Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton

Introduction

Introduction i first heard lucille clifton read her poetry in January 1992 when I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When Clifton took the stage in Greenlaw Hall, she gripped the unsteady lectern and said, “I suppose it wouldn’t be the end of the world if this fell over.” After a pause, she added, “And if it was the end of the world, nobody would know.” Everybody laughed. We were relaxed, receptive, and ready to listen to this poet, a stout African American woman wearing large glasses and smiling at us. For the next hour, she read new poems that would be published in The Book of Light as well as signature works such as “homage to my hips” and “wishes for sons.” For all of her good humor and smiles, however, she struck me as someone who was very careful with other people and with herself. It was obvious from her poems that she was an intensely emotional person whose wit and charm belied a meditative, serious spirit. She had evidently given a lot of thought to the fall of a lectern, the end of the world. Either event could happen; consequences had to be considered. On that January evening in Chapel Hill, there were no crashes, no cataclysmic endings. She put on a good show even as her poems made the performance a highstakes juggling act—“my eyes bright, my mouth smiling, / my singed hands burning” (N 71). Among her new poems was “dear jesse helms,” aimed at North Carolina ’s senior senator, the self-proclaimed opponent of all things obscene. Helms had once quipped that North Carolina could establish a state zoo just by putting a fence around Chapel Hill. Clifton had correctly guessed that this liberal zoo’s inhabitants would share her dislike of the military euphemisms used during the Gulf War. The poem concludes: the smart bombs do not recognize the babies. something 1 2 wild blessings is happening obscene. they are shrouding words so that families cannot find them. civilian deaths have become collateral damage, bullets are anti-personnel. jesse, the fear is anti-personnel. jesse, the hate is anti-personnel. jesse, the war is anti-personnel, and something awful is happening. something obscene. (BL 39–40) Although I admired the poem then, I can better appreciate its symmetry and precision now that its occasion has receded. Clifton has a way of tapping into the zeitgeist and writing poems that a lot of people enjoy and intuitively understand. But the real test comes years later. Do the poems still move us? Do they still feel like they’re beamed from a secret, extraperceptive corner of our own brains? For me, Clifton’s poems have made a deeper, more profound sense over time. I have never tired of her work. Six years after I first heard Clifton read, I sat in her townhouse living room in Columbia, Maryland, testing my tape recorder and inhaling the scent of burning incense. I was excited and nervous about interviewing the author of the poems I’d been poring over for the past year. It was the day before Easter—a fortuitous time to meet with a poet who drew so much inspiration from the Bible. Seated on a sofa diagonally across from me, Clifton was smiling a little but not much. Rather than talking to me on this beautiful spring day, she could have been resting, reading the newspaper, or writing a poem. But there I was, with my new tape recorder and note pad, and she was going to let me do my job. A lot had happened to Lucille Clifton since I had last seen her. She had endured a lumpectomy, dialysis, and a kidney transplant; her brother had died. The Book of Light was in print, as was The Terrible Stories (1996). introduction 3 She had continued to write books for young children and give numerous poetry readings, and she was working on the new poems that would be in Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 (2000), the volume that would earn her the National Book Award for poetry. She was holding a visiting professorship at Duke University that spring semester. When I met with her, she was home for the weekend with two of her daughters in the house that they shared. The interview began. In keeping with my first impressions...