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Lucille Clifton | 67 but who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire poetics statement Excerpts from an Interview with Charles Rowell1 . . . A person can, I hope, enjoy the poetry without knowing that I am black or female. But it adds to their understanding if they do know it— that is, that I am black and female. To me, that I am what I am is all of it; all of what I am is relevant. Do you know what I mean? All understandings of language involve more than the dictionary definition of a word. So the more one knows about who is using the word, the more the reader brings to a fuller understanding of what is meant. Communication involves not only definition but also nuance, sound, history, baggage, culture, even generation and gender and race. A reader can relate to a poem on some level, knowing little about the writer, but the more one knows, the more one understands. Walt Whitman saying “i hear America singing” made it necessary for Langston Hughes to remind, “I too sing America,” not so much because of what the writer might have understood but because of what Langston Hughes guessed about the reader. . . . I say to students all the time that either/or is not an African tradition. Both/and is tradition. I don’t believe in either/or. I believe in both/and. So my “I” tends to be both me Lucille and the me that stands for people who look like me, and the me that is also human, you know. I think if I distinguish anything, there’s a distinction between what I look like on the outside and what somebody else does, and what we are on the inside. So it’s me as the outside and me as the inside. . . . What I’m writing is also history. And some of it is the history of the inside of us; and some of it is the history of the outside. Poetry is about more than logic. Poetry, it seems to me . . . comes from both intellect and intuition. One doesn’t separate oneself out. It’s not either /or; it’s both/and again. And so if I write, I must write out of the whole of what I am. . . . in writing poems, of course, I have to use my intellect. But that’s not all that I use. I use intuition. I even use fear, you know. 68 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century [Laughter] I try to use everything that I am. Now, in the academy—and I can talk about creative writing programs, I teach in them—one tends to think of poetry as not only an intellectual exercise but one that’s just for the eyes. Does it look like a poem? Must be a poem. But I’m interested in other questions: Does it sound like a poem? Does it feel like a poem? Does it tell as much of the whole truth about being human as it can? Because the whole truth is that we’re not all just our head and what we think. Logic is very useful; so is feeling. lucille clifton’s communal “i” Adrienne McCormick who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire1 Reading Lucille Clifton’s work demands of her literary critics attention to four decades of poetic production, and to the cultural contexts of those decades. Her first book of poems, Good Times, was published in 1969, and her most recent, Voices, was published in 2008. Clifton’s poems are fully engaged in her times, reflecting conversations with the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements; the movement of feminist poetries through issues relating to the body, sexuality, family, and revisionist mythmaking; shifting questions raised by confessional poetics and identity politics, multiculturalism , and critical race studies; environmentalist concerns manifested in environmental literature and ecofeminist thought; struggles with language, meaning, history, and subjectivity associated with African American postmodernity ; and an abiding attention to spirituality as a force for change in contemporary society. Throughout these decades, Clifton has been publishing work that challenges conventional assumptions about the lyric subject. What Clifton produces throughout her career is a multilayered communal “i,” rather than an authoritative, individual “I,” and a complex vision of lyric subjectivity as constructed, contingent, and communal rather than essential, consistent, or coherent. In her poems, subjectivity is dispersed across first-, second-, and third-person pronouns, and her poems ...

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