Lucille Clifton’s Sounds of Faith: “still there is mercy, there is grace” | Theresa Senato Edwards

I wrote this a couple or so years ago. I post it today in memory of a fine poet.

In Lucille Clifton’s book The Book of Light, the poet covers many thought-provoking ideas using clean, crisp lines. And although it appears a reader could quickly devour each poem in this collection, I find myself going back and rereading because there is so much more to savor in every one.

What is extremely clever are the ways in which Clifton uses her titles to begin some of her poems. One poem, in particular, titled “still there is mercy, there is grace,” begins right from its title and continues smoothly through to the end of the fifth line:

still there is mercy, there is grace

how otherwise
could I have come to this
marble spinning in space
propelled by the great
thumb of the universe? (lines 1-5)

These beginning lines also make ingenious use of alliteration and what Ron Padgett refers to as “[a]lliterative effect […] “when the repeated sound is neither stressed nor initial” (9). We see this latter technique in Clifton’s use of the words “grace,” “otherwise,” “this,” “space,” and “universe.” The repeated “s” sounds in these words are found at their ends, with “space” having the repeated sound at the beginning and end. This effect helps the title connect with the lines and helps the text glide along the page.

Furthermore, the “s” sound is a sharp yet powerful contrast to the sounds of the other words in the lines that intentionally stand out: “marble,” “propelled,” “great,” and “thumb.” Thus, the interchanging of soft and hard sounds creates a strong voice for the speaker. This is what Clifton intends and carries through to the poem’s end to convey the poem’s underlying focus: the humble power of God’s caring compassion.

With this in mind, the juxtaposition of soft/hard sounds makes sense as Clifton continues using similar phrasing, beginning with a phrase repetition and ending with another question:

how otherwise
could the two roads
of this tongue
converge into a single
certitude? (6-10)

The two different sounds (soft/hard) heard in the words “otherwise”/“could,” “two”/”roads,” “this”/”tongue,” and “converge”/”single” represent two different languages or differences in general, like “the two roads / of this tongue” that Clifton addresses. Yet, in these lines, she unites the dichotomy, proclaiming God’s grace without questioning his power, as she does in the first few lines and intimately shows in her last lines.

The poet continues, again beginning with repetition and juxtaposing opposite sounds:

how otherwise
could I, a sleek old
traveler,
curl one day safe and still
beside You
at Your feet, perhaps,
but, amen, Yours. (11-17)

The harsh sound in “could” mimics “converge” in the previous lines, connects to “curl,” here, and continues to balance the magnitude of not only Clifton’s words but also her faith in God. She leaves her readers involved in an image of opposites, of small and large, of God and human, rejoicing in the fact that no matter the degree of contrast, there is compassion and comfort both at the beginning of life, seen at the poem’s start; during life’s struggles, seen mid-poem; and at the end of life, seen here.

It is obvious that Clifton’s faith is strong, yet she does not preach in “still there is mercy, there is grace.” She skillfully communicates her faith through her craft, using the sound of words.

Thersa Senato Edwards

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Works Cited

Clifton, Lucille. The Book of Light. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 1993.

Padgett, Ron, ed. The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1987.

For Mama Lucille | Julie Phillips Brown

What is it when the light falls away, the dark opening over a dampening earth in its bed, all the houses shuttered. At day’s end, the poet has passed, and the body of her work, lies silent.

So possessed of her body, she is in it still.

Where does she wander now.

My Mama moved among the days
like a dreamwalker in a field;
seemed like what she touched was hers
seemed like what touched her couldn’t hold,
she got us almost through the high grass
then seemed like she turned around and ran
right back in
right back on in

To share some part of the world with the Lucille Clifton was extraordinary—her fierce grace, her keen gaze. To know she was passing through it all, the same as me, as I read and loved her poems. We are her dreamwalkers now. We are what could not hold her, even though she touched us.

After her death, I began reading her first collection, Good Times, with a friend. I had read so many of her books, but never the first. What was it we sought in beginning again? We went in search of that womb, a mother for us all. To go back to our origin, when things were still possible and unfolding, for her, and for us: a good time, when something still might happen. We hoped she would not run from us, not from us, this one time

*         *         *         *         *

If something should happen
          After Lucille Clifton

for instance
if the book should open
and spread among the earth
and below earth open the seeds
against the sweep of the sky
or
if the body should open
and spread among the earth
and below earth open the sweep
of the sky
or
if all our bodies
should open to each other
and open the book
and open the earth holding its seed of the body
and open the sweep of the skies
and all our words wash together
in a rush of breaking
we will run
we will keep on
right on running


Julie Phillips Brown

homage to lucille | Cara Benson

her words were all that.
showed how sound could
roll itself out
in such full places as those
poems. no small things. those
lines were big.
a little word like i from her
in a tasty whip of a poem
it said more than most did say
it moved more than most did move.
her words were mighty words.
her words were magic words.
i want to know poems
all over again. to hear and
be under her spell.


Cara Benson

"Listening to Lucille Clifton, Last Time Live (Dodge Festival 2008)" | Naomi Shihab Nye

Across a giant space from the front of the tent
to the far back over acres of shadowy heads
cold rain tapping canvas her lines rolled
wheeling perfect orbits litanies constellations
I was a dark space wondering
how we come to be with certain people
instead of others nearby who remind us
more of ourselves than our own selves do
lucille perfect time to listen to you


Naomi Shihab Nye

Untitled | Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In April of 2007, I helped welcome back Ms. Lucille to SUNY-Fredonia, the first college she ever enrolled in, but sadly left in the nineteen-fifties with a lot of hurt and anger in her bag. There was much pomp and circumstance in this visit, as the whole campus was eager to show her that much has changed in the campus climate in the time since she left Fredonia. Our women’s choir performed her poems to a standing room-only crowd. The English faculty held a roundtable to discuss her poems and designed a broadside of her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” where proceeds from its purchase would go to a scholarship for African-American students. She was scheduled to give a Distinguished Lecture to cap off her visit.

It was an event-filled two days with Ms. Lucille. Daffodils and tulips burst fresh and frothy-full across our lovely campus. I was eight months pregnant, but there was no way I was going to miss a single event with her in town, even though my doctor urged me to have as much rest as possible those weeks. When I was eighteen, I had recited from memory her poem “Admonitions,” to an (all-white) classroom at my first poetry reading in college, which was met with a bewildered and slightly stunned silence:

…
Girls 


First time a white man 


opens his fly like a good thing 


we'll just laugh, laugh real loud my 


black women


Children 


When they ask you 


why is your mama so funny


Say


She is a poet 


she don't have no sense

But I couldn’t help myself. Finding her words— so sassy, so full of light and ache and heartbeat in the middle of my giant Poulin poetry anthology was a salve and a kind of salvation to me those days of figuring out my major, figuring out what exactly I was doing in college. Hers was a voice I could believe in. Could be afraid of. Could snicker with in my dorm room by myself.

After her reading at Fredonia to an audience that numbered in the hundreds, she snuck a break from signing books and broadsides to nosh on a few cupcakes and punch with me (I was her water-girl, making sure she didn’t want for anything—new pen, bottle of water, took pictures for people who asked during the over an hour and a-half book signing that followed her reading). We snacked together behind the auditorium coat racks and she turned to me and placed her hands on my ever-expanding belly, a gesture that happened all too frequently that last month of my pregnancy from strangers and friends alike. But with “Mama Lucille,” I wasn’t startled. She just had that way with you. Very calmly and quietly, she whispered a blessing to my belly. Then she asked me, “What if he is the one, Child?” I laughed nervously, not quite understanding where she was going. The line of people waiting to get their books signed was growing restless. The cupcakes were almost gone.

She said again, “What if he is the one—the one who really does something? The one who ends poverty in this country? The one—who finds a cure for cancer. What if your son is the one who changes our lives for so much good?” My eyes filled with tears. No one, save my husband, had ever spoken to me that tenderly when I was pregnant. “My Child, raise that baby as if he. is. the. one. You will never go wrong. Trust in that.” She shuffled back down at the table to finish signing books and broadsides and I stood by in silence, turning over her words like a hard candy in my mouth.

***

I went home that night knowing I had just been in the very presence of an angel. Thank you, Lucille, light-mother of words. My almost three year-old son thanks you, too.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

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Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the award-winning collections of poetry, Miracle Fruit and At the Drive-In Volcano. Other awards for her writing include an NEA Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia and lives in Western NY with her husband and young son.

"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

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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