It’s her birthday today.
Rita Dove said of Lucille Clifton’s body of work:
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.
As an example, here is the stunning poem she wrote two days after 9/11. Such simple words, such a simple structure – and yet what a huge outpouring of feeling. This is the kind of thing a Poet Laureate would do, express the grief, express what we all were feeling about firemen in those horrible days and weeks following the attack. And yet the poem feels almost “tossed off” – and maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t – either way: sometimes it takes a LOT of effort to create something seemingly so effortless. I wept openly the first time I read it.
Thursday 9/13/01
the firemen
ascend
in a blaze of courage
rising
like jacob’s ladder
into the mouth of
history
reaching through hell
in order to find
heaven
or whatever the river jordan
is called
in their heroic house
The Academy of American Poets creates these wonderful small videos called “Poetry Break.” A poet sits and reads one poem, maybe prefacing it with a couple of sentences about the writing of it. Nothing too elaborate. It’s a “poetry break”. A meditative moment where you can put your focus on something else, lose yourself in the worlds created by another’s words.
Here is one featuring Lucille Clifton, and interestingly enough (considering what I just wrote above about how her poem feels like it poured out of her in one “take”), she prefaces the reading of this title-less poem with a couple of words about how this was the easiest poem she ever wrote. It tumbled out of her.
Lucille Clifton thoughtful words about poetry:
While poetry sometimes to teachers is a matter of text and something to be studied, for me poetry is a way of living in the world. I think that I don’t produce texts, and I don’t do it to be studied, though I do recognize the value of those things. But for me poetry is a way of trying to express something that is very difficult to express, and it’s a way of trying to come to peace with the world. The mistake teachers sometimes make is that they think art and poetry—-they think that’s about answers. And it’s not about that, it’s about questions. So you come to poetry not out of what you know but out of what you wonder. And everyone wonders something differently and at different times. It is a mistake in poetry—-it is not a mistake to try to figure out the ways that it’s crafted, but its crafting is not what it is.
Her words remind me of Rilke’s command to the young poet:
Live the questions.
You can learn more about Lucille Clifton at Poetry Foundation.
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