REMEMBERING LUCILLE CLIFTON
Good morning, everyone. Here we are, still deep in winter (and deep snow in many places), yet ready once more to think about poetry.
Lucille Clifton was not only a famous African-American poet but one of our greatest and most memorable American poets. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, she was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a visiting professor at Columbia University, and in 2006 a fellow at Dartmouth College. Her first book, a poetry collection called Good Times, was published in 1969 and named by The New York Times as one of the year’s best books. This was quickly succeeded by a number of other highly-regarded poetry books, a memoir, and a number of children’s books. Among her other accomplishments, she raised six children. Her death in 2010 at the age of 73 was a loss to all of us.
I had the privilege of meeting and conversing with this great lady sometime in the 1980’s, when directing a poetry reading series for the Arts Council of Princeton (NJ). Although we had a Board of Directors, I had creative freedom in selecting poets to introduce to our audience and chose them from those whose books had given me such pleasure that I wanted to share it. Lucille Clifton did not disappoint. Having grown up in Buffalo, New York, and attended SUNY Fredonia, both of which I knew very well, we had much to talk about, both at dinner and as I picked her up and drove her back to her hotel. I was sorry to say goodbye.
Her poems are strong and beautiful, as was she, and she delved into topics rarely broached in poetry at that time. She was famous for poems that women loved, such as “homage to my hips,” (always in lower-case, of course), which begins:
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
and concludes:
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
She was always asked to read it, which she did, magnificently and to uproarious applause.
Nothing daunted, she also wrote “homage to my hair,” ending:
the grayer she do get, good God,
the blacker she do be!
Later poems included “poem to my uterus” and the beautiful “to my last period,” which begins:
“well girl, goodbye …
and goes on to say:
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.
I can only recommend that you read her books for yourselves, especially Quilting and Good Woman.
–Irene Wills
Poetry Editor