This book would not be at all without the devotion that is The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton edited by Kevin Young and Michael Glaser. I am ever thankful to them both for carrying such a work into being.
I give thanks to the Rose Library at Emory University, especially Head of Research Services, Courtney Chartier. I thank Ricky Maldonado who sent me recordings of Clifton reading at the 92nd Street Y, one of them from 1969 after she won their Discovery contest. I thank the 11 wonderful thinkers who met with me in a cloud of a room at Pratt where we, around a candle and a packet of materials, thought together about the mysteries and the concrete of Clifton’s work. Thank you: Nicole Valdivieso, Ericka Hodges, Tina Zafreen Alam, Jaylen Strong, Dianca London, Jessica Angima, Shayla Lawz, Isa Guzman, Amanda Hohenberg, Charlotte Seebeck, Aliera Zeledon-Morasch. I also thank Andrea Bott, Patty Cottrell, and Beth Loffreda of the Writing Department at Pratt for supporting such a workshop and for coordinating much appreciated photocopying support. My deep thanks especially to Beth Loffreda for the year that helped me to devote such time to this work.
I thank the editors of Paris Review for publishing two of the previously uncollected poems: “bouquet” and “Poem To My Yellow Coat. Along with The Estate of Lucille T. Clifton and BOA Editions Ltd., I thank Copper Canyon Press for permission to reprint selections from The Book of Light in this volume.
And to these compasses I touch my forehead: Sonia Sanchez, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Ross Gay, Kamilah Aisha Moon. And those who talked with me over the mysterious light of the internet: Eisa Davis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Patrick Rosal, Ama Codjoe. They each answered my questions so generously and candidly—with clarity and depth of insight, and with the secret gift of informality, as was the nature of our correspondence. Such exchanges added to my thinking and listening as I made my final selections.
Here is Cheryl Boyce-Taylor about Clifton’s work: “Her work appears pure and simple, but man, oh, man. So deadly and deep and honest. She pulls you out of your lies in her work. There’s nowhere to tell those lies in your work. You just have to be truthful.” And later: “I think her work is political … I find her poems open-mouthed just like Sonia.”
Here is Eisa Davis: “I think about how truly difficult it must have been (I haven’t read her talking about it and perhaps you have) to have written poems about her father violating her. I mean, what did that do? that’s emotionally complex and political and fierce for sure.
“I think she had to find a way to keep herself safe, in her mind. so in her poems I feel her drawing a circle around us while smelling a wolf. there’s safety to be made, and a leakage of that safety. since the poems are lyrical, especially in the ohs she uses, it’s a new gospel I hear …she’s laughing. a lot. she tells the children to say she’s a poet, she don’t have no sense—and this means to me that she must have plenty. sense above sense, outside of sense. she writes poems in one movement, about one piece of sense. she survived her father and returned to us as the moon.
“of course that’s not all of her work. but then she goes through menopause and cancer and kidney transplant and writes about all that, generously, powerfully, without indulgence … she’s really the second part of Baraka’s ‘Fuck poems / and they are useful …’ she’s truly showing us how to make it through life.”
Here is Kamiliah Aisha Moon on what Clifton’s work makes possible: “Permission to be and keep it real. To be shameless, unabashed. To be vulnerable as a show of strength. To wonder and to be amazed. To decipher dreams. To rage eloquently and elegantly. To claim and proclaim.” And on the things she thinks of in, to borrow from Rita Dove, Clifton’s “thingful” work, Moon writes: “Brooms, knife, kitchen counter, bowls, boats. Tools that clear the way, pare; things that allow for making, that carry.”
Here is Rachel Eliza Griffiths: “Clifton’s work has pushed me away from believing that what is ‘simple’ is also ‘easy,’ which is to say, that Clifton has guided me into a tense space of belief, love, and labor. Clifton’s faith is chiseled into what is both spoken and unsayable. Her work also asks me to leap and to remember, as Morrison wrote, the natural and earned elements that might be defined as ‘freedom.’ Clifton’s work is the opening in the water and the water, the flight and the brutal symphonic wind the wings make as they lift the body to which they belong. And, too, Clifton’s work is a space where the word ‘belonging’ opens and opens for me. She belongs to herself, to her family, to poetry, to us, and whatever is beyond that. Her work then is also about the autonomy of language, about whom and which words are spared. It is also about whom language, memory, justice do not spare.”
Here is Patrick Rosal: “I remember reading ‘homage to my hips.’ And I think then and throughout my life, that was one of the clearest poems of understanding what the world says you should love and the thing you actually love and care for can be really, really different. And that your own body can be a thing that you care for and love because much of the world doesn’t (or doesn’t seem to) was something I knew in my experience of being in my own skin and with other folks whom I know were not loved publicly and mythologically.
