Lucille Clifton: Defining What American Poetry Is

Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. xv + 224 pp. $36.95 cloth.

Lucille Clifton's poem "Study the Masters" implores readers to pay attention to invisible women "like my aunt timmie. / it was her iron,/ or one like hers, / that smoothed the sheets / the master poet slept on." Though their physical labor has been taken for granted, and their spiritual and artistic gifts have gone unacknowledged, poor black women have been central to the making of America. The poem protests the woman's exclusion from national history even as it insists on her centrality to it. It ends by addressing the reader directly and declaring that "if you had heard" the black domestic worker's song, "you would understand form and line / and discipline and order and / america."¹ As the spatial arrangement of the lyric affirms, the worker's dreams are as important as the poet's; her song, no less than his, defines America. As she posits a democratic ideal that revises our understanding of the heroic and the beautiful, Clifton pays homage to past masters of American vernacular poetry, such as Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes.

At the end of the wide-ranging interview that Hilary Holladay appends to Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton, the poet chooses not to identify herself as either "American" or "black." She is of course both. Her declaration "I am an American poet; this is what American poetry is" is accurate but evidently not yet accepted (200). If it were, this fine book would not be the first devoted to her writing. To a significant degree, Clifton is excluded from the formal study of poetry, even though followers of poetry eagerly embrace her work. They respond to its capacious spirit—its exuberant joy and elegiac reflection—and its language that captures the sound of colloquial speech in taut poetic lines.

With a publishing career dating from 1969, Clifton is the author of twelve volumes of poetry and a memoir. Several of her books have received Pulitzer Prize nominations. The Terrible Stories was a finalist for the National Book Award, which Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000, received in 2000. In 1999, after controversy surrounding the homogeneity of its membership, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The list of honors is long. More striking, however, is the enthusiastic response of audiences to her work. A fixture at the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival, where she reads to standing-room-only crowds, Clifton garners substantial audiences across the nation. The thinness of the critical response to her work contrasts sharply to the robust popularity of her readings. One hopes that Wild Blessings signals the beginning of the end of this divide.

Holladay is especially good at placing Clifton's work in the traditions of American and English poetry. She reads it in dialogue with Paul Laurence Dunbar and William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath. Plath is the surprise in this list, because she and Clifton seem at first glance to be so different. But Holladay demonstrates that their explorations of the female body are in fact complementary. Clifton's gentler, more self-accepting embrace is no less productive for poetry than Plath's ambivalence and self-castigation. Clifton is a visionary poet as well as a socially conscious one. Holladay explicates the biblical allusions in her work and locates her practice in traditions of biblical typology in African American culture. But Holladay recognizes that "the light that came to Lucille Clifton," to quote the title of a cycle of poems, is spiritually heterodox, and she teases out references to the diverse spiritual traditions that inform Clifton's vision. At every turn, Holladay demonstrates respect for what she calls the "supernatural" sources of Clifton's...