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,
that there is only so much
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
