Positive Vibrations

In Lucille Clifton's thirteenth book of poetry, Voices, we quickly discover that she continues to be a poet of very good—remarkably good—ideas. Take for example the opening poem, entitled with a line from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843): "Marley was dead to begin with," in which she writes lovingly about singing "No Woman No Cry" with the children of Bob Marley, the reggae genius, presumably at a concert. Here are the first seven lines of this very good idea turned poem:

then in trenchtown and in babylonthe sound of marleys ghostrose and began to fill the airlike in the christmas tale

his spirit shuddered and was aliveagain his dreadful locksthick in the voices of his children.

The poem suggests that in the canon of great artful/literary figures, Bob Marley is at least as, if not much more, interesting than Marley, the ghost from A Christmas Carol, and therefore perhaps Dickens himself, one of the great white male literary geniuses. What's more, she courageously makes this claim as the opening poem in a book of Poetry (with a capital P), deep in the heart of the home of white males. In this first poem, she flips the idea of what is most artful and canonical—or, and this is just as possible, she isn't so much challenging the notions of what is canonical as she is drawing attention to the similarities of these very different men. Indeed, both Charles Dickens and Bob Marley were and continue to be loved by the poor and marginalized. Marley's ghost entreats Scrooge to stop being so penny-pinching and to help people who are less fortunate, just as Bob Marley reminisces about how "we would cook cornmeal porridge, / Of which I'll share with you."

This kind of flipping and simultaneous comparing in order to draw attention to the folly of stereotypes is something Clifton has been doing a long time. In one of her most famous poems from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 (1987) called "Homage to My Hips," she does something similar. She says, "yes my hips are remarkable, but not because they don't fit the stereotypical idea for what hips should be." They don't "fit into little / petty places." Instead, they are remarkable because of their very presence in the world. She draws attention to what the world has told her she should be ashamed of and hide (and that, as she says, "I have known them / to put a spell on a man and / spin him like a top!" doesn't hurt either).

The next three poems in Voices—"aunt jemima," "uncle ben," and "cream of wheat,"—draw attention to the figures of African American people representing these boxes of food. Of these three food poems, two of the three are written as dramatic monologues that show these figures as individuals with interests, desires, questions, and gripes about how they have been depicted, and the cost to black culture of their representation these many years as mere logos.

But in this first section called "hearing," she doesn't just draw attention to issues of African American racial inequalities. She also gives us dramatic monologues written in the voices of Mataoka (in the parenthetical under the title, Clifton tells us that this is the real name of Pocahontas), a horse, a dog, and a raccoon. She does not discriminate in her advocacy for the marginalized. These short, simple, good-idea-poems are the best of the ones in this collection because they are, simply, so well conceived. Mataoka (Pocahontas) tells of a foreboding dream she has before the white man came to her people. The horse wonders why he was "born to balance / this two-leg / on my back," and the raccoon utters a bedtime prayer asking God to "welcome this bandit into the kingdom." Clifton has a genius for discovering and investigating the marginalized and giving us, through her poems, ever-new ways of walking in their shoes.

When Clifton...