Lucille Clifton, June 27, 1936 - February 13, 2010.

[EFerrari]

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, on June 27, 1936. Her first book of poems, Good Times, was rated one of the best books of the year by the New York Times in 1969.

Clifton remained employed in state and federal government positions until 1971, when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she completed two collections: Good News About the Earth (1972) and An Ordinary Woman (1974).
She has gone on to write several other collections of poetry, including Voices (BOA Editions, 2008); Mercy (2004); Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (2000), which won the National Book Award; The Terrible Stories (1995), which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Book of Light (1993); Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991); Next: New Poems (1987)

Her collection Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Two-Headed Woman (1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee, was the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize. She has also written Generations: A Memoir (1976) and more than sixteen books for children, written expressly for an African-American audience.

Of her work, Rita Dove has written:

"In contrast to much of the poetry being written today—intellectualized lyricism characterized by an application of inductive thought to unusual images—Lucille Clifton's poems are compact and self-sufficient...Her revelations then resemble the epiphanies of childhood and early adolescence, when one's lack of preconceptions about the self allowed for brilliant slippage into the metaphysical, a glimpse into an egoless, utterly thingful and serene world."

Her honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award, and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize.

In 1999, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

After a long battle with cancer, Lucille Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of 73.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/79

Bill Moyers: Remembering Lucille Clifton

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02262010/watch2.html



Homage to My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top




telling our stories

the fox came every evening to my door
asking for nothing. my fear
trapped me inside, hoping to dismiss her
but she sat till morning, waiting.

at dawn we would, each of us,
rise frm our haunches, look through the glass
then walk away.

did she gather her village around her
and sing of the hairless moon face,
the trembling snout, the ignorant eyes?

child, i tell you now it was not
the animal blood i was hiding from,
it was the poet in her, the poet and
the terrible stories she could tell.

* * *

Lucille Clifton reading two poems at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEVdSYqyk2Y



Admonitions

boys
i don't promise you nothing
but this
what you pawn
i will redeem
what you steal
i will conceal
my private silence to
your public guilt
is all i got

girls
first time a white man
opens his fly
like a good thing
we'll just laugh
laugh real loud my
black women

children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny
say
she is a poet
she don't have no sense









To you, my sister, the better makir.

[ChicagoSuz219]

1. Thank you for posting her poems. n/t

[JTFrog]

2. K&R

[elleng]

3. THANK YOU!

children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny
say
she is a poet
she don't have no sense

O8)

[EFerrari]

4. Obituaries

February 17, 2010
Lucille Clifton, Poet Who Explored Intricacies of Black Lives, Dies at 73
By MARGALIT FOX

Lucille Clifton, a distinguished American poet whose work trained lenses wide and narrow on the experience of being black and female in the 20th century, exploring vast subjects like the indignities of history and intimate ones like the indignities of the body, died on Saturday in Baltimore. She was 73 and lived in Columbia, Md.

The precise cause of death had not been determined, her sister, Elaine Philip, told The Associated Press on Sunday. Ms. Clifton, who had cancer, had been hospitalized recently with an infection.

Ms. Clifton received a National Book Award in 2000 for “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000,” published by BOA Editions. In 2007, she became the first African-American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award that is one of American poetry’s signal honors.

Her book “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980” (BOA, 1987) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1988.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/arts/17clifton.html?pagewanted=print

Lucille Clifton, one-time poet laureate of Md., dies at 73
February 14, 2010|By Nick Madigan | [e-mail]

Former state poet laureate Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award winner whose work was lauded for its "moral quality," died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. She was 73.

With a mix of profundity, earthiness and humor - amply evident in her 11 books of poetry - Ms. Clifton often defied conventional notions of poetic expression, but in many ways her themes were traditional, Wallace R. Peppers wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

"She writes of her family because she is greatly interested in making sense of their lives and relationships; she writes of adversity and success in the ghetto community; and she writes of her role as a poet," according to Mr. Peppers.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-02-14/news/bal-md.ob.clifton14feb14_1_fred-clifton-poet-laureate-lucille-clifton

Lucille Clifton, Md. poet laureate and National Book Award winner

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 21, 2010

When she was a girl, Lucille Clifton sat on her mother's lap and listened to her recite poetry. Her mother never made it through elementary school, but she knew the power of language, and her poems stayed in her daughter's head forever.

But another memory seared itself in young Lucille's memory, too: when her father said no wife of his would be a poet. She watched as her thwarted mother threw her pages of verse into a burning furnace.

Years later, Ms. Clifton would remember this moment in a poem of her own, which she called "fury":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/20/AR2010022003419.html

Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies
By Jay Rey
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: February 14, 2010, 12:14 pm / 7 comments
Published: February 15, 2010, 1:34 am

Lucille Clifton, born and raised in the Buffalo area before going on to achieve some of the literary world's highest honors as a major American poet, died Saturday morning at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore at age 73, her sister told The Buffalo News.

Clifton had been ill for some time with some type of infection, and had undergone surgery to remove her colon Friday, but her exact cause of death is still uncertain, Clifton's sister, Elaine Philip said today.

"We really don't know," Philip said, "she had an infection throughout her body, and we don't know yet where it was coming from."

Clifton, who lived in Columbia, Md., and was the former poet laureate of the state, was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

She won the National Book Award in 2001 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000," and in 2007, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded one of the literary world's highest honors — the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Foundation.

http://www.buffalonews.com/2010/02/13/955670/clifton-honored-poet-from-buffalo.html

Lucille Clifton dies at 73; award-winning poet
The descendant of slaves and former Maryland poet laureate who won the National Book Award in 2000, she was known for spare, elegant and frequently autobiographical poems.
February 21, 2010|By Elaine Woo

When Lucille Clifton was a girl in the 1940s, she saw her mother burning poems in their furnace. A grade-school dropout who loved words and wrote traditional verse, her mother had an offer to publish her work in a book, but her husband and children scorned the idea of a poet in the family.

Their rejection was so stinging that she turned the cherished words to cinders in a fit of fury and sorrow that Clifton never forgot:

her hand is crying.

her hand is clutching

a sheaf of papers.

poems.

she gives them up.

they burn

jewels into jewels.

her eyes are animals.

each hank of her hair

is a serpent's obedient

wife.

she will never recover.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/21/local/la-me-lucille-clifton21-2010feb21

[Rhiannon12866]

5. K&R! Just saw a tribute to her at the end of Bill Moyers...

Amazing and talented lady... O8)

[Delphinus]

6. Thank you.

Moving prose. :)

[Kind of Blue]

7. Thanks for posting, EFerrari. I had no idea that

she has passed.

I met her once when she was a writer in residence at GWU before I knew her to be a famous lady. She was Extremely Warm and reminded me of my mom, quick to smile, ready to engage, and gave me a big hug when I told her how her poetry moved me. I'd see her around campus and wave and she'd wave back. She was a gem and I felt lifted in her presence or just seeing her walking around.

Rest in Peace, Ms. Clifton. You did well.

[EFerrari]

9. I had no idea either until someone mentioned it at Howard Zinn's memorial.

Reading her work out loud made me understand what poetry is and how it works. :hi:

[Kind of Blue]

11. Nice appreciation story about her this morning on NPR.

:hi: How timely is this? I was surprised to hear it and thought you might enjoy it.
Poet Lucille Clifton: "Everything Is Connected"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124113507

[EFerrari]

12. Thanks so much, Kind of Blue.

:hi:

[yellowwood]

8. Thanks for this discussion

if something should happen

for instance
if the sea should break
and crash against the decks
and below decks break the cargo
against the sides of the sea
or
if the chains should break
and crash against the decks
and below decks break the sides
of the sea
or
if the seas of cities
should crash against each other
and break the chains
and break the walls holding down the cargo
and break the sides of the seas
and all the waters of the earth wash together
in a rush of breaking
where will the captains run and
to what harbor?

Lucille Clifton

[mix]

10. k r

RIP

[Octafish]

13. NYT said she was a 'Poet Who Explored Intricacies of Black Lives.'

Ms. Clifton explored the truth of all lives.

As a man with no sense, I am humbled to read her work.

Thank you for sharing, EFerrari.

[EFerrari]

14. I had the same reaction to that headline.

:hi:

[EFerrari]

15. Poetry Everywhere: "won't you celebrate with me?" (PBS video + )

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/clifton.html


To read this and other poems by Lucille Clifton, as well as biographical information about the poet, please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1304

"One should wish to celebrate more than to be celebrated." Lucille Clifton. :party:

won't you celebrate with me

by Lucille Clifton
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylonbabylon Once a great city in Biblical times, see Psalms 137; also used as a dismissive term in western Black cultures for “anything to which the Black consciousness represents the degenerate or oppressive state of white culture” (OED)
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge betweenbetween / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”
starshine and clay,between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

[EFerrari]

16. oh antic God

“oh antic God”

by Lucille Clifton


oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.