Wild Blessings

The Poetry of Lucille Clifton

Hilary Holladay

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807144626
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Widely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality, poet Lucille Clifton has published thirteen volumes of poems since 1969 and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the 2000 National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. Her verse is featured in almost every anthology of contemporary poetry, and her readings draw large and enthusiastic audiences. Although Clifton's poetry is a pleasure to read, it is neither as simple nor as blithely celebratory as readers sometimes assume. The bursts of joy found in her polished, elegant lines are frequently set against a backdrop of regret and sorrow. Alternately consoling, stimulating, and emotionally devastating, Clifton's poems are unforgettable. In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetic tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts -- personal, political, and literary -- as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific works: Clifton's poems about womanhood, a central concern throughout her career; her fertility poems, which are provocatively compared with Sylvia Plath's poems on the same subject; her relation to the Black Arts Movement and to other black female poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez; her biblical poems; her elegies; and her poignant family history, Generations, an extended prose poem. In addition to a new preface written after Clifton's death in 2010, this updated edition includes an epilogue that discusses the poetry collections she published after 2004.
Readers encountering Lucille Clifton's poems for the first time and those long familiar with her distinctive voice will benefit from Hilary Holladay's striking insights and her illuminating interview with the influential American poet.

CHAPTER 1

Light Years

LUCILLE CLIFTON IS AMONG THOSE time-traveling souls who Walt Whitman believed would “look back on me because I look’d forward to them.”¹ In her sweeping, elegiac vision of the world, she is the Good Gray Poet’s descendant, his sister, his dark reflection in the waves. Her earnest voice bears witness to what she calls “the bond of live things everywhere” (GW 149). Combining Christian tenets with pantheistic African lore, the philosophy evident in her poetry holds that all life is sacred and all lives are interdependent. But because she was born “both nonwhite and woman” (BL 25), some fifty years after the elder poet’s death, her world is quite different from Whitman’s. As an African American woman, whose great-great-grandmother was captured as a young child in Dahomey, Africa, and brought to the United States as a slave, Clifton is especially sensitive to the injustices that blacks, women, and poor people have suffered in the United States. Her poetry is in large part a response and antidote to these injustices as well as a tribute to the human spirit’s will to endure, and even soar, in the face of pain and loss.

Although she is not a strictly autobiographical poet, her identity is integral to everything she writes: “A person can, I hope, enjoy the poetry without knowing that I am black or female. But it adds to their understanding if they do know it—that is, that I am black and female. To me, that I am what I am is all of it; all of what I am is relevant.”² Upon reading Clifton, one finds that her poems often manage to be deeply personal while also speaking directly to universal emotions as well as social and political realities.

The poem “1994,” for instance, was inspired by the poet’s breast cancer diagnosis: “i was leaving my fifty-eighth year / when a thumb of ice / stamped itself hard near my heart” (TS 24). In addition to recounting a personal ordeal, the poem acknowledges the looming threat of breast cancer to women as well as the risks that women and blacks assume every day: “you know how dangerous it is / to be born with breasts / you know how dangerous it is / to wear dark skin.” History is, in large part, the story of a continuous assault on vulnerable groups, and Clifton assumes that her readers know that story, regardless of their role in it. The poem’s sorrowful reproach—“have we not been good children / did we not inherit the earth”—suddenly gives way to an unnervingly direct appeal: “but you must know all about this / from your own shivering life.” One would be hard pressed to read this poem without experiencing a spine-tingling shock of recognition. Such is often the case in Clifton’s poems, which time and again illuminate the universal within the individual, the black, and the female.

Born with twelve fingers, like her mother and her firstborn daughter, Clifton often uses her hands to symbolize a spiritual connection with others, a deep and abiding empathy flowing involuntarily from her body and soul. Her extra digits were removed when she was an infant, but their seeming magic (growing out of the old superstition that witches had twelve fingers) is still with her: “I’ve always had a kind [of] sixth sense—especially when somebody talks about hands. Yes, a sixth sense—if you want to call it that—that deals with spirituality and the sacred.”³ In the mid-1970s, Clifton was in contact, through a Ouija board and automatic writing, with her deceased mother, Thelma Sayles; poems in An Ordinary Woman and Two-Headed Woman draw on that moving but profoundly unsettling experience. Around the same time, she also wrote a series of poems based on the words of “The Ones Who Talk,” disembodied spirits commenting on “the fate and danger of the world of the Americas.”⁴ In a variation on the traditional reading of palms, she said that she could sometimes sense important things about people just by touching their hands.⁵ This phenomenon is the subject of “wild blessings” (Q 47). The poem begins with the fragmented revelation “licked in the palm of my hand / by an uninvited woman,” which is possibly a reference to Thelma Sayles’s posthumous visitations. The poem goes on to list some of the hands Clifton has held, including “the hand / of a girl who threw herself / from a tenement window, the trembling / junkie hand of a priest.” Given this history, the distraught poet declares:

do not ask me to thank the tongue
that circled my fingers
or pride myself on the attentions
of the holy lost.
i am grateful for many blessings
but the gift of understanding,
the wild one, maybe not.

(Q 47)

No matter its attendant difficulties, the gift of understanding has served Clifton and her readers exceptionally well. Reading her elegantly arranged volumes, in which hope just barely outweighs despair, we begin to see the mythic sweep of our own lives, the connections across generations and cultures, and we begin to feel that Clifton, in speaking for herself, is inviting us to listen, very carefully, to ourselves.

Like many of her poems, the story of Clifton’s youth is more complex than it initially seems. Born in 1936 to a steel worker and a homemaker in Depew, New York, she grew up in Depew and later in Buffalo, a child of the Great Migration of southern blacks to the industrial North:

Depew is where I was born. Depew New York, in 1936. Roosevelt time. It was a small town, mostly Polish, all its life turned like a machine around the steel mill. We lived in a house on Muskingum Street, and my Mama’s family lived on Laverack. My grandparents lived in this big frame house on Laverack Street with one toilet. And in that house were my Mama’s family, the Moores, and a lot of other people, lines of people, old and young. (GW 265)

Though her southern-born African American parents had very little formal education, they both loved to read books and newspapers and tell family stories. Their daughter looked on with interest as Thelma Moore Sayles wrote poetry in iambic pentameter and Samuel Sayles read the Bible—the text that would become central to so many of Clifton’s later poems.

The Sayles family appeared happy on the outside, but Clifton has exposed the painful troubles beneath the placid surface. Her father had two daughters in addition to Lucille: one by his first wife, who predeceased him, and another by a neighbor woman, around the same time that Lucille was born. Samuel Sayles Sr. stopped sharing a bed with Thelma Sayles after the birth of their son, Lucille’s younger brother. These circumstances would have been difficult in themselves, but the trouble was greatly compounded by Samuel Sayles’s abuse of Lucille, who has written about the molestation in several of her poems and spoken of it in interviews. Clifton insists that this was not the whole story of her relationship with her father. In Generations, she writes forgivingly that “He hurt us all a lot and we hurt him a lot, the way people who love each other do” (GW 273). But the abuse was clearly a defining component of her youth and has been a continuing source of melancholy.

Despite her early private suffering, Lucille Sayles’s intelligence and academic achievement boded well for her future. She was not only the first in her family to graduate from high school but also the first to attend college, thanks to an academic scholarship, one of a small number that Howard University awarded to incoming students in 1953. A drama major with a keen interest in literature and writing, she met professors (and distinguished poets) Sterling Brown and Owen Dodson as well as fellow students Toni Morrison and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The example of her professors and her gifted peers was an inspiration to the young poet from Buffalo.

That inspiration did not extend to studying, however, and Clifton’s low grades cost her the coveted scholarship. She returned to Buffalo, deeply embarrassed, and enrolled in Fredonia State Teachers College. That experience lasted only a couple of months, however. Although she would eventually become a professor of creative writing, Clifton herself was not cut out for college life. She preferred, instead, to fashion her own approach to education, an approach that stood her in good stead as a poet and role model for her students. Noting that “there’s a way of being that tends to be necessary for poets,” she explained that, for her, that meant an active pursuit of knowledge and understanding: “You know, a way of not just accepting the taught, passed-on information, but trying to get more than that. That comes from being a little black girl in Buffalo, New York, and understanding that what people were going to teach me might not be all that I needed to know, and so choosing at some point to learn, not just be taught.”⁶

In 1958 she married Fred Clifton, who was completing his senior year at the University of Buffalo. She had met her future husband through Ishmael Reed, an up-and-coming black writer who was part of her circle of friends in Buffalo. The newly married couple lived in Buffalo for about a decade while Fred, a yogi with wide-ranging philosophical interests, pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Lucille, who worked for the first several years of her marriage as a claims clerk for the New York state employment office, had six children between 1961 and 1967. All the while, she was writing poems.

During those busy years, the subject of race relations often dominated the national news. While Clifton was at Howard, the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the following year Rosa Parks refused to give up her front seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After the Cliftons had married, the upheaval continued. The assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. shocked the country. Race riots and campus turmoil added to the trauma. Still, there was the pervasive sense that black people were finally beginning to come into their own politically and artistically in the United States. The Black Arts Movement was proof of this phenomenon. Gwendolyn Brooks, the movement’s elder states-woman, issued a passionate call for nationalism among black authors: “The prevailing understanding: black literature is literature BY blacks, ABOUT blacks, directed TO blacks. ESSENTIAL black literature is the distillation of black life. Black life is different from white life. Different in nuance, different in ‘nitty gritty.’ Different from birth. Different at death.”⁷

Little did Clifton know that her own life was about to become quite different from what it had been, thanks to the (black) poet Robert Hayden and the (white) poet Carolyn Kizer. After Clifton had read about Hayden in the magazine Negro Digest and written to him in hopes that he would help her publish her work, Hayden showed a selection of her poems to Kizer, who in turn entered the poems in the YW-YMCA Poetry Center Discovery Award competition. By this time Fred and Lucille Clifton were living in Baltimore, where Fred was educational coordinator for the Model Cities Program and Lucille worked for the U.S. Office of Education. Clifton did not know that Kizer had entered her poems in the contest, so her selection as the winner came as a happy surprise. The Discovery Award drew the attention of Random House, where her first three books of poetry and her memoir would be published, with Toni Morrison as her editor.

Given all of the political and social tumult that accompanied her youth, it seems fitting that Clifton published the provocatively titled Good Times in 1969—a decidedly dramatic, news-filled year. Amid the nation’s impassioned debates about war, black power, and women’s rights, Clifton learned that the New York Times had named her debut volume one of ten notable books of the year: now she had a nascent national reputation. Her career as an author of children’s picture books was taking off at the same time, with the publication of Some of the Days of Everett Anderson also occurring in 1969. It was a bittersweet time for her, however, since 1969 was also the year that her father died. Still, she was a black woman succeeding as a writer—a living paradox—and thus fulfilling her father’s abundant hopes for her. In 1972, she followed up her debut success with Good News about the Earth, a book that is more explicitly political than her first.

As the women’s movement gathered momentum in the 1970s, an increasingly self-confident and self-aware female persona began to appear in Clifton’s poems and in her memoir, Generations (1976). In An Ordinary Woman (1974) and Two-Headed Woman (1980) we see a feminist spirituality infusing her poems. Her private spiritual experiences—notably her supernatural communications with her deceased mother—became central to her vision of the world. After the publication of Two-Headed Woman, however, Clifton did not publish another poetry book until Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980 (1987), the retrospective of her first decade as a published writer, and Next (1987). Important changes in her life—the death of her husband at age forty-nine in 1984 and her new teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz—were no doubt partly responsible for this relatively quiet period in her writing career.⁸ Her subsequent books reveal that her spirituality and mortality had become the definitive core around which her poetry revolved. Between 1991 and 2000, despite bouts with breast cancer and kidney failure, she published four volumes of poetry: Quilting (1991), The Book of Light (1993), The Terrible Stories (1996), and Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 (2000). Social justice, African American history, and the innate strength of womanhood remain important themes, but her own life cycle and her quest for self-understanding give her later poetry its primary force and direction. This development confirms her candid admission that “I don’t write because I have a mission to heal the world. My mission is to heal Lucille if I can, as much as I can.”⁹

Though her books earned her a steady stream of national honors, including her 1999 appointment to the previously all-white Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, and her university teaching positions also bespeak mainstream status, Clifton is a voice speaking from, and for, the racial and social margins of American society. Her writing reveals her strong social conscience and broad awareness of human suffering. The concept of a “double consciousness”—W. E. B. Du Bois’ term for the pained recognition and tac...