Lucille Sayles Clifton was born in Depew, New York, to Samuel L. and Thelma Moore Sayles. Her father worked for the New York steel mills; her mother was a launderer, homemaker, and a vocational poet. Although neither parent was formally educated, they provided their large family with an appreciation and an abundance of books, especially those by African Americans. At age sixteen, Lucille entered college early, matriculating as a drama major at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her Howard associates included such intellectuals as Sterling A. Brown, A. B. Spellman, Chloe Wofford (now Toni Morrison), who later edited her writings for Random House, and Fred Clifton, whom she married in 1958.
After transferring to Fredonia State Teachers College in 1955, Clifton worked as an actor and began to cultivate in poetry the minimalist characteristics that would become her professional signature. Like other prominent Black Aesthetic poets consciously breaking with Euro-centric conventions, including Sonia Sanchez and her Howard colleague, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Clifton developed such stylistic features as concise, untitled free verse lyrics of mostly iambic tri-meter lines, occasional slant rhymes, anaphora and other forms of repetition, puns and allusions, lowercase letters, sparse punctuation, and a lean lexicon of rudimentary but evocative words.
Clifton has been likened to Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson in her style. Her poems are spare in form, deceptively simple in language, complex in ideas, and reflective of the commonplace, the everyday.
Her first volume of poems was Good Times. She was inspired by her own family, especially her six young children, Clifton's early poems are celebrations of African American ancestry, heritage, and culture. Her early publications praise African Americans for their historic resistance to oppression and their survival of economic and political racism. Clifton's prose maintains a familial and cultural tradition of storytelling. The themes of her exceptional poems reflect both Clifton's ethnic pride and her womanist principles, and integrate her race and gender consciousness. Casting her persona as at once plain and extraordinary, Clifton challenges pejorative Western myths that define women and people of color as predatory and malevolent or vulnerable and impotent. Her poems attest to her political sagacity and her lyrical mysticism.
Her poetry reflects optimism, an emphasis on the qualities that has allowed people to survive, and the belief that people have the ability to make things better. It is peopled with strong characters and historical and biblical figures. Her female characters represent known and unknown heroes who have taken responsibility and stands, and reflect the strength of the Dahomey woman who was the founder of Clifton's family in America. Her black males are strong, healthy, and treated with love and respect. Poem sequences throughout her works espouse Clifton’s belief in divine grace by revising the characterization of such biblical figures as the Old Testament prophets, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary, and in An Ordinary Woman she shows herself in conflict and consort with Kali, the Hindu goddess of war and creativity. Clifton is nonetheless witty and sanguine as she probes the impact of history on the present. She testifies to the pain of oppression manifested in her parents’ tormented marriage, in racism that undermines progressive movements for social change, in disregard for the planet Earth as a living and sentient being.
The place of her poetry and prose is essentially urban landscapes that are examples of most Black communities in this country. Her poetry is often a conscious, quiet introduction to the real world of Black sensitivities. Clifton consciously pits her spare, economical language against the pervasive and negative images of black urban life, insistently reminding her readers of the humanity concealed underneath social and economic statistics. Like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, she sees virtue and dignity in the lives of ordinary African-Americans, giving them” faces, names, and histories, and validating their existence. In the face of the daily realities of urban life, Clifton records both the adversity and the small triumphs, always maintaining a strong-willed sense of optimism and spiritual resilience. She also defines herself as a poet whose task is to keep historical memory alive. At the same time that Clifton accepts the weight of this history, however, she refuses to be trapped or defeated by it. Like a blues singer’s lyrics, Clifton’s poems confront the chaos, disorder, and pain of human experience to transcend these conditions and to reaffirm her humanity. The optimism that shapes Clifton’s poetry is nourished by her deep spiritual beliefs. She often invokes Christian motifs and biblical references in her poems. In her capacity as both witness and seer, she looks through the madness and sorrow of the world, locating moments of epiphany in the mundane and ordinary. And her poetry invariably moves toward those moments of calm and tranquility, of grace, which speak to the continuity of the human spirit.
Her poem: “poem to my uterus” and “to my last period”; is a celebration of women’s fertility, poem in praise of menstruation compares the menstrual flow to a river bright as the blood red edge of the moon. Its central metaphor and its tone bring to mind Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the famously dignified poem and benchmark work of the Harlem Renaissance. While Hughes focuses on the role of blacks, especially black men, in the shaping of civilization, Clifton looks at the female experience through the ages. By fusing images of nature, female sexuality, and matriarchal mythology, the poem transcends the familiar taboos surrounding the fertile woman, and menstruation becomes an awe-inspiring life force. Should a stronger force exist, it would only be another version of “this wild water,” and one could only “pray that it flows also through animals beautiful and faithful and ancient and female and brave.” In one conditional sentence, which five times repeats the phrase “if there is a river,” the poem represents the cyclical and periodic aspects of menstruation. Her “poem to my uterus” and “to my last period”; are companion pieces, appearing on facing pages and addressing related events. They resemble “there is a girl inside” and “female” in their use of personification. In the woeful “poem to my uterus” the poet addresses her soon-to-be-removed uterus as an old girl-a term that is both wry and affectionate. She goes on to compare her uterus to a stocking I will not need / where I am going, / where I am going, lines implying both uncertainty about the future and a heightened awareness of mortality. The woman and her reproductive organs are in a mutually dependent relationship:
My black bag of desire
where can I go
barefoot
without you
where can you go
without me
With her essential black bag, the woman is a well-prepared traveler. Without it, she anticipates a loss of direction and a lack of purpose. The word barefoot brings to mind an undressed woman, alone with her body. If a woman’s mind and body create and continually define each other, then the loss of a body part represents a partial death. In the case of a sex organ, the loss is all the more profound since it means the woman can no longer conceive or bear children. The woman in this poem mourns the loss of creative potential as well as the seeming erasure of her sexual history. Caught in limbo, she asks questions that neither her mind nor her body can answer. “To my last period” is less anxious and more resilient than the one in “poem to my uterus.” From the start, it is clear that the poet’s imagination and humor have already rescued her from the dangers of self-pity:
Well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
Thirty-eight years and you
never arrived … splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow
The stanza’s syntactically delayed meaning brings to mind the anxieties preceding and then attending menstruation, whereas the unexpected image of the “red dress” celebrates the vividness, the privately riveting beauty, of the blood itself. The rest of the poem develops the female conceit. The uterus may have been a reliable “old girl,” but the menstrual flow was a willful, brazen spirit:
Now it is done,
and I feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? Wasn’t she beautiful?
Here the poet’s component parts are imagined as female: The “hussy” and the grandmothers represent her youthful and postmenopausal selves, respectively. Fortified by the vivid memory of menstruation, a process that both enriched and complicated her life, the woman turns away from her body (“now it is done”) and addresses an unspecified audience. This is a subtle indication that she is willing to accept her altered body. The mournful tone of “poem to my uterus” has given way to a gently self-mocking, yet more accepting, outlook. Lucille Clifton brings tragedy into our lives comfortably. It forces us to realize that what happened wasn’t isolated, but something real in our world. Whether her poetry is exploring the biological changes within her own body or imagining the death of the Sioux chief Crazy Horse, Lucille Clifton’s world is both earthy and spiritual. |