Homage to My Hips
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips,
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
[1976]
Biography taken from The Poetry Foundation
A prolific and widely respected poet, Lucille Clifton's work emphasizes
endurance and strength through adversity, focusing particularly on
African-American experience and family life. Awarding the prestigious Ruth
Lilly Poetry Prize to Clifton in 2007, the judges remarked that “One always
feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton’s poems—it is a moral
quality that some poets have and some don’t.” In addition to the Ruth Lilly
prize, Clifton was the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as
finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980
(1987) and Next: New Poems (1987). Her collection Two-Headed Woman (1980) was
also a Pulitzer nominee and won the Juniper Prize from the University of
Massachusetts. She served as the state of Maryland's poet laureate from 1974
until 1985, and won the prestigious National Book Award for Blessing the Boats:
New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (2000). In addition to her numerous poetry
collections, she wrote many children's books. Clifton was a Distinguished
Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland and a Chancellor of
the Academy of American Poets.
Clifton is noted for saying much with few words. In a Christian Century
review of Clifton's work, Peggy Rosenthal commented, "The first thing that
strikes us about Lucille Clifton's poetry is what is missing: capitalization,
punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its
spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words
themselves" In an American Poetry Review article about Clifton's work,
Robin Becker commented on Clifton's lean style: "Clifton's poetics of
understatement—no capitalization, few strong stresses per line, many poems
totaling fewer than twenty lines, the sharp rhetorical question—includes the
essential only."
Clifton's first volume of poetry, Good Times (1969), was cited by the
New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. The poems, inspired by
Clifton’s family of six young children, show the beginnings of Clifton’s spare,
unadorned style and center around the facts of African-American urban life.
Clifton's second volume of poetry, Good News about the Earth: New Poems (1972),
was written in the midst of the political and social upheavals of the late
1960s and 70s, and its poems reflect those changes, including a middle sequence
that pays homage to black political leaders. Writing in Poetry, Ralph J. Mills,
Jr., said that Clifton's poetic scope transcends the black experience "to
embrace the entire world, human and non-human, in the deep affirmation she
makes in the teeth of negative evidence." However, An Ordinary Woman
(1974), Clifton's third collection of poems, largely abandoned the examination
of racial issues that had marked her previous books, looking instead at the
writer's roles as woman and poet. Helen Vendler declared in the New York Times
Book Review that Clifton "recalls for us those bare places we have all
waited as 'ordinary women,' with no choices but yes or no, no art, no grace, no
words, no reprieve." Generations: A Memoir (1976) is an "eloquent
eulogy of [Clifton's] parents," Reynolds Price wrote in the New York Times
Book Review, adding that, "as with most elegists, her purpose is
perpetuation and celebration, not judgment…There is no sustained chronological
narrative. Instead, clusters of brief anecdotes gather round two poles, the
deaths of father and mother." The book was later collected in Good Woman:
Poems and a Memoir: 1969-1980, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize along
with Next: New Poems (1987).
The book that followed Clifton’s dual Pulitzer nomination, Quilting: Poems
1987-1990 (1991), also won widespread critical acclaim Using a quilt as a
poetic metaphor for life, each poem is a story, bound together through history
and figuratively sewn with the thread of experience. Each section of the book
is divided by a conventional quilt design name—"Eight-pointed Star"
and "Tree of Life"—which provides a framework for Clifton’s poetic
quilt. Clifton's main focus is on women's history; however, according to Robert
Mitchell in American Book Review, her poetry has a far broader range: "Her
heroes include nameless slaves buried on old plantations, Hector Peterson (the
first child killed in the Soweto riot), Fannie Lou Hamer (founder of the
Mississippi Peace and Freedom Party), Nelson and Winnie Mandela, W. E. B.
DuBois, Huey P. Newton, and many other people who gave their lives to [free]
black people from slavery and prejudice."
Enthusiasts of Quilting included critic Bruce Bennett in the New York
Times Book Review, who praised Clifton as a "passionate, mercurial writer,
by turns angry, prophetic, compassionate, shrewd, sensuous, vulnerable and
funny....The movement and effect of the whole book communicate the sense of a
journey through which the poet achieves an understanding of something
new." Clifton's 1993 poetry collection, The Book of Light, contains poems
on subjects ranging from bigotry and intolerance, epitomized by a poem about
controversial U.S. Senator Jesse Helms; destruction, including a poem about the
tragic bombing by police of a MOVE compound in Philadelphia in 1985; religion,
characterized by a sequence of poems featuring a dialogue between God and the
devil; and mythology, rendered by poems about figures such as Atlas and
Superman. "If this poet's art has deepened since ... Good Times, it's in
an increased capacity for quiet delicacy and fresh generalization,"
remarked Poetry contributor Calvin Bedient, declaring that when Clifton writes
without "anger and sentimentality, she writes at her remarkable
best." Lockett concluded that the collection is "a gift of joy, a
truly illuminated manuscript by a writer whose powers have been visited by
grace."
Both The Terrible Stories (1996) and Blessing the Boats: New and
Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (2000) shed light upon women's survival skills in the
face of ill health, family upheaval, and historic tragedy. Blessing the Boats
is a compilation of four Clifton books, plus new poems, which, Becker noted in
her review for American Poetry Review, "shows readers how the poet's
themes and formal structures develop over time." Among the pieces
collected in these volumes are several about the author's breast cancer, but
she also deals with juvenile violence, child abuse, biblical characters,
dreams, the legacy of slavery, and a shaman-like empathy with animals as varied
as foxes, squirrels, and crabs. She also speaks in a number of voices, as noted
by Becker, including "angel, Eve, Lazarus, Leda, Lot's Wife, Lucifer,
among others ... as she probes the narratives that undergird western
civilization and forges new ones."
A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that the collection
"distills a distinctive American voice, one that pulls no punches in
taking on the best and worst of life." The volume was awarded the National
Book Award. Renee Olson reported on the award for Booklist that "Clifton
was cited for evoking 'the struggle, beauty, and passion of one woman's life
with such clarity and power that her vision becomes representative, communal,
and unforgettable.'" In Mercy (2004), Clifton's twelfth book of poetry,
the poet writes about the relationship between mothers and daughters,
terrorism, prejudice, and personal faith. Clifton’s next book, Voices (2008),
includes short verses personifying objects, as well as poems on more familiar
terrain. Reviewing the book for the Baltimore Sun, Diane Scharper commented on
the impetus of Clifton’s title: “Each section explores the ways the poet
relates to voices: from those spoken by inanimate objects to those remembered
to those "overheard" in the titles of pictures. Serving as a medium, the
poet speaks not only for those things that have no voice, but also for the
feelings associated with them.”
Lucille Clifton was also a highly-regarded author for children. Her
books for children were designed to help them understand their world and
facilitate an understanding of black heritage specifically, which in turn
fosters an important link with the past. In books like All Us Come Cross the
Water (1973), Clifton created the context to raise awareness of
African-American history and heritage. Her most famous creation, though, was
Everett Anderson, an African-American boy living in a big city. Clifton went on
to publish eight Everett Anderson titles, including Everett Anderson’s Goodbye
(1984), which won the Coretta Scott King Award. Connecting Clifton’s work as a
children’s author to her poetry, Jocelyn K. Moody in the Oxford Companion to
African American Literature wrote: “Like her poetry, Clifton's short fiction
extols the human capacity for love, rejuvenation, and transcendence over
weakness and malevolence even as it exposes the myth of the American dream.”
Speaking to Michael S. Glaser during an interview for the Antioch
Review, Clifton reflected that she continues to write, because "writing is
a way of continuing to hope ... perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am
not alone." How would Clifton like to be remembered? "I would like to
be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being
human. My inclination is to try to help."
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