1
No one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside it, I believe that inside the voices of many contemporary U.S. American poets are the poems of Lucille Clifton. There is the ferocity of her clear sight. There is the constellatory thinking where every thing is kin. The verbs of one body might also be the verbs of another seemingly disparate or distant body (her streetlights, for example, bloom). And all things have agency: as the speaker of “august the 12th” mourns a distant brother on his birthday, the speaker’s hair cries, too (“my hair / is crying for her brother”). The poems, in their specificity and dilating scale, startle readers into new sense. They discomfort as often as they bless, and they bless as often as they wonder—bearing witness to joy and to struggle.
Over the course of her life, Clifton wrote 13 collections of poems, a memoir (which she worked on with her editor for the book, Toni Morrison), and more than 16 children’s books written for African American children, including Some of the Days of Everett Anderson and Black BC’s. And in 1988 Clifton was the first writer to have two books of poetry nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. Those books were Next and good woman.
Her works are explicitly historical and of a palpable present moment. The earliest of the poems in this Selected are written during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the nuclear age, ecological crises, and independent movements across Africa. As the poet Kevin Young writes in the afterword of the monumental Collected: “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 … 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.”
Clifton’s first book, good times, was published when her children were ages 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Her daughters Sidney, Gillian, and Alexia remember their mother’s writing as part of their daily life: “As children, we watched our mother type on her old-fashioned typewriter at the dining room table. For us, this is what mothers did; and where they did it; create worlds, play games, and share meals in the same place. Her creating space was her sanctuary, and ours. So it is with her every word.” Such insistence on acknowledging all worlds in all spaces has emboldened and nourished so many of us otherwise encouraged to shutdown our truest circuitry. Instead, her poems pulse with the miracle of the porous and daily. Distilled yet capacious, her poems, like seeds, are miraculous vessels of past and future, of dense and elemental possibility. However large the story they carry, they are always scaled to the particular and resonant detail which amplifies the world at their center.
2
Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles on June 27, 1936. If someone happened to have looked up at the sky that day they would have seen what looked like a moon split in half, 57% of the surface of the moon visible from the earth. I love to think of this poet born with twelve-fingers under a moon half visible, half invisible to our eyes. This poet of one eye fixed and another wandering, feeling both ordinary and magic, standing astride at least two worlds, being born out of one Thelma (her mother) into the old and new bones of her own name. Of this naming she writes:
on my mother’s tongue
breaks through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.
lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.
light breaks from her life
to her lives …
mine already is
an afrikan name.
Her poem reveals an archive of, among other things, some of what African America does to English and some of what English does to African America. In the memoir Generations she writes this of her lineage:
And Lucy was hanged. Was hanged, the lady whose name they gave me like a gift had her neck pulled up by a rope until the neck broke and I can see Mammy Ca’line standing straight as a soldier in green Virginia […] and I know that her child made no sound and I turn in my chair and arch my back and make this sound for my two mothers and for all Dahomey women.
Such repetitions of names and stories move across her work. Histories written in circles much like time and weather are recorded in the rings of a tree. It was toward such repetitions and echoes that I listened, and out of them I began to see the shape of this Selected of poems rendered with documentary, spiritual, and mystical sensibilities. Peter Conners, my editor and the publisher of BOA Editions, calls it “listening for Ms. Lucille.” I tried to listen so close I even dreamed of her voice one January morning. It seems not mine to keep but something I should share with you: You’re always whole, she said. Except when you’re dreaming you’re a quarter open.
3
I tried to walk back through the final selections open as I’d be in a dream, or toward that kind of openness anyway. I listened for what I understood to be repeated resonances and reckonings across her life—the power of words, the loss of her mother, the deaths of the beloveds, the poem as a way to wonder, wonder as a way to live. Abortions. Children. The magic of hands. The violations of hands. Environmental crises and the links between racial violence and the devastation of the environment. The terrible stories of the terrible things we do to one another. I listened and heard something mystical: “the light flaring/ behind what has been called / the world …” I listened for what was strange and mysterious and a quarter open. I listened for what was sharp, clear, and yet prismatic and complex. I heard her, again and again, claim her Ones as the ones in the ground without headstones, the ones ringing like black bells, Black people, Black women people, one called Alice. Clifton says:
study the masters
like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets…
Part of her brilliance is in her ability to name, with specificity, her kin, while also leaving an opening for those outside of the frame of her particular knowing. The words “like” and “or” anchor us in the concrete while pointing us to a knowledge still outside of the poem.
4
How to Carry Water begins with the poem “5/23/67 R.I.P.” Written in ‘67 it was not published until 2012, in The Collected. I give deep and abiding thanks to editors Kevin Young and Michael Glaser for the hours and devotion which brought that collection into the world, and out of which this Selected emerges.
In “5/23/67 R.I.P.” Clifton mourns the loss of the Great Langston Hughes, writer, activist, and chronicler of Black Life. The poem, dated one day after his death, closes with a lament (“Oh who gone remember now like it was …”) but in the lines directly above I come to understand that his death also marks Clifton’s eye as she reads even the moon through the veil of her own mourning:
make the moon look like
a yellow man in a veil
watching the troubled people
running and crying
Oh who gone remember now like it was,
Langston gone.
The poem—in its being at all—is an attempt to remember a community’s loss while simultaneously marking the impossibility of that record ever being precise enough. The decision to begin the Selected here carried a few hopes. I wanted to mark Clifton’s documentary sensibility and a strange, triple-eyed imagery where the moon, for example, looks like a yellow man in a veil, a mourner among mourners, but also watching, like, maybe, a poet. A poet like Langston, a poet like Ms. Lucille.
5
The Selected begins with “5/23/67 R.I.P.” and moves chronologically across the work ending with ten previously uncollected poems. Most of these poems my sister-poet Kamilah Aisha Moon and I came upon together while visiting Clifton’s papers at Emory. To see those poems whose margins were sometimes scribbled with the math of bills and the drawings of children, was to have yet another sense of the hours and breaths by which the poems were made. And to read across her revisions was to also sense the circuitry and pull of her own listening. In “Poem With Rhyme,” for example, she changes: “I have cried, me and my / possible yes …” to “I have cried, me and my / black yes …” This change from “possible” to “black” to me revealed a circuitry of association. For Clifton the lineage of “black” is a lineage of possibility.
I revisited those poems again and again to see which, if any, might resonate with the other poems I’d already set aside for the Selected. A few of them, yes, seemed to utterly be a part and so I contacted the publisher and Clifton’s daughters. Now these are the last poems of the book. This said, it is not clear to me when these poems were written. I love that an otherwise chronological organization is troubled by these poems I cannot place in order or time definitively. This, too, seems essential and part of what her work offers. This, too, seems part of what I have been listening for.
6
In the archives I also found what I’d been looking for. I knew that Toni Morrison was Clifton’s editor at Random House when Clifton was writing Generations. I had been hoping to find correspondence between them about the writing, perhaps just as a way of hearing these wondrous and brilliant writers thinking together generally, but I also hoped to understand something about each of their poetics.
In May of 1972, Toni Morrison writes to Lucille Clifton thanking her for agreeing to read stories by Toni Cade Bambara. She writes: “I think they are stunning—and hope you will too.” When Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love was published in 1972, Clifton’s words were published on the back: “She has captured it all, how we really talk… She must love us very much.” (So here we see that for Clifton, precision and love hold each other.) In November of 1973 Morrison again writes to Clifton, New York to Baltimore: “So good to meet you at last. I wish we had more time—I had just discovered what it was when the time was gone. Come back.”
Later in the letter Morrison shares her notes on Clifton’s manuscript—questions about titles and diction, a suggestion to delete a last line here and a fourth verse there. In the margins of Morrison’s letter are Clifton’s handwritten marks, clear and to the point:
2. a. I don’t agree. “precious” and “valuable” are different.
b. I agree about Sunflowers, suggest we leave it out …
c. I don’t agree.
d. I agree. That fourth verse belongs in my memory not in the poem.
e. I want/mean to say this. It needs saying. again.
f. I don’t agree.
g. I don’t agree.
h. I agree.
What do you think about what I think?
Love to yourself and
your boys,
Lucille
7
water sign woman
the woman who feels everything
sits in her new house
waiting for someone to come
who knows how to carry water
without spilling, who knows
why the desert is sprinkled
with salt, why tomorrow
is such a long and ominous word.
they say to the feel things woman
that little she dreams is possible,
joy to go around, only so much
water. there are no questions
for this, no arguments. she has
to forget to remember the edge
of the sea, they say, to forget …
In “Uses of the Erotic” (1978) Audre Lorde writes: “There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” And later: “Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy.” In articulating the power of the erotic as, among other things, something by which we can gauge our feelings and sense of fulfillment, Lorde also articulates a relationship between the erotic and attention: “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.”
I read a thread from dreams to joy to water to Lorde’s erotic. I read a verse that does not abide by the forgetting that others want this water woman to abide. In the waters of this poem swirls another of her poems:
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.
So then what is water? What can it be?
The element. Daily, ordinary, enduring. Extraordinary, shiftful, expansive. A word for what one is thirsty for. Desire. What can quench. What can be swum and what cannot be swum. The Atlantic. Middle Passages. The distance between this and that. That which cannot be held for long in bare hands but can be carried. The sky, the river, the rain. Knowing and unknowing. Ancestral. Elder, our singular and plural and going on.
8 I am building a ladder of listening
I was listening for Ms. Lucille. And in that listening I was lucky to be in conversation with several writers. Such exchanges added to my thinking, especially an early conversation with Sidney Clifton about desire in her mother’s poems. Desire led me to “water sign woman” and to the waiting, knowing, and feeling there.
9
I walked awake and differently attentive to the bridge between Clifton’s poems and the lives of those around me. Just days after coming to How to Carry Water as the title, for example, I sat reading the big, black Collected in the café below my apartment. The young waiter saw the book and said, Oh my god! I love Lucille Clifton’s poetry! He talked about “homage to my hips” and how she talks about things he didn’t think of as being in poems. Before leaving I said it was so nice to meet him and asked him his name. He said, River. And I thought, Of course!
I listened to the songs that Ms. Lucille’s daughters told me she loved, among them: Ray Charles’ “Georgia On My Mind,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” “Born to Lose,” and “America the Beautiful.” Aretha’s Aretha Arrives and Aretha’s Gold. The songs of Joe Cocker, Dionne Warwick, Nina Simone. Creedence Clearwater Revival singing I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain …
When I asked Sonia Sanchez about what she hoped for this Selected, she spoke about an old-fashioned smile that people sometimes get when they hear Lucille Clifton’s name. She said, in a way that infused each word with a sense of looking forward and looking back: “I want Lucille to be seen, not an old-fashioned smile.” And she spoke about how difficult so many of Clifton’s poems are, especially the poems about her father sexually abusing her. She spoke of how political her poems, and how discomforting and fierce that work. And what that took.
She said resoundingly: “This was a brilliant woman.”
11
… and I turn in my chair and arch my back and make this sound for my two mothers and for all Dahomey women.
12
Come back. It is the “Come back” of Toni Morrison’s letter that I keep hearing. It was written in 1973 but catches so sharply still, in the light. And yet this is also true:
in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.
—aracelis girmay
Brooklyn, NY
2020