Lucille Clifton 101

By the end of her career, Lucille Clifton had achieved a rare stature. Critically acclaimed and widely read, she was a lodestar, a bright point for the poetry world to follow. Born in 1936, she is often read alongside fellow writers in the Black Arts and second-wave feminist movements, such as Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde, because of the stories Clifton told about Black life, family, and womanhood. Best known for anthems of triumph and self-definition, such as “won’t you celebrate with me,” Clifton was a prolific poet who wrote fearlessly about a range of important topics. Her signature lyric style is brief, sharp, and unshowy. Her language is direct and uncapitalized yet often mystical in its resonance, full of mystery and surprise. Toni Morrison, the editor of Clifton’s memoir Generations, might have put it best, writing that Clifton’s verse was “seductive with the simplicity of an atom” but also “highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Her humility emanated from a radical commitment to the democratic, a belief that “any stone / can sing” and “your tongue / is useful / not unique.” But she nonetheless cut an authentic and distinctive swath through 20th- and 21st-century poetry, and her work continues to influence contemporary poets from Danez Smith to francine j. harris to Craig Morgan Teicher. The following poems, organized chronologically, offer a brief introduction to a towering figure in US poetry.

“the lost baby poem”
In this early poem, published in Clifton’s second book, Good Times (1972), the poet’s use of image and apostrophe is masterful. In the first stanza, she echoes Robert Hayden, beginning where “Those Winter Sundays” ends: in “love’s austere and lonely offices,” where the sacrifices made by parents and children remain unspoken. But Clifton’s poem pushes further, filling those silences through direct address. The second stanza describes, in vivid detail, the hard world that the speaker’s unborn child never saw. By the third and final stanza, longing and regret is transmuted into prayer and vow—into a commitment to never be “less than a mountain / for your definite brothers and sisters.”

“cutting greens”
Clifton, who raised six children and taught for many years, often wrote at her kitchen table. Especially in early books, her work reflects the everyday realities of juggling family, work, and art; they are extraordinary poems borne from the life of—as she puts it in the title of her third book of poetry—an ordinary woman. This piece from that 1974 collection charts its own course from ordinary to extraordinary: it begins with cooking but ends with “bond of live things everywhere.” Notably, the source and meaning of that “bond” is ambiguous. Clifton’s epiphany arises from a shared Blacknesss, which can be a source of connection but is also an identity formed in part through a history of suffering. Even more fundamentally, she recognizes that “live things everywhere” have a capacity for hunger, conflict, resistance, and, ultimately, mortality. Anything, whether animal or vegetable, the poem suggests in its closing moments, can find itself “under the knife”—or holding the knife.

“homage to my hips”
This well-known poem from two-headed woman (1980) celebrates Clifton’s Black womanhood, acknowledging the history that makes this homage radical (“these hips have never been enslaved”) while also setting that history aside, refusing to be beholden to it (“they don't like to be held back”). Clifton handles poetic tradition in much the same way. She reimagines the sharp, modernist enjambments of William Carlos Williams, for example, separating an adjective from its object (“they don't fit into little / petty places”) to defy the world’s policing of women’s bodies. Clifton’s humor here, alongside her characteristic brevity, also points toward another important precursor and fellow innovator: Emily Dickinson. 

“my dream about the second coming”
Like “john,” part of an earlier sequence that reimagined the Jesus story in African American vernacular, this narrative from Clifton’s Pulitzer Prize–finalist Next (1987) makes an old story new. Its concise sensory details (“the snow in her hair melts away”) and psychological insight (“she doesn’t believe it”) defamiliarizes the annunciation and the nativity by presenting it from Mary’s perspective. How surprising and confusing (even disturbing) would it be to experience immaculate conception? Clifton ends abruptly, on a surreal note: what is the capital S “Something” that Mary gives birth to? How does that gesture revise the second coming story? These questions are answered only by the open space of the page and the silence of her abrupt ending, which invite readers to continue puzzling long after the poem is done. 

“poem in praise of menstruation”
Both the anaphora and the river conceit connect this piece from Quilting (1991) to Langston Hughes, an early champion of her work. Like Hughes in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Clifton uses water as a figure to connect her own experience to something “ancient” and even sacred. She shared this approach with her brethren in the Black Arts movement, with friends such as Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka, who attempted to create new mythologies that centered on Black experience. This particular poem focuses on womanhood, asserting that being “female and brave” is as fundamental to Clifton’s identity as her Blackness. But its spirit is expansive and intersectional, predicated on generosity and possibility, on if and and. 

“far memory”
Clifton returned to the persona poem throughout her career for various purposes—to raise the dead, for example, or revisit childhood in an embodied way. In this sequence from her 1992 collection, The Book of Light, Clifton reflects on her personal experiences—such as her abusive, “betraying father”—in new ways by assuming the identity of a nun. But this change of view has a literal dimension—here Clifton is writing about “another life” she lived, a past embodiment. Though she didn’t publish writing about this until later in life, Clifton had experiences with the supernatural for decades, aligning her with visionary poets such as Blake, Yeats, and her contemporary James Merrill. She claimed she communicated with her dead mother via Ouija board and caught glimpses of her past lives. This poem, then, can be read as an oblique meditation on this kind of “far memory,” an assertion “that we carry our baggage / in our cupped hands / when we burst through / the waters of our mother.”

“jasper texas 1998”
First included in her National Book Award–winning selected poems blessing the boats (2000), Clifton’s response to the 1998 murder of James Byrd by three white supremacists is startling in its compression and power. With just a few short lines, Clifton not only bears witness to the brutality of the crime but also gives Byrd back the agency his killers denied him and raises serious questions about what it means to have a voice in a racist culture. In a cutting satire of so-called democracy in the United States, Byrd’s severed head is “chosen to speak” by the “members” of his body and offers readers (unsurprisingly) a searing indictment of a broken body politic. “why,” it asks, “should i call the white man brother” when the actions of these killers reveal just how farcical the country’s principles of equality and fraternity are. 

“here rests”
The generous gaze of this funny, melancholic epitaph from 2004 is informed by a lifetime of transforming life into art. Clifton’s process is addressed directly in the poem itself: “when you poem this / and you will,” her older sister says, “remember the Book of Job.” The moment points to the open-book authenticity of Clifton’s work while also acknowledging—in Josephine’s self-consciousness, in the Biblical symbolism—the layers of artifice writing involves. But above all, Josephine’s back talk is a sly way for Clifton to draw her sister—knowing, literate, lively—on the page on her sister’s own terms, irreducible to tropes.