The Limits of Celebration in Lucille Clifton’s Poetry: Writing the Aging Woman’s Body

This article explores the role of the aging body in Lucille Clifton’s poetry. It focuses on the intricate and changing relationship among age, race, sexuality, reproduction, disease, and body size as her poetry progresses. Literary criticism on Clifton typically stresses the life-affirming, celebratory nature of her depiction of the black female body.¹ Clifton’s focus on race is historically significant; Alicia Ostriker points out that Clifton began writing during the Black Arts Movement (bam) and purposely engaged its celebratory themes early on.² Therefore, a Black Arts framework dominates the criticism on Clifton’s poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist critics have focused on both race and gender with an emphasis on Clifton’s praise of the black female body. But this focus on rejoicing in the body has obscured the role of the aging, black female body in Clifton’s work. Although Kevin Young has remarked that in Clifton’s poetry “the body is the seat of struggle and praise,” and Hilary Holladay, the foremost scholar on Clifton, has periodically included aging in an occasional close reading of a poem, no sustained effort to date has been given to either the thematic treatment of aging in Clifton’s poetry or reconsiderations of how the bodily struggles Young points to should be understood in the context of how aging complicates Clifton’s use of celebration.³

If we separate Clifton’s poetry roughly by decades into early (1960s–80s), middle (1990s), and late periods (the turn of the twenty-first century onward), we see that these periods correspond to different emphases on the aging body and demonstrate shifts in Clifton’s celebratory impulse over time.⁴ Although poems on aging are less prevalent in the early poetry between 1965 and 1988, the poems that do address aging tend to celebrate its signs and associate the black woman’s thickness as a marker of desirability. The poetry from the middle period thematically stresses a growing association between aging and disease as well as a tendency to highlight the size of the body to code a growing anxiety about the aging body. The late poetry forges strong connections in relation to aging, decline, and impending death at the same time that it celebrates the possibility of an afterlife and the continuity of the universe. However, even Clifton’s early, most laudatory work features moments of ambiguity, and I will use these distinctions to show that the celebratory impulse, especially in relation to the aging body, declines as her poetry progresses.

I will incorporate current social science research into my narrative on Clifton in order to contextualize the relationship between aging and body size in Clifton’s poetry. Clifton’s proclivity to praise her weight in youth and mourn her weight loss in advanced age will therefore be discussed in light of contemporary research findings. I argue that Clifton’s work is notable for addressing aging, race, and weight, especially since social science researchers are currently in the process of theorizing how these identity markers operate in women’s lives.

Clifton’s poetry is ideal for demonstrating that age cannot be divorced from issues of race and gender since Clifton grounds her poetry in the body. Because her body is at once black, female, and aging, she explores these issues simultaneously in the poems that address aging. Clifton’s proclivity to celebrate her aging body should be understood in relation to her racial heritage. Moreover, this article demonstrates that Clifton’s growing preoccupation with aging as her poetry progresses is bound up with the reoccurring figures of the mother and the mirror image, both motifs that complicate her understanding of her own aging process across the spectrum of her early, middle, and late poetry. Most women can relate to the experience of contemplating their changing image in the mirror year after year. Consequently, Clifton’s poetry should interest those invested in studying how women understand their own aging since it strikes a careful balance between lamenting the changes in the aging body and celebrating them.

The poem “homage...