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SPEAKER:
This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Lucille Clifton. Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 in Depew, New York. Her father was a steelworker. Her mother worked in a laundry and wrote poetry in private. Clifton remembers sitting on her mother's lap and listening as she read poetry. She began to write her own poems at age ten. Clifton attended Howard University and Fredonia Teachers College. She married Fred James Clifton in 1958, and together they had six children. Clifton has written much about her own children and about the experience of being a mother and a poet. When Clifton was 30, Langston Hughes included her in his influential anthology, The Poetry of the Negro.

Three years later, she published Good Times, her first book of poems. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and named a Top ten book of 1969 by The New York Times. Clifton's poetry is pared down, written in short lines of lowercase letters. She writes about the lives of African-Americans and the experiences of women, both historical and personal. She's written about cancer, the body, violence, biblical characters, the history of slavery, urban lives and animals, including many poems about one particular fox. Clifton is the author of more than ten books of poetry, Blessing the Boats, a volume of her collected poems won the National Book Award in 2000. She's also written many children's books, including eight Everett Anderson books about an African-American boy living in the city. Clifton has won an Emmy Award, fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, L.A. Literary Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize. And in 1999, she was appointed chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

She taught at many colleges, including University of California, Santa Cruz, Saint Mary's College of Maryland, and Columbia University. Lucille Clifton died in 2010 after a long battle with cancer. She was 73 years old. The following poems were recorded at the Library of Congress in 1973 and 1989.

LUCILLE CLIFTON:

The first one I'd like to read is new. It's called My Poem. And it is my poem. It was written because after readings, I often get people, you often get people asking you questions. And one of the questions that I get asked is, or variations on why are you so filled with hate, that sort of thing. Well, this is My Poem.

a love person
from love people
out of the afrikan sun
under the sign of cancer.
whoever see my
midnight smile
seeing star apple and
mango from home.
whoever take me for
a negative thing,
his death be on him
like a skin
and his skin
be his heart’s revenge.

This is a poem called Sisters for Elaine Philip on her birthday. And it was written for my sister. It was published in Essence magazine.

And it was a trying to tell my sister who we both were. And she loved it. My sister bought every Essence that came out that month, and she was very happy, which makes me happy. I also like to read it in places where I see my other sisters. And I think you'll understand why. Sisters, for Elaine Philip on her birthday.

me and you be sisters.
we be the same.
me and you
coming from the same place.
me and you
be greasing our legs
touching up our edges.
me and you
be scared of rats
be stepping on roaches.
me and you
come running high down purdy street one time
and mama laugh and shake her head at
me and you.
me and you
got babies
got thirty-five
got black
let our hair go back
be loving ourselves
be loving ourselves
be sisters.
only where you sing
i poet.

This is a poem called Cutting Greens. I've read it before, and I'm pleased to see that what happened that time didn't happen this time. When I read it before, I said cutting greens and people laughed. To which I said cutting greens, greens aren't funny, greens are good.

This is strange. A strange poem because in the middle of cutting them, I began thinking about what I was doing. And it suddenly struck me as strange that I was, you know, usually you mix greens. Some people may not know that, but you do. And I was thinking about, look at me mixing these greens and they may not want to be mixed. And I thought that was a strange thing for me to do. Well, anyhow, Cutting Greens.

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

I like to have fun with poetry. I believe poetry can be fun. That doesn't mean I'm not serious. I am very serious. But I want to get myself sort of up. So I want to read a celebratory poem.

And this is one. And this is fun for me because I like to see how people react to it. It's called Poem in Praise of Menstruation. You see people react, adults react. These are grown ups. They know about this, but they react. It's interesting. Something very natural to half the planet's people and nobody mentions it. More than half. Poem in Praise of Menstruation.

if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon if

there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta if there

is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain if there is

a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel if there is in

the universe such a river if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave

Thank you. Somehow, that leads me to reading about other things. My Dream About Time.

a woman unlike myself is running
down the long hall of a lifeless house
with too many windows which open on
a world she has no language for,
running and running until she reaches
at last the one and only door
which she pulls open to find each wall
is faced with clocks and as she watches
all of the clocks strike
NO

I come out of the Baptist church. I often say that because I did come out of the Baptist Church. But once you have been there, it doesn't leave you. And this was the kind of church where you got happy. You were happy in our church. John.

somebody coming in blackness
like a star
and the world be a great bush
on his head
and his eyes be fire
in the city
and his mouth be true as time

he be calling the people brother
even in the prison
even in the jail

i’m just only a baptist preacher
somebody bigger than me coming
in blackness like a star

Spring Song.

The green of Jesus

is breaking the ground

and the sweet smell of delicious Jesus

is opening the house and

the dance of Jesus music

has hold of the air and

the world is turning

in the body of Jesus and

Children, the future is possible

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER

That was Lucille Clifton recorded at the Library of Congress in 1973 and 1989. The poems are used by permission of HarperCollins and Alfred Aiken app. You've been listening to The Essential American Poets Podcast produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Lucille Clifton and other essential American poets and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.