Lucille Clifton

Ever since I heard about her death on February 13, I've been meaning to write a post about the amazing poet Lucille Clifton. Then, the other day, I was catching up on some podcasts and came across this terrific tribute from Poetry Off the Shelf. Most of the podcast a reairing of a 2007 Curtis Fox interview with Clifton.

There's great material here, well worth ten minutes of your time: first off all, you get such a wonderful sense of Clifton as a person. She's funny, eloquent, and inspiring. She says that she started writing poems as a way of answering back to Emily Dickinson (!). When asked when she realized she could be a professional poet, she answers that she's still kind of waiting to find that out. She makes the point that when her first book of poems was published, her children were 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. How did she find time to write with six little kids? "Well, I did what I had to do...I started in my head. I didn't write poems down until they were nearly done...Today it's called multi-tasking...then it was just being a mother and doing what one had to in the way that one had to do it."

She reads four poems, "'oh antic god,'" "jasper texas 1998," "homage to my hips," and "won't you celebrate with me."

She and Curtis Fox discuss "jasper texas 1998" in some detail, since it is less "life-affirming" than some of her other poems. Clifton gives us a richer sense of her poetic purpose when she says "I was not put here to write pretty things," but to write about life, good and bad. She also points to the poetry's endurance in the face of violence and pain: "after something like that happens [the murder of James Byrd], that I continue to write is affirming, that poetry continues to come to me."

About "homage to my hips," she states, "I am a luxury-sized woman...In the United States...we like all kind of luxury-sized things, except women, which is very annoying." Too funny. Incidentally, about a week ago, I was talking to a colleague about a seminar she will participating in about "beauty" and I went right to this poem. I love what she says here about beauty--how she challenges the dominant standards of beauty and celebrates her own. Gotta love her response to Fox's question: "Was [the poem] a response to the feminist movement?" She laughs and says, "No, it was a response to my big hips!"

She also asserts, "I am an American poet." That's a pretty cool assertion for a woman so often called an "African-American poet" or an "African American woman poet" to make. The latter two labels do matter, of course, and are worth discussing and embracing but, as we've talked about in my Ethnic American Literature class this semester, they also threaten to cordon off writers into restrictive boxes. At one point, she states, "I am interested in writing about what it means to be a human and ways to do that with grace and courage." What a woman. What a poet. Give the recording a listen. You won't be disappointed.