the poetry of Lucille Clifton
National Book Award winner, Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, children’s books author, mother, memoirist, Jeopardy champion, survivor, poet, and national treasure, Lucille Clifton was at the height of her poetic powers when she died in February 2010.
Clifton’s work is phenomenally varied, and simultaneously of the moment—fresh and forward-seeking. In tracing the roots (and telling the tales) of a black family, her memoir Generations was groundbreaking and could be said to forecast the rise in the attention paid to black genealogy. But Clifton’s work also critiques family and country, mourns and makes known what one book of hers calls “the terrible stories.” She’s as interested in soul as body, her poetry paying “homage to my hips” and providing “wishes for sons”; biblical in her lines as Whitman, she invites an American “I,” this time lowercase.
To mention Clifton’s winning Jeopardy is not to say that Clifton is interested in trivia, but rather, in knowledge. (The win is something she was quite proud of—as well the set of encyclopedias that came with it.) As you’ll recall, the Jeopardy game show provides the answers and contestants (and we at home) provide the questions; in her work, Clifton’s questioning of ourselves adds up to an answer, and in her answering our need for history or pride or praise she also asks a lot of us, too.
At a Poetry Society of America event honoring her in 2004, I called Clifton our Neruda, and I still think this is accurate: like him, she’s interested in the large issues, the human ones, and does them justice in a literal sense. I was going to say that she does so through small things, but looking over her work of nearly fifty years there’s nothing small but the lack of capital letters; instead we have dreams and shapeshifters and elegy and many kinds of visitation, whether from a fox or “the Ones.” Like poet Ted Hughes, she writes of animal and spirit and any number of spirit animals, including “raccoon prayers” and even “yeti poets.” Like Neruda, she writes of love, politics, loneliness, and justice.
She also, like Neruda, crafts odes to her elements (cooking greens), the body (hair, hips), and a large-scale idea of America. One of these includes what it means to be a black woman, something she names, implies, connects with, and calls out from—often to her fellow women poets, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Margaret Walker to Maxine Kumin. It is no wonder that one of her earliest poems, from the 1950s, is “To E.D.”—Emily Dickinson, whose short lines and unique punctuation, or lack thereof, she would seem to, as we say, call kin.
Clifton too should be considered alongside the same company she kept when the New York Times cited her first book among the twenty best books of 1969. As the only woman (and poet) in the “fiction” category, Clifton appears alongside Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and even The Godfather by Mario Puzo. (It was a notable year.) Much like these, Clifton’s debut endures as a modern classic.
In Clifton’s hands, the ordinary, including even punctuation, is transformed—like Superman, who figures in some of her poems, she leaps and soars, crossing bridges as one poem has it, “between starshine and clay.” She is also a poet often engaged with the mystic, whether in the form of dream or the “two-headed woman,” soothsayer and homemade prophet. Her unique perspective is reflected in the ways she talks about, and often speaks for, the family, often in its most invisible arenas—from “the lost baby poem” to evictions, to her regular reflections on her birthday and other significant, life-changing dates. It is no wonder that she would write a suite of public poems after September 11th. If Whitman’s poetic self contained a multitude, often through the metaphor of a burgeoning nation, Clifton’s poetic self embraces its multitude through the metaphor of family.
born in babylon: Early Uncollected Poems, 1965–1969
The early, previously unpublished work of Lucille Clifton is remarkable for its clarity. As in the selection found here, we can see in the early work many of the themes of her mature work, noting the ways that, even starting out, Clifton established a unique, consistent perspective. Before her first book, we can see her distinctive voice: a poem like “Black Women,” which opens the section, reveals not only many of her concerns but also her effective use of the line, its music in its nascent form and suggestive of her future development.
The poems in this first section are found in her archive at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) in a folder she labeled “UNPUBLISHED POEMS.” This type has been crossed out sometime later, replaced with her handwritten note: “Old Poems and Ones that May Not Be Poems at all and Maybe should be thrown away One Day”; and then at another point, simply “Bad Poems.” There are some who would say that the mere presence of such phrases confirms these are “not poems at all” and should indeed be thrown away—to do otherwise is to violate the writer’s wishes, never mind whenever they were made. There are some who would urge us to have burned Kafka’s work, hewing to his instructions after his death, no matter the cost to literature.
But we already have seen such burning of poems by Clifton’s own mother. In a story she would recount both in writing and in person, Clifton’s mother wrote poems—after her husband, Clifton’s father, disapproved of them, Ruby Sayles set fire to her own work, spiting both her husband and herself. Clifton reads this act of self-immolation as a cautionary tale: one that instructs on the limits too often placed on black female imagination; and on the cost of not saying so, the dear price of silence. She is writing poems for a mother whose own life and poems were taken away, too soon and forever.
Clifton protests, questions, and crafts her mother’s self-defeating defiance into a rallying cry for her verse. To not include these early yet mature poems she saved despite her shifting labels would seem to ignore such a cry, what later she would call, speaking metaphorically about a fox that visits her, “the poet in her, the poet and / the terrible stories she could tell.” These formerly unpublished poems seem to us—and one suspects, to a Clifton who saved them—“bad” only in that sense of the “terrible stories” they tell. They are terrific in both senses.
What’s more, those who knew and loved Clifton well knew she had no problem discarding work. Indeed, she must have done so regularly, as little work from before the 1960s survives; nor do we have any drafts of the poems in her first book, Good Woman (1969), though we do have versions of its typescripts. It appears at least early on, whenever a poem was finished, Clifton’s practice was to destroy her drafts, letting the last version stand.
Fortunately for us, there are a small number of notebook-page poems, written in a delicate penmanship—one of which is dated 1955—that might be best described as juvenilia, complete with rhyme and inverted archaic phrasing. In other words, nothing like the fifty-some poems in the “Bad Poems” folder, which are rather clean, free from handwritten edits, many even prepared and addressed for submission to magazines. It is clear these previously unpublished poems are ones she worked and reworked: we can see her testing out lines, even recasting them (as she does in “Black Women”) in another poem (“Conversation Overheard in a Graveyard”); on a few occasions she rewrites poems entirely, or subtly (as revealed in the two versions of what one version titles “Miss Ann,” slang for the slave mistress). We have tried to represent the range of this work, its depth and also its vitality: “something / like alive.” As such, we have let the typography of these uncollected gems stand, down to the titles, in order to give a sense of their varied origins. I have begun to think of these as “Bad Poems” in the vernacular sense, bad meaning good—they are revelations of the poet Clifton already is, and predict the powerful poet she would become.
Dating of these poems is more an art than a science: though she rarely dated any poems, the earliest date we have on a draft is found on “Old Hundred,” from 1965. Comparing paper and type, not to mention style, I have placed the poems in a rough chronology. With it, we can see her move from more “public” poems in a broad voice to more personal and, dare I say, profound work, including the remarkable set of Mama “letters” and poems about family—themes that she’d return to and that distinguish her work even early on. Here, in their proper, early context, we can see Clifton work toward the poems that make up her remarkable first book.
Recalling the context of the times makes these poems all the more astonishing. Both the poetry world and the world of the 1960s were in upheaval; the years from 1965 to 1969 saw the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the first human walking on the moon, all of which appear in the poems. There was also a revolution in poetry, especially black poetry, which accompanied, described, and descried the unrest in the streets. The Black Arts movement, which Lucille Clifton found herself a part of and in many ways helped to forge, insisted on poems for and about black folks, establishing a black aesthetic based on varying ways of black speech, African structures, and political action.
In such a context, Clifton’s “Black Women” poem is a breakthrough, but a shared one. Black Arts sought many things but above all a public poetry—one aware of its audience and even pitched at times toward a newfound audience that it was both meeting and making. Clifton’s lasting innovation, which may seem obvious only in retrospect, can be glimpsed in this early work: she would move from a public poetry to a more personal one, crafting poems in sequence that consist of “letters” from Mama, poems to a father and “old hoodoo man” she later will term “old liar old lecher,” and poems bridging the divide of racial lines.
By the end of the decade, if Clifton often speaks for a “we,” she is also establishing the intimate “I”—soon rendered as a lowercase “i”—that would infuse her work.
both nonwhite and woman: Good Woman, 1969–1980
It is with Good Times that Clifton’s poetry would appear to the world in 1969, naming the turbulent times in a way few would. The book’s title contains all Clifton’s optimism and irony. In doing so, Clifton counters any predictable kinds of protest, while also offering a group of poems—without any sections, notably interconnected—that take us on a narrative of family as a form of nation. As in her early poems, Clifton finds the site of both protest and possibility in the family: “oh children think about the / good times.” Clifton suggests that a poem can and should be made of this daily survival as a kind of celebration. In this way, her title poem is a blues.
Clifton shifts the focus of poetry from the streets to the stoop, from worrying about “the Man” to writing about the family—and what once was called “the family of man.” The talk of the poem is just as important as its form, which is also musical, repetitive, spoken; we have here “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
Interestingly, the original edition has some uppercasing, mostly of proper nouns—and even, occasionally, the “i.” (This would be regularized in later versions, edits honored in this volume.) An early carbon also indicates that Good Times was once known as “New Thing,” proposed with “Illustrations by Sidney, Fredrica, and Channing Clifton,” three of her six children. Such a “New Thing” (capitalized) is not simply that found in the poem “if i stand in my window”—in which the poet presses “breasts / against my windowpane / like black birds pushing against glass / because i am somebody / in a New Thing”—but was also a term used by black folks in the know to mean avant-garde jazz. The freedom the poem seeks is similar to that of free jazz—and may be read just as politically as the “new thing” was.
Mostly because they are as much music as polemic, much like fellow poet Michael S. Harper’s first book from the following year, the poems and politics of Clifton’s debut still resonate, concerned with humanity in the face of the hurricane.
The words “good” and “woman” recur throughout the titles of Clifton’s first four books, indicating their shared concerns. Her individual book titles seem not just to conjugate but conjure such words up: Good Times (1969), Good News About the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), and Two-Headed Woman (1980), create a kind of extraordinary long poem that Clifton would later gather—along with her memoir Generations—in the collection titled Good Woman. Clifton’s “good woman” is the “poor girl” of Bessie Smith’s blues grown up, triumphant.
This Good Woman sequence of books marks a remarkable epic of the everyday, including several key sequences that still seem as vital as when they were written. Like its predecessor, Good News About the Earth gives “good news” in a time of bad, echoing both the headlines and the black spiritual “Ain’t That Good News”; the book also elucidates a more typical Black Arts pantheon of heroes than Good Times, from poems “to bobby seale” and “for my sisters.” (A set of proofs among her literary papers indicate the book was once termed “Good News About the Earth and Other Heroes” before contracting to simply “Good News” and then to its final form.) The volume starts with a poem “after kent state,” where the shooting of peaceful anti-war protesters by National Guardsmen marked a terrifying transformation in the national psyche. Clifton also reads the event along racial lines, despairing that “white ways are / the way of death.” Clearly Kent State and the difficulties of the 1960s affected Clifton’s work as much as it did the national self-perception.
Despite the title, these are often angry poems—she is giving us good news about “the earth,” after all, which isn’t the same as about race relations, the United States, or the state of things. Rather, she draws power from what some might call an ecopoetics:
being property once myself
i have a feeling for it,
that’s why i can talk
about environment.
what wants to be a tree,
ought to be he can be it.
same thing for other things.
same thing for men.
This sense of “the earth” is one that would and will transform throughout her work, furthering and challenging her concerns.
But this is only one part of Good News—for the book ends with the remarkable sequence “some jesus.” This series of poems in the voice of biblical figures does what mere protest often cannot: it provides a radical perspective made new by the poet imagining an inner life of the saints. (The poems also suggest divinity for the “heroes” of the second section by that name, a not unfamiliar narrative for the martyrs of the civil rights struggle.) Her “calling of the disciples,” from Adam and Eve to Lazarus, suggests not only hope but a kind of liberation theology, ending with a “spring song” in which “the world is turning / in the body of Jesus and / the future is possible.” Hers is a deity in the mode of Santería or James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation”—a personal, prophetic God who speaks in a black idiom. Hers is a Black Madonna, a mother with womanist concerns.
Such concerns would soon find their way in poems about birth and death, “lucy and her girls.” She would express this in An Ordinary Woman in poems addressing “the black God, Kali, / a woman God and terrible / with her skulls and breasts.” Such a God both simultaneously combats the “Gods” of white Christianity questioned in her poem about the “New Thing,” but also embraced by “some jesus.” Clifton’s “i” contains a multicultural multitude. At the same time, her claim in the book is just to be “ordinary,” something bolder than declaring black folks are kings and queens. Such ordinariness is triumphant and transformable: An Ordinary Woman is a book of “bones” and “roots,” of roaches and her thirty-eighth year. It is a book approaching what some might call midlife, the poet meditating on possibly outliving her mother, who died at forty-four. This early death and loss is an anniversary her poems constantly circle.
Clifton often writes poems of anniversary and commemoration, especially around the anniversary of her own birth. We can see this even in her early work, as in “the poet at thirty two.” At the risk of interrupting the sequence of Clifton’s books we consider sacred, we have included here a small number of such occasional poems found in her papers or given to friends, placing them in the chronology of the Collected. Several are from a manuscript that seems to have been dispersed after Ordinary Woman, or have been subsumed by later projects—perhaps explaining the timeframe and transformation between the woman as “ordinary” and “two-headed.”
With Ordinary Woman, Clifton is not so much a poet of elegy or public memorial as of loss anticipated, remembered, refused:
in the thirty eighth
year of my life,
surrounded by life,
a perfect picture of
blackness blessed,
i had not expected this
loneliness.
What a sense of upending expectations of blackness and blessedness—rhyming with “loneliness” instead. There is, as in the sound of Charlie Parker’s horn, the plaintiveness of John Coltrane, the blues of Bessie and Billie—all the heroes of Black Arts, “blessed” but dying young—an almost overwhelming yearning. Rather than refer to, or merely describe this yearning, the repetition and chorusing of Clifton’s poems earn and enact it. If Dante’s epic begins “in the middle of life,” Clifton’s epic pauses there—fearing the tale will remain in an ordinary purgatory.
For Clifton’s title Ordinary Woman is both a wish and wishful thinking: to be “ordinary” is a respite and a calling, is a way of staking a daily poetry, but also a poetry that brings the extraordinary within grasp. The book ends with an evocation of the poet as “lucy one-eye,” the nickname itself a prophet’s:
i was born in a hotel,
a maskmaker.
my bones were knit by
a perilous knife.
my skin turned around
at midnight and
i entered the earth in
a woman jar.
i learned the world all
wormside up
and this is my yes
my strong fingers;
i was born in a bed of
good lessons
and it has made me
wise.
As a maskmaker, the poet is herself perilous, filled with yes and with strong fingers, all which she will name further in her next book.
With Two-Headed Woman, Clifton finds herself at the height of her powers—and makes such powers literal. The “some jesus” sequence—like the informal one before it in Good Times that evoked kinfolk “tyrone” and “willie b”; like the early “Mama” poems—establishes an “i” that is as American as it is eternal, as biblical as it is black. From here forward, Clifton’s books, while made up of individual poems—many of them showstoppers—would also include discrete and informal sequences, often about the world of spirit. Two-Headed Woman would return to Biblical settings, evoking Mary as well as a tremendous series “to the blind” and “to the lame.” By aligning with such figures as those in need of mercy and the traditional Christian mother of mercy, Clifton evoked not just an “environment” but a humanity that needed voicing.
Taken together, Clifton’s spiritual poems, crossing her entire poetic life—and even its afterlife, included here—form a sustained devotional of remarkable clarity and complexity. The result is reminiscent of the work of her friend and fellow poet Denise Levertov and the Unholy Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom Levertov wrote on), not to mention The Temple of metaphysical poet George Herbert. To my eye, her lowercase litanies and questioning catechisms remain as shaped and sprung as her predecessors who saw the radical forms of their verse enacting the challenges of faith.
Facing such a challenge, Clifton’s personal pantheon would give way to a myth of self. Two-Headed Woman finds a metaphor for what might be called Clifton’s womanism, or black feminism, but also for the poet herself. The “two-headed woman” is that conjure woman of legend and tradition, the hoodoo practitioner not to be trusted but to be admired and even feared; she is the artist incarnate, filled with secrets which she also reveals and revels in. A still-uncollected poem, “the two headed woman blues,” found in her papers (but not this volume) makes this connection perhaps too explicit between the conjure woman and the blues:
her four eyes notice
in all directions.
her ears overhear
what she’s not listening for.
For Clifton, such power is not just folklore, but is embodied in the fact of her being born polydactyl, with twelve fingers. This “witchy” birth both marks and connects her to the other women in her family, including her mother, born with this genetic trait. Extra fingers are a sign of Clifton being an artist, but also of loss; the poet recasts the myth of being “born in a hotel”—a place, like the crossroads, of transition and mythic transfer—with the fact of being “born with twelve fingers.” One makes a legend of the self; the other makes the fact of the self into a legend. Two-Headed Woman is autobiography as epic.
We might remember too that a “dactyl” is a form of a poetic line (whose name from the Greek means “finger”) with one stressed syllable, followed by two unstressed (or “short”) ones. While not strictly syllabic, Clifton’s verse at this time has a many-fingered music:
i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter.
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and
dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn’t understand
the powerful memories of ghosts. now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter and me
through our terrible shadowy hands.
These “shadowy hands” are also the shadow book of her mother, long ago sacrificed. They also contrast with the body Clifton praises in classic poems like “homage to my hips” and “homage to my hair.” These poems of praise are both funny and serious, shadowy and showy.
After Good News and An Ordinary Woman came Generations (1976), Clifton’s memoir of her family. Edited by Toni Morrison, the memoir also evokes the “Dahomey woman” of her grandmother, crafting yet another tradition her book inhabits. Clifton would gather Generations, along with her first four poetry books, in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980, effectively ending the first phase of her mature writing. One-eyed, two-headed, twelve-fingered, Dahomean, and good—even when she’s bad—this woman is a creation as remarkable as Whitman’s American “I,” ordinary in her extraordinariness and extraordinary in what she calls and makes ordinary.
what did i see to be except myself?: blessing the boats, 1988–2000
What would be next for Clifton, appearing the same year as Good Woman, was a book aptly titled Next (1987). Starting with a section declaring “we are all next,” the book is filled with an array of “us”: Crazy Horse and “history,” leukemia and shapeshifter poems. A sequence of dreams record an array of ancestry, philosophy, and even “my dream about being white.” The poems also reckon with “the death of fred clifton,” her husband who passed from cancer in 1984 at the age of 49. Just as her mother speaks in one poem about her own death, reminiscent of dream, her late husband speaks from beyond:
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.
This is not just a description of the afterlife, but the life Clifton’s poems seek. It is a poetic life—and line—that takes William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things” and heads inward, and upward.
In a confessional era, Next is made up not of confessions so much as dreamscapes, a strategy which paradoxically turns them not less real but more immediate, haunting. Clifton writes of enduring and surviving cancer herself, leukemia transforming into “dream/ritual,” “white rabbit,” and even in one unrealized poem found in the archive, “leukemia as race.” Poems also invoke the “shapeshifter,” a menacing male presence suggestive of abuse. No wonder then the body is the seat of struggle and praise. What’s more, for Clifton there’s no split between the body, the spirit, and the intellect: no ideas but in the body.
Next was followed by Quilting (1991), a book that took the title’s “women’s work” as its galvanizing force, sharing the quilters’ communal strength and sophisticated structures. In the title poem, Clifton makes quilting a female inheritance that’s part of an “unknown world” too often ignored; the book is not mere complaint, but a reckoning with “wild blessings.” There are poems “in praise of menstruation,” “to my uterus,” “to my last period”: “well girl, goodbye, / after thirty-eight years.” One of my favorites is “wishes for sons,” both a blessing and a curse:
i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.
i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.
I’ve read from and taught this poem a number of times and am always struck by its generosity and humor, something we can lose sight of given Clifton’s directness, her bravery in saying the unsaid. There’s also a temptation to overlook the sophistication of her craft, whether in the pacing or the deadpan lines, not to mention the thoughtful paradoxes (and double negatives) of the poem’s end:
let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.
In Clifton’s hands, the double negatives add up to a wild blessing.
With her next book, Book of Light (1993), Clifton’s first name is again something she writes about and through. Lucille means “light,” something she earlier evokes in the poem “the light that came to lucille clifton” (which once had been the title of the whole of Two-Headed Woman). Such a light involves the visitations for ill and good that she evokes often in her work, from a “yeti poet” to Superman to “leda” poems that evoke abuse at the hands of a father. These poems evoke some of The Terrible Stories (1996) that would name her next volume, where the visitation would be from a fox she called a fellow poet.
Like Ted Hughes, Clifton had always used the mystic just beyond what’s seen to frame and inform poems; like Hughes, this poetic regularly involved a shifting set of totemic animals. Where for Hughes the fox and the crow were emblems of myth, the fox that first visits in The Terrible Stories is more like “the light that came to lucille clifton”—a nightly visitation that’s a version of the poet. Fox is also decidedly a female figure, much the way Clifton genders the moon:
the moon understands dark places.
the moon has secrets of her own.
she holds what light she can.
These visitations continue to illuminate a path both in her poetry and private life that she would not fully reveal to readers until later on.
Though she had been the first person to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for two books in the same year (for Good Woman and Next) and had been finalist for the National Book Award (for The Terrible Stories), Lucille Clifton finally won the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000. This was a great acknowledgment of the path she had been clearing in books gathered since Good Woman, but also of the new poems of Blessing. Many suggest her physical frailty, and there is a sorrow found in the lines, a shade less defiant: “i am tired of understanding.”
The self in Blessing’s new poems is weary, but also brave; a poem like “donor” addresses the kidney transplant Clifton received from her daughter, but not without telling a story on the self addressed to the daughter, admitting to “trying not to have you.” The body, ever-present in Clifton, is here less triumphant, but no less truthful or admirable. There is a “praise song” but it is to an aunt saved from suicide; there are protests of lynching, not in the past but in present-day Texas. These are poems of blessing, in other words, as only Clifton can craft. In her powerful phrase, the poems announce “grief for what is born human, / grief for what is not.”
The poems also invoke mortality, often through its opposite: heaven figures here, and paradise, including the exiled Lucifer (whose name she well knows, means “light” too). But perhaps the most fitting figure in Blessing is Lazarus, whose resurrection from the dead seems a metaphor for transcending sickness and sorrow, while recognizing both. As the title poem wishes, “may you in your innocence / sail through this to that” while Lazarus says “on the third day i contemplate / what i was moving from / what i was moving toward.” This or that, from or toward, the poems wonder—and wander as only a true poet can, filled with Keatsian negative capability—Clifton’s kind of double negatives urging us forward.
No wonder her next book would be called Mercy.
bridge between starshine and clay: 2000–2010
In the late 1970s Clifton received a series of messages from the spirit world, examples of what is sometimes called “spirit writing” and Clifton herself occasionally referred to as “automatic writing.” Such writings place Clifton squarely in a tradition of prophecy, from Jeremiah to two-headed women, as well as in that fellowship of poets who directly engage the spirit world in their writings. Modern English-language poets from Yeats to Robert Duncan have used spiritualism as generative structures; James Merrill even used the Ouija board to organize his modern epic. Around the same time as Merrill, Clifton received “the message from The Ones”—or The Ones conjured her up—crafting a spiritual epic alongside her poetic one.
Such spirit writing, amounting to four fascinating boxes at Emory University’s MARBL, testify to a multitude of often daily sessions for recording these messages. If spirituality had always been on her mind and in her poetry, here it became manifest. Much like the uncollected early work, Clifton seems to have admired this work—she certainly does not seem ashamed of it, but one imagines she wasn’t sure what exactly to do with it. With Mercy in 2004, Clifton finally transcribed some aspects of “the messages” and allowed them to be published as the final section of the book.
Not quite a poem, or at least one we might think of only from her, these poems channel a prophetic and otherworldly voice, quite literally:
The result is a poetry that is both hers and not hers, one that may remind us of old forms, both the oral form of folklore and that old, sung, lyric art, the psalm. They seem to me also in a continuum with the selfsame mystical African American traditions that titled Two-Headed Woman but also broader senses of motherwit and the searching spirituality of Jean Toomer, who after his Cane would write a significant set of Essentials, or aphorisms, not to mention his searching, mystical poem, “Blue Meridian.” Her effort also evokes William Blake, whose work she recalls in her poem “blake” from The Terrible Stories:
saw them glittering in the trees,
their quills erect among the leaves,
angels everywhere. we need new words
for what this is, this hunger entering our
loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays
of hope. we need the flutter that can save
us, something that will swirl across the face
of what we have become and bring us grace.
back north, i sit again in my own home
dreaming of blake, searching the branches
for just one poem.
With Mercy, Clifton writes what she fears may be “last words,” titling poems “cancer” and “after oz”; she is writing too after September 11th, which appears in the sequence “september song.” Mercy is what the poems seek and show us, dedicated to her two children who passed away in 2000 and 2004: “the only mercy is memory.” Mercy also manages to be a book of Clifton’s present, despite what might in other hands be pure elegy. Is the poet wrestling with mortality? Are The Ones welcoming the poet into an afterlife, or an other world Clifton clearly saw as nearer and less faraway than others might?
Part of the power of Clifton’s late work comes from how contemplative yet forward-looking it is. With Voices (2008), the last full-length book published in her lifetime, Clifton returned to questions of race with a newfound grace and humor. (She told me once she considered calling the collection Colored Girls.) Figures like “aunt jemima” and “uncle ben” became part of her pantheon; by taking on pop culture, Clifton did not abandon the totemic world of Yeti and The Ones, instead offering a “raccoon prayer” and revisiting Crazy Horse under his original name, Witko.
What Clifton seeks is a community—one we realize she has been crafting all along, making family members myths and myths familiar and familial. She warns us against holding such myths too dear—or rather, “aunt jemima” does, when she speaks—but Clifton also manages an intimacy suggested by her section titles, “hearing” and “being heard.” The last section contains “ten oxherding pictures,” a sequence Clifton first published in a fine press limited edition in 1988. This work in many ways does what The Ones did for the other volume, consolidating and communicating with another tradition, here Buddhist. Her multitudes keep multiplying.
If we ended with Mercy and Voices, that would perhaps be enough—they are poems of benediction in a sense, aware of mortality, and aware of our constant longing for more. We are fortunate however that the poet seems to have left behind the start of a manuscript, “Book of Days,” that extends her reach and wishes even further.
It is a book that almost did not survive. My fellow editor, Michael S. Glaser, worked with Clifton at St. Mary’s in Maryland for years; when she cleaned out her office after retiring in 2006, she threw away a number of things, including poems, many in her hand or with her clear edits—all of which are now part of her archive (and reprinted here in “Last Poems & Drafts”). The typescript for “Book of Days” was among these discards, complete it seems, without any editorial markings or even her name. (This is not unusual: we can almost judge a poem as hers among her papers because it doesn’t bear her name.) As I mentioned, Clifton was perfectly capable of tossing away her own poems, even good ones; I myself rescued a few from the maw of the trash. Perhaps she felt there were often other copies on her computer? Fortunately for us Glaser resurrected “Book of Days”—a title Clifton’s daughter Alexia recalls her working on—for the sequence is a wonder, a manuscript that seems quite complete, mournful yet mindful, concerned with birth, death, and that “what we will become / waits in us like an ache.” These new poems, found in 2006, seem to be ones that extend her concerns and provide an alternate ending to what she herself lived to publish. If it indeed is what it appears to be, this is a poet in the mood of reckoning with the death of children and of the poet herself. It is tempting to see the final lines of the sequence as a grace note: “this earth, this garden, this woman, / this one precious, perishable kingdom.”
Yet Clifton kept writing; this is what true writers do. There are three other chief sources for this last set of poems that we have included, all in different stages of completion, but all also in clean condition—suggestive if not of being final, then of no longer being “in progress” to the extent that some other drafts are.
The first source of the last poems includes what I out of habit call “daybooks,” but might more properly be called day planners, several of which are found among her papers at Emory. These eight-by-eleven inch, month-by-month calendars include her busy schedule of readings, and often serve as a kind of portable desk, with work memos, invitations to read, and travel itineraries tucked in; they also include drafts of poems in progress and what appear to be reading copies of new poems. Several poems in the “Last Poems & Drafts” section come from these daybooks, either in typed or occasionally handwritten form. The title “Book of Days” seems all the more fitting given this practice.
The poem “some points along some of the meridians” is a find from her 2007 daybook—it is immediately proceeded by a printed set of “point references” to what might be acupuncture or other localized medicines based on the body, the list a gift from a friend on her birthday. From this follows the “meridians” poem which at first seems merely a further list—but much like the poem that begins The Book of Light, consisting of merely the dictionary definition of light, there seems a purposeful ordering to the sections and even in the new title. All poems question the idea of what makes up a poem, or they should—and none more than the list poem—but here you can see her poet’s sensibility, whether in the ordering of the body or her love of it, expressed through language. How poignant for someone at this time struggling with her health, and with an organ transplant, to call the kidney “deep valley” and “spirit storehouse” and “spirit burial ground.” In this way, these last poems have not only survived, they are poems of a survivor.
The more immediately recognizable style of “6/27/06 seventy”—the date and age of her birthday—recasts a poem of a similar title that appears in Voices. The poem was written, we know, from early drafts in 2006 and appears completed in 2008. Like many of the last poems, Clifton started this on the computer: often not using her computer’s word processing program, but e-mail, which appears to have provided less in the way of interfering “autocorrections”—capitalizing every “i” we can only imagine—with the directness of her old typewriter. Or even her Videowriter, a machine made only for word processing whose small screen may have impacted her line in ways we haven’t quite fully understood—much as we haven’t yet understood the ways the spirit writing impacted her work, with its different kind of daily log and practice, filled with connected, looping words from the pen never leaving the page. She often turned this page horizontally, like a landscape; the result is a quite different effect than those short, relineated “Ones” in Mercy.
While her computers are undergoing the kinds of forensics and archival investigations that may yet yield other poems—not to mention drafts of those poems we have here—processing this kind of “born digital” work is still underway. However, a number of poems here were clearly composed in e-mail then printed, including “6/27/06 seventy” and “after the children died.”
Another set of her late work comes from Squaw Valley workshops in California. I taught at one session with her in 2005; as attendees to that conference know, all poets there, including workshop leaders, write a poem a day, handed out in the morning and workshopped that same day. Clifton, who attended the conference many times (and commented on the awkwardness of its place name), often used the daily practice to full advantage—indeed, a number of poems from Voices appear to have taken first form, or perhaps been polished further, at Squaw Valley. The poems “haiku” and “An American Story” stem from files from that conference.
These poems may be the start of the project that Alexia Clifton remembers her mother mentioning toward what would be the end of her life: a book to be called God Bless America. While we have not yet encountered the full manuscript, the typescript three-line version of “God Bless America” we do have is far more than a fragment. Rather, like her “haiku,” Clifton seems to be moving by suggestion. She was always one whose questions and love of paradox informed her best poems, like “why some people be mad at me sometimes”:
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
The poem “God Bless America” was found among her last daybook, from 2010, where it was tucked in the short days of February, the month she would die in—fifty-one years to the day after her own mother. Right behind that poem is another poem, what appears to be the last poem Clifton wrote and the last poem in this book. There are two handwritten drafts to this poem that starts “In the middle of the Eye”; the second one, reprinted here as is, appears remarkably clean and direct. Prescient and powerful, the poem is both a testimony and an example of Clifton’s strength to the end; she not only stands, but withstands, and stands up amidst “the fiery sight.”
The last words in the 2010 daybook are the start to the acceptance speech Clifton began for the Frost Medal she was to be awarded by the Poetry Society of America in April of that year. While she did not live to give that speech, we still have her spoken, written, near sung voice in lines echoing her most reprinted poem: “I stand here before you having survived 3 bouts with cancer, a kidney transplant, the loss of my husband and two of my children and arthritis like you wouldn’t believe. Indeed won’t you celebrate with me?”
—Kevin Young