In Memory of Lucille Clifton

 

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

 

I’m always a little surprised when famous poets die. I understand that death is the condition of our life, but I somehow always expect famous poets to work around it. Last week, I was reminded again how silly this thinking is with the death of Lucille Clifton, a remarkable poet and woman by all accounts. When I first met Clifton’s poems in a college poetry class, the only thing I could think to do with her language was memorize it, repeat her words over and over in my head until they were my own, until I had consumed them. To this day, I know only three poems by heart, one of them Clifton’s “admonitions,” a startling yet funny poem that deals with race, gender, and what it means to be a poet. The last stanza reads:

children

when they ask you

why is your mama so funny

say

she is a poet

she don’t have no sense

Every time I make a mistake, every time someone stares at my loud laugh or my inability to understand, I think of those lines, and remind myself, if a woman as lovely as Lucille Clifton can laugh about having no sense, why can’t I?

Clifton wrote often about her body, celebrating its power, its strength, its frailties, in striking honesty and striking humor. She wrote about surviving the deaths of children and family members, about race and racism, about what it means to live in an African American body, in a woman’s body, in a mother’s body, in a body ravaged by disease, in a country that doesn’t respect any of those things. In the poem “1994,” Clifton writes:

you know how dangerous it is

to be born with breasts

you know how dangerous it is

to wear dark skin

And in “my dream about being white,” she writes:

and i’m wearing

white history

but there’s no future

in those clothes

so i take them off and

wake up

dancing.

Throughout her writing life, she fought injustice; for more than a decade, she fought cancer. As my father would say, Lucille Clifton fought like hell. She wrote children’s books as well as poetry, was the Poet Laureate of Maryland, taught workshops and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice. And she was only 73 years old.

Here’s my favorite of her poems, “won’t you celebrate with me”

won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

So here’s to celebrating Lucille Clifton’s fighting spirit, her drive, her keen eye and ear turned to our life’s rhythms, to our life’s misfortunes and happiness. And here’s to keeping her memory alive. Yes, last week, something that tried to kill her succeeded—but for 73 years, she won and won and won.

 

Andrea Scarpino  is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com