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chapter 1 Light Years lucille clifton is among those time-traveling souls who Walt Whitman believed would “look back on me because I look’d forward to them.”1 In her sweeping, elegiac vision of the world, she is the Good Gray Poet’s descendant, his sister, his dark reflection in the waves. Her earnest voice bears witness to what she calls “the bond of live things everywhere” (GW 149). Combining Christian tenets with pantheistic African lore, the philosophy evident in her poetry holds that all life is sacred and all lives are interdependent. But because she was born “both nonwhite and woman” (BL 25), some fifty years after the elder poet’s death, her world is quite different from Whitman’s. As an African American woman, whose great-great-grandmother was captured as a young child in Dahomey, Africa , and brought to the United States as a slave, Clifton is especially sensitive to the injustices that blacks, women, and poor people have suffered in the United States. Her poetry is in large part a response and antidote to these injustices as well as a tribute to the human spirit’s will to endure, and even soar, in the face of pain and loss. Although she is not a strictly autobiographical poet, her identity is integral to everything she writes: “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.”2 Upon reading Clifton, one finds that her poems often manage to be deeply personal while also speaking directly to universal emotions as well as social and political realities. The poem “1994,” for instance, was inspired by the poet’s breast cancer diagnosis: “i was leaving my fifty-eighth year / when a thumb of ice / stamped itself hard near my heart” (TS 24). In addition to recounting a 1. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 162. 2. Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Lucille Clifton,” Callaloo 22, no. 1 (1999): 58. 7 8 wild blessings personal ordeal, the poem acknowledges the looming threat of breast cancer to women as well as the risks that women and blacks assume every day: “you know how dangerous it is / to be born with breasts / you know how dangerous it is / to wear dark skin.” History is, in large part, the story of a continuous assault on vulnerable groups, and Clifton assumes that her readers know that story, regardless of their role in it. The poem’s sorrowful reproach—“have we not been good children / did we not inherit the earth”—suddenly gives way to an unnervingly direct appeal: “but you must know all about this / from your own shivering life.” One would be hard pressed to read this poem without experiencing a spine-tingling shock of recognition. Such is often the case in Clifton’s poems, which time and again illuminate the universal within the individual, the black, and the female. Born with twelve fingers, like her mother and her firstborn daughter, Clifton often uses her hands to symbolize a spiritual connection with others , a deep and abiding empathy flowing involuntarily from her body and soul. Her extra digits were removed when she was an infant, but their seeming magic (growing out of the old superstition that witches had twelve fingers) is still with her: “I’ve always had a kind [of] sixth sense— especially when somebody talks about hands. Yes, a sixth sense—if you want to call it that—that deals with spirituality and the sacred.”3 In the mid-1970s, Clifton was in contact, through a Ouija board and automatic writing, with her deceased mother, Thelma Sayles; poems in An Ordinary Woman and Two-Headed Woman draw on that moving but profoundly unsettling experience. Around the same time, she also wrote a series of poems based on the words of “The Ones Who Talk,” disembodied spirits commenting on “the fate and danger of the world of the Americas.”4 In a variation on the traditional reading of palms, she said that she could sometimes sense important things about people just by touching their hands.5 This phenomenon is the subject of “wild blessings” (Q 47). The poem begins with the fragmented...

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