Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from New York. Common topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African American heritage, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the female body.
She was the first person in her family to finish high school and attend college. She started Howard University on scholarship as a drama major but lost the scholarship two years later.
Thus began her writing career.
Good Times, her first book of poems, was published in 1969. She has since been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and has been honored as Maryland's Poet Laureate.
Ms. Clifton's foray into writing for children began with Some of the Days of Everett Anderson, published in 1970.
In 1976, Generations: A Memoir was published. In 2000, she won the National Book Award for Poetry, for her work "Poems Seven".
From 1985 to 1989, Clifton was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. From 1995 to 1999, she was a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 2006, she was a fellow at Dartmouth College.
Clifton received the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement posthumously, from the Poetry Society of America.
“and at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.”
“dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.”
“they are shrouding words so that families cannot find them.”
“they will empty your eyes of everything you love”
“who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?”
“so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world”
“a tongue blistered with smiling”
“walked erect out of my sleep”
“i am rejuvenated bones rising from the dear floor where they found you”
“was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.”
“her dangling braids the color of rain.”
“oh antic Godreturn to memy mother in her thirties leaned across the front porch the huge pillow of her breasts pressing against the railsummoning me in for bed.I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.I can barely recall her songthe scent of her handsthough her wild hair scratches my dreams at night. return to me, oh Lord of then and now, my mother’s calling,her young voice humming my name.”
“I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”
“People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.”
“You might as well answer the door, my child,the truth is furiously knocking.”
“they ask me to rememberbut they want me to remembertheir memoriesand I keep on remembering mine”
“don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”
“We cannot create what we can't imagine.”
“I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.”
“I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.”
“listen,you a wonder.you a city of a woman.you got a geographyof your own.listen,somebody need a mapto understand you.somebody need directionsto move around you.listen,woman,you not a noplaceanonymousgirl;mister with his hands on youhe got his hands onsomedamnbody!”
“the lost womenI need to know their namesthose women I would have walked with,jauntily the way men go in groupsswinging their arms, and the onesthose sweating women whom I would have joinedAfter a hard game to chew the fatwhat would we have called each other laughingjoking into our beer? where are my gangs,my teams, my mislaid sisters?all the women who could have known me,where in the world are their names?”
“Wishes For Sons i wish them cramps.i wish them a strange townand the last tampon.I wish them no 7-11.i wish them one week earlyand wearing a white skirt.i wish them one week late.later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to.let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.”
“won't you celebrate with mewhat i have shaped intoa kind of life? i had no model.born in babylonboth nonwhite and womanwhat did i see to be except myself?i made it uphere on this bridge betweenstarshine and clay,my one hand holding tightmy other hand; come celebratewith me that everydaysomething has tried to kill meand has failed.”
“I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.”
“the lesson of the falling leavesthe leaves believesuch letting go is lovesuch love is faithsuch faith is gracesuch grace is godi agree with the leaves”
“blessing the boats(at saint mary’s)may the tidethat is entering even nowthe lip of our understandingcarry you outbeyond the face of fearmay you kissthe wind then turn from itcertain that it willlove your backmay youopen your eyes to waterwater waving foreverand may you in your innocencesail through this to that”