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.
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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:
light
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.
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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
