"Words in Honor and in Memory of Lucille Clifton: A Beginning..." | Evie Shockley

Lucille Clifton’s passing marks the first time that I have lost a friend who is also a well-known (and beloved) public figure. Thus, at a moment when I most want to draw into myself—or, rather, to draw near the people in my life who also knew her—and grieve for Lucille, the woman, I find it impossible not to add my voice to those who are primarily mourning the loss of Clifton, the poet, because I mourn that loss as well.

Lucille taught me many things, explicitly and by example. A very important idea she taught me is that poetry is for everyone. Not every poem is for every person, of course, but poetry as an activity, as an expression of culture, as an art to be appreciated cannot be defined so as to exclude the poetic activity, expression, and appreciation of the majority of the people. Speaking specifically of our national tradition, she often said that American poetry is a house, a large house with many, many rooms. There is room enough for everyone in American poetry, she insisted.

Her spirit of inclusivity didn’t prevent her from distinguishing unmemorable poetry from work that aspired to and achieved something special—illuminating, moving, revelatory—in its use of language. And it didn’t mean that she liked all kinds of poetry equally, in terms of her personal taste. But it did mean that she took each poem on its own terms. I have seen her practice, brilliantly, what she preached. In the two semesters I studied with her formally, Lucille warned each workshop that there were certain kinds of “experimental” poetry she didn’t feel she really understood; though we were welcome to bring such work to be discussed by the group, she might not be able to help us with it as much as she could with other kinds of poems. Ha! No matter how divergent a poem was from the kind of work Lucille herself created and most enjoyed, she unfailingly offered some observation or suggestion that went right to the heart of the piece and pointed toward how it could more effectively be the poem it was trying to be.

One of the many things I will remember about Lucille is her sense of humor, which often came glittering down around her like a warm rain of broken glass and balm. Looking-glass, at that, and not such small shards that you couldn’t see bits of yourself in them—but always, too, the balm. It was evident in one of the things she often said at the beginnings of her readings, a phrase she got from an old preacher: “I come to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.”

I speak of loss, but with deep gratitude that it is only her physical presence—no small thing, of course! but only the physical—that is gone. I still have her poems, which I could never be done (re)reading in a lifetime, as well as the photos, videos, and audio recordings that are the gift of this era of technology. But, more than that, her essential presence, that part of her that was most her, remains with me, in memory and otherwise. She wrote this poem in the voice of her mother, but now when I read it, I hear Lucille speaking:

dying

i saw a small moon rise
from the breast of a woman
lying in a hospital hall
and I saw that the moon was me
and I saw that the punctured bag
of a woman body was me
and i saw you sad there in the lobby
waiting to visit and I wanted
to sing to you
go home
i am waiting for you there

Peace.

Evie Shockley

From "Kin and Kin: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton" | Alicia Ostriker

[This piece] is from the opening of my essay on her in my book Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. When we met after I wrote this essay, back in the early '90s or thereabouts, Lucille thanked me for being (she said) the only critic who wrote about her not only as a Black poet but as a poet, period. I was so happy she said this because that's what I wanted to do. Lucille is a poet who belongs to women, to Black people, but also to the whole world. She did things in poetry that were never done before, and yet seem totally universal. I can't think of her as gone, because her poems are so alive, so much a part of us. --AO

---

Lucille Clifton's writing is deceptively simple.... Marilyn Hacker has written that Clifton's poems remind her, in grace and deftness, of Japanese ink drawings. They remind me of a drum held in a woman's lap. The woman sits on a plain wooden chair, or on the earth. A community surrounds her. She slaps the drum with her bare hands. "Oh children," this drummer says in the title poem of Clifton's first book, "think about the good times."

The work of a minimalist artist like Clifton makes empty space resonate. Silence in such art is not mere absence of noise, but locates us as it were on a cosmic stage. We are meant to understand the unsaid, to take our humble places with a sense of balance and belonging instead of the anxiety and alienation promoted by more conspicuously sublime and ambitious artistries. Omissions, as Marianne Moore remarks in another context, are not accidents. Whatever the content of a particular piece, we should experience the craftsmanship of the minimalist as a set of unerring gestures governed by a constraining and shaping discipline, so habitual it seems effortless. While the white space in art of this kind stands for the largeness of space and time in which we human creatures find ourselves, the figured space stands for thick experience--experience which has been philosophically contemplated for an extended period. The artist, having patiently learned something quite exact about the dynamics of reality, offers it in concentrated form.

A byproduct of concentration may be humor, the sacred levity associated with adepts in numerous traditions of religious art. Think of the Zen image of the laughing monk; John Cage's playfulness; the jokes of the thirteenth century Sufi poet Rumi, or those in the Chasidic stories told by Martin Buber; the trickster pranks of Coyote in Native American folktales, or Monkey King leaping to the end of the universe and peeing on the Buddha's little finger in a Chinese tale; remember the boyishly erotic mischief of the young Krishna. Then think of how Clifton fuses high comedy and high seriousness when she describes the poetic vocation, a topic most poets approach with a solemnity proportional to their/our insecurity. Clifton's "admonitions," the last poem in good times, ends:

children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny
say
she is a poet
she don't have no sense

Another early poem about her vocation is "prayer," which asks an unnamed listener to "lighten up," wonders why his hand is so heavy on "just poor/ me," and receives a response which makes this poem cunningly parallel John Milton's complaint of blindness:

answer

this is the stuff
i made the heroes out of
all the saints
and prophets and things
had to come by
this (70)

Has Clifton read Milton's sonnet, which questions how God can exact the "day-labor" of poetry from a blind man, and ends in the famous "They also serve who only stand and wait"? Whether she has or not, what impresses me (and makes me laugh) is the identical structure of these two poems in which the poet interrogates God's fairness and gets fairly answered--and the marvelous freshness of Clinton's version. It thrills me as an American that this sacred conversation, this de profundis, can occur in the vernacular American language. I enjoy the down-home familiarity between Clifton and her God; I applaud a woman lining herself up with the heroes and prophets; and I feel, as well, for her struggle--which is not Milton's blindness, or Gerard Manley Hopkins' conviction of sin, but an American Black woman's struggle which I can guess at. In a much later piece, "the making of poems," humility and comedy again meet:

the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job. (186)

What does it mean when a woman calls herself "adam and his mother?" The mother could be Eve, or a nameless pre-monotheistic goddess, or just any mother doing her homely work--and that conflation of myth and modernity is part of the joke. Making the poet double-gendered is another part. "True names" registers the archaic notion that language is not arbitrary, that poetry names true essences of things--while the poet's failure, it seems to me, conflates individual inadequacy with the imperfect meshing of signifiers and signified in a non-mythic world. How could "adam and his mother" find language for the way we live in the twentieth century? Still, they have to try. As with the simple double gesture of "this" to stand for the hardship god inflicts on saints and prophets, the idea of the poet's work as an impossible yet sacred task is effectively rendered in the plainest of language--right down to calling it not a task but a job. "The making of poems" demystifies poetic labor and dignifies maternal and manly labor. What these poems tell us is that high and low things can meet, along with the union of the holy and the comic, if the poet knows enough about both.

Alicia Ostriker

Spring Poem | GE Patterson

the world offers this

now    rock light sound feather grass

to love and you do

you love everything at once

cause that's your way, that's your way


GE Patterson

"I Am In The Becoming" | Sharon Mesmer

      — in memory of Lucille Clifton and Lisa Kuhlman


Being human, I have always
entered a tethered moment
to redeem the dream
at the end of time.
But where is my body now?

It seems my scars still attach,
but in the abstract —
just as my stars beat in eclipse,
whatever their nature
and purpose.

It’s true that I would know
this one you are now seeing in dreams,
being in community,
together being broken.
But now I am the one becoming,
becoming now.

While crossing a great ocean
or ascending a throne
we may see ourselves
as the winged
revealers of reveries,
beseechers with open hands.
Or thus I have heard.
And thus I now know.

And where is my body now?
My body is in the becoming,
becoming now.

Sharon Mesmer

Remembering Lucille Clifton

Starting Monday, March 8 at Delirious Hem, with essays, poems, & remembrances by:

Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Alicia Ostriker
Cara Benson
Deborah Poe
Evie Shockley
GE Patterson
Imani Tolliver
Mairead Byrne
naomi shihab nye
Shanna Compton
Sharon Mesmer
Tara Betts
Theresa Edwards

This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like Forum #2

To skip this intro and go directly to the forum, please scroll down to the next post!

Welcome to our second This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like forum, where each day this week you will find new responses.




Featuring:
Monday February 1: Ching-In Chen, Jennifer Bartlett, & Kate Durbin
Tuesday February 2: Juliet Cook & Kate Schapira
Wednesday February 3: Kirsten Kaschock & Michele Battiste

Thursday February 4: Michelle Detorie & Stephanie Strickland

Friday February 5: T.A. Noonan & Theodora Danylevich
Saturday February 6: Amy King & Kirsten Kaschock 2

With more to come!

There are likely as many strains and modes of feminist poetics as there are of feminism, but in reviews, discussions, and even our own manifestos, we often fall into shorthand that fails to explore this valuable friction, our own variations. I'd longed for unpacking, and so issued this open-ended call:

This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like: what branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge? Are there particular feminist tactics you employ? Do you consider yourself a feminist in many ways, but don't particularly involve it in the poetry? Feel free to take liberties with the questions! Short, long, essay, manifesto, whatever appeals to you!

Our first forum was full of such provocative, funny, thoughtful, revealing, and kick-ass work, I thought we'd better run another. We hope you'll enjoy and join in the conversation. If you post on your own blog in response to this conversation, or if you're a poet identifying as a woman, and you'd like to add a post to this forum, please drop a note in the comments!

Curated by Danielle Pafunda

Amy King

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi, Slaves to Do these Things (forthcoming from BlazeVox), and I Want to Make You Safe (forthcoming from Litmus Press). She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College, and co-curates The Stain reading series in Brooklyn, NY.

“My Barbaric Bitch of a Yawp”

She lost all her innocence

Gave it to an abscess

She lost all her innocence

She said, "I am not a feminist"

—Hole, “I Think That I Would Die”

I care but can’t go into specifics just now, no time. I’m busy making poems; you’ll find the details there. My visions in verse. So this’ll be a one-off rant-song to sing along with and jump-start your day to.

I get called a bitch, or a feminist-bitch, at least once a week and, likewise, I often name people to say something about what they’ve just done. “Asshole, just cut me off in traffic.” “Angel, just helped my grandmother cross the street!” So with such proliferation of naming going on, I really don’t get the fear of being identified as or, gasp, calling one’s self a feminist. We know a name doesn’t define our entirety; or as Audre Lorde so aptly put it, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." So they say it’s the history; they don’t want to come across as man-hating hairy dykes. Then they say they know the women’s movement was made up of a wide variety of women (as well as more than a few supportive uncles, fathers and brothers), that those women, who were so often our aunts, grandmothers and mothers, were not evil witches. They say they know that those women won a lot of rights and changed the structure of male-female relationships. But don’t ask them (the “I’m not a feminist but…” gals) what rights those women won, don’t ask them how relations between men and women have changed, don’t ask them how they benefited from the blood, sweat and tears of those unsung feminists…

I am a feminist because I recognize the label isn’t going away; it carries a brave history and it has a future. I love the efforts those feminists made, however misguided or right on they got it over the years. Feminism is a past and feminism is a future. It’s political. Though I’m no politician, I live in a world were my public persona carries real weight. Political implications. What I do defines the label I represent at that moment. What I say gives value to the movements I align myself with. It does not define me; I am defining it. I’m a lesbian, I say, because I need to defend other queer women, but I’ve fucked men. I’m an independent because I want people to have more governing power, but I’ve voted Democrat. I’m an American because I love so much the idealism we’ve advanced on, but I critique the atrocious acts my country commits. If I give up the feminist label to the straining voice against it, to those who insist that the name somehow distorts and pins me down, then I give up the parts of that history, and its power, that are so significant and worth my time and gratitude. And I would be forced to see the world through backwards blinders only. I would be giving up the privilege of working with people who fearlessly butt against the unequal, classist, homophobic, sexist, racist, religious, status-quo-for-the-masses mentality. I would be giving up the empowerment that community inspires.

“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. … Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.”

—J.K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Speech 2008

Any poet worth her salt knows that, generally speaking, you can do one of two things with language -- You can use your words to reflect what society surrounds us with. You can represent the insipid mainstream culture and repeat it however prettily or dolled up you like. You can distract with pseudo-epiphanies or masturbate to empty language games until you’re living in a vacuum of your own making. Or you can be a creator, you can write the poetry that is not popular because you are saying things that don’t just comfort people and tell them that the way they’re living now is perfect and lovely and oh-so-right. You can either reflect or you can create, at great risk, to improve things, reveal complexities, point out those brilliant chinks in the mainstream armor of duality and western rigidity. You create to show that there is more to perceive, that change is always afoot, that you want to have a hand in what that change should do, that you can visualize a keener, more interesting and diverse world where the roles and lines and tasks relegated to “woman” and “man” are thinning fronts that can no longer support humanity’s advancement. These “confusing” “crazy” creations are often unpopular because they shake us up; the status quo resists because people aren’t accustomed to seeing in radical and as-yet-unfathomed ways, they can’t visualize themselves in the odd pictures such poets are making. We are afraid to imagine other ways of being on a planet dominated by wars, environmental destruction, and the luxury of ignorance. We hope that if we stay very still, don’t move, and speak clearly, nothing will come undone—and we’ll be safe.

“… Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other.”

—Judith Butler

So it is with feminism and poetry, which are movements, hand-in-hand progressions, the visualization of hope and the often-belittled notion of investing in improvement, even *gasp* looking for some moral imperative in context. Feminist poets do not invest substantial attention in that static image of a hairy angry bitch meant to shut us down and squelch our efforts and dry the ink of our pens; we are too busy moving and shaking shit up and asking people to become aware of and check the power structures we participate in and to give up certain power privileges so that we each might arrive at some semblance of equal footing with access to basic necessities and accesses and to share and to look at other aspects of our humanity that we have been told to repress because they’re too feminine. Feminist poets are putting pen to paper where and when it counts and challenging the very core notions of what it means to be human, literally, conceptually, and emotionally. If I blur and confound the line between one more “them versus us” modus operandi, then I’m doing my job and causing people to pause & reconsider the next actions they’ll take: to hit and kill and segregate, or to lean in, study, consider, smell, see, think and breathe shared air—and then act and react.

“I think … that we have not yet become human. Or, I might say, in a different way, that the category of the human is in the process of becoming. What constitutes the human is a site of contestation. There are clashing cultural interpretations about what the human ought to be, and that every time you assert human rights, you are also adding to the meaning of what the human is.”

—Judith Butler

Empathy, you suggest? But isn’t it better to give a good ass beating and take one’s seat higher on the scale? Fuck the hierarchy. It’s not the “natural” order of things, despite the desperate protests of those that sit atop their mountain of things and cling to a misanthropic power. Our current situation is a complex ideological structure designed with all manner of booby traps, many self-policing, to keep us in our places, sequestered in valleys and caves, in our lady and dude roles, scared to say that on the face of it, this scene isn’t right when, across the worldwide board and at its most basic, one gender is still supposed to cow tow to another. It’s even got us scared to say that there aren’t only two genders nor two scripted ways to act: feminine or masculine, for each of us. That’s why so many young people want to talk about fluidity: they’re tapping into how this hostile-yet-invisible way of seeing and being (invisible so that we can’t point the problems out) bars access, holds us in place, tells us if we don’t wear the “proper” dolly clothes or sport manly muscles and strictly maintain aggression as a male norm then we’re out of line and doomed to a life of miserable outcast status. It’s why some can’t even see that women could never just “act like men” to achieve equality (see Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/comment-page-8/) – that kind of “way in” is bogus because the very structure of the way things are doesn’t permit such “feminine” considerations as empathy and mindfulness, in fact eliminates them, and this is why we don’t let mothers engage in ground combat. The social fabric as it stands would simply melt and implode.

Remember in “The Matrix” when Neo is asked if he senses that something is off? That reality isn’t sitting quite right? Well, we word workers are all friggin’ Neo. We’re each “the one” and “the one” and “the one” gathered into a sharp arrow point called feminism, guided and guiding together into every next moment and context. And it’s up to those of us with even an iota of awareness to daringly claim that label and continue to define it and redefine it and work together and add to it and impose on it and make that label act on our behalves—despite what mud is slung and fears are put upon us to slow us down and stop us. Because even the fallout changes and we can learn from that: feminists used to be scared of being relegated to lives of “old maids.” Now we’re just afraid of not being sexy. Just think if Emma Goldman caved and said, “Oh no, they’re forever calling me names, screw the vote. Screw the way I want to live, I’ll just marry and shut up and dutifully light the home fires now.” Like Emma G., poets should catch that mud and work it into the sculptures they want to see. We’re not here to smile and be pretty; we write the poems we want to see in the world, however difficult it is to birth them, however much we are berated, however many want to scare and break us. And to respond to this anger with the act of creation is love itself, that sentimental “feminine” essence, the firm basis from which feminists and poets have been acting together forever.

So goddamn right, this is what a feminist poet looks like – keep on looking and watch me work *or* slide on your typing shoes, join me beneath the disco lights, and sing your barbaric bitch of a yawp with feeling—

“Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.”

—Hélène Cixous, 1976