yeti poet” to Superman to “leda” poems that evoke abuse at the hands of a father. These poems evoke some of The Terrible Stories (1996) that would name her next volume, where the visitation would be from a fox she called a fellow poet.
Like Ted Hughes, Clifton had always used the mystic just beyond what’s seen to frame and inform poems; like Hughes, this poetic regularly involved a shifting set of totemic animals. Where for Hughes the fox and the crow were emblems of myth, the fox that first visits in The Terrible Stories is more like “the light that came to lucille clifton”—a nightly visitation that’s a version of the poet. Fox is also decidedly a female figure, much the way Clifton genders the moon:
the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.
These visitations continue to illuminate a path both in her poetry and private life that she would not fully reveal to readers until later on.
Though she had been the first person to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for two books in the same year (for Good Woman and Next) and had been finalist for the National Book Award (for The Terrible Stories), Lucille Clifton finally won the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000. This was a great acknowledgment of the path she had been clearing in books gathered since Good Woman, but also of the new poems of Blessing. Many suggest her physical frailty, and there is a sorrow found in the lines, a shade less defiant: “i am tired of understanding.”
The self in Blessing’s new poems is weary, but also brave; a poem like “donor” addresses the kidney transplant Clifton received from her daughter, but not without telling a story on the self addressed to the daughter, admitting to “trying not to have you.” The body, ever-present in Clifton, is here less triumphant, but no less truthful or admirable. There is a “praise song” but it is to an aunt saved from suicide; there are protests of lynching, not in the past but in present-day Texas. These are poems of blessing, in other words, as only Clifton can craft. In her powerful phrase, the poems announce “grief for what is born human, / grief for what is not.”
The poems also invoke mortality, often through its opposite: heaven figures here, and paradise, including the exiled Lucifer (whose name she well knows, means “light” too). But perhaps the most fitting figure in Blessing is Lazarus, whose resurrection from the dead seems a metaphor for transcending sickness and sorrow, while recognizing both. As the title poem wishes, “may you in your innocence / sail through this to that” while Lazarus says “on the third day i contemplate / what i was moving from / what i was moving toward.” This or that, from or toward, the poems wonder—and wander as only a true poet can, filled with Keatsian negative capability—Clifton’s kind of double negatives urging us forward.
No wonder her next book would be called Mercy.
bridge between starshine and clay: 2000–2010
In the late 1970s Clifton received a series of messages from the spirit world, examples of what is sometimes called “spirit writing” and Clifton herself occasionally referred to as “automatic writing.” Such writings place Clifton squarely in a tradition of prophecy, from Jeremiah to two-headed women, as well as in that fellowship of poets who directly engage the spirit world in their writings. Modern English-language poets from Yeats to Robert Duncan have used spiritualism as generative structures; James Merrill even used the Ouija board to organize his modern epic. Around the same time as Merrill, Clifton received “the message from The Ones”—or The Ones conjured her up—crafting a spiritual epic alongside her poetic one.
Such spirit writing, amounting to four fascinating boxes at Emory University’s MARBL, testify to a multitude of often daily sessions for recording these messages. If spirituality had always been on her mind and in her poetry, here it became manifest. Much like the uncollected early work, Clifton seems to have admired this work—she certainly does not seem ashamed of it, but one imagines she wasn’t sure what exactly to do with it. With Mercy in 2004, Clifton finally transcribed some aspects of “the messages” and allowed them to be published as the final section of the book.
Not quite a poem, or at least one we might think of only from her, these poems channel a prophetic and otherworldly voice, quite literally:
you are not
your brothers keeper
you are
your brother
The result is a poetry that is both hers and not hers, one that may remind us of old forms, both the oral form of folklore and that old, sung, lyric art, the psalm. They seem to me also in a continuum with the selfsame mystical African American traditions that titled Two-Headed Woman but also broader senses of motherwit and the searching spirituality of Jean Toomer, who after his Cane would write a significant set of Essentials, or aphorisms, not to mention his searching, mystical poem, “Blue Meridian.” Her effort also evokes William Blake, whose work she recalls in her poem “blake” from The Terrible Stories:
saw them glittering in the trees,
their quills erect among the leaves,
angels everywhere. we need new words
for what this is, this hunger entering our
loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays
of hope. we need the flutter that can save
us, something that will swirl across the face
of what we have become and bring us grace.
back north, i sit again in my own home
dreaming of blake, searching the branches
for just one poem.
With Mercy, Clifton writes what she fears may be “last words,” titling poems “cancer” and “after oz”; she is writing too
after September 11th, which appears in the sequence “september song.” Mercy is what the poems seek and show us, dedicated to her two children who passed away in 2000 and 2004: “the only mercy is memory.” Mercy also manages to be a book of Clifton’s present, despite what might in other hands be pure elegy. Is the poet wrestling with mortality? Are The Ones welcoming the poet into an afterlife, or an other world Clifton clearly saw as nearer and less faraway than others might?
Part of the power of Clifton’s late work comes from how contemplative yet forward-looking it is. With Voices (2008), the last full-length book published in her lifetime, Clifton returned to questions of race with a newfound grace and humor. (She told me once she considered calling the collection Colored Girls.) Figures like “aunt jemima” and “uncle ben” became part of her pantheon; by taking on pop culture, Clifton did not abandon the totemic world of Yeti and The Ones, instead offering a “raccoon prayer” and revisiting Crazy Horse under his original name, Witko.
What Clifton seeks is a community—one we realize she has been crafting all along, making family members myths and myths familiar and familial. She warns us against holding such myths too dear—or rather, “aunt jemima” does, when she speaks—but Clifton also manages an intimacy suggested by her section titles, “hearing” and “being heard.” The last section contains “ten oxherding pictures,” a sequence Clifton first published in a fine press limited edition in 1988. This work in many ways does what The Ones did for the other volume, consolidating and communicating with another tradition, here Buddhist. Her multitudes keep multiplying.
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 Page 24
