I have always loved National Public Radio (NPR), and I love coming across certain "gems" of stories that really make me think and reflect on my teaching. One article from this past Sunday was no exception. I was first introduced to poet Lucille Clifton as a graduate student at Harvard in a learning and teaching class with my advisor. I hope you enjoy it and that it brings out a little bit of the inner writer in you that may have been afraid to come out or in hiding for years...
For the full article or to listen to the audio stories or Clifton's poems, please visit: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124113507.
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Poet Lucille Clifton: 'Everything Is Connected'
by DAVID GURA
Mark Lennihan/AP
Over the course of her long career, Lucille Clifton received Pulitzer Prize nominations and a National Book Award. In 2007, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She is pictured above in 2000.
February 28, 2010
As a girl growing up in the 1940s on Lake Erie, Lucille Clifton never thought she would become a poet.
"The only poets I ever saw were the portraits that hung on the walls in elementary school in Buffalo, N.Y.," she said in 1993. "Old, dead white men, with beards, from New England."
Clifton did not look like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman. She was a woman and an African-American, and later, a wife and a mother of six children.
But Clifton did become a poet — and after a long, successful career, she died on Feb. 13 at age 73 from complications from cancer.
Clifton cared deeply about American history and her own personal history. To her, they were connected.
"One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected," Clifton said. "There is so much history that we have not validated."
According to Elizabeth Alexander, a poet who teaches at Yale University, Clifton was a brave poet.
"There are some poets who are interested in writing at the edge, and face-to-face with death," she said. "And Clifton is the bravest in that regard."
In her poems, Clifton reexamined the history of the United States. She bravely tackled tough subjects: injustice, racism, sexism and the apocalyptic.
"She said, 'With my poetry, I hope to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,'" Alexander said.
Just after Sept. 11, Clifton spoke with NPR's Susan Stamberg: "After the event, people turned to poetry," Clifton remarked. "They realized instinctively that there is something here that helps us with our insides."
Clifton could have — and often did have — a remarkably light touch, a penchant for humor.
Pulitzer Prize-wining poet Rita Dove, who teaches at the University of Virginia, said that Clifton's poetry was evocative, open to interpretation.
"She could state something very simply and still have a slightly ironic context to it, or subtext to it, that some people would get and some wouldn't," Dove said. "It was just a little wink."
In print, Clifton's poems look distinctive, with limited punctuation and few capital letters.
That spare style added to her work's powerful intimacy, says poet Kevin Young, who teaches in the English department at Emory University, in Atlanta. He helped the university purchase Clifton's papers.
"There is a kind of quietude in that lowercase, but also a boldness of speech," Young said. "She's just talking to you, but she's also sort of singing at the same time."
According to Dove, writing with the kind of concision Clifton mastered is challenging.
"It is so much more difficult to write simply than it is to write in a complex manner," Dove said. "What she did, to pare it down to the essential and still have it sing, that is hard."
Over the course of her long career, Clifton received Pulitzer Prize nominations and a National Book Award. In 2007, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, one of the highest honors in American letters.
According to Alexander, Clifton lived with serious illness for decades.
"Her life in her body was not comfortable," Alexander said.
Clifton leaves behind a long legacy. She published more than 30 books and influenced countless poets, including Young, Dove and Alexander, through her writing and teaching, at the Cave Canem poetry retreat and St. Mary's College of Maryland.
"She inspired not just respect and admiration, but very, very, very deep love," Alexander said. "I miss her profoundly."
I also cannot resist sharing some of my favorite poems by Clifton:
cruelty
by LUCILLE CLIFTON
cruelty. don't talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.
when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country
and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.
it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.
i didn't ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.
now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.
study the masters
by LUCILLE CLIFTON
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smothered the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words;
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.
the lesson of the falling leaves
by LUCILLE CLIFTON
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god.
i agree with the leaves.
Poems reprinted by permission, BOA Editions Ltd.
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