Lucille Clifton

Clifton, Lucille (b. 1936), poet, juvenile fiction writer, autobiographer, and educator. 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, home-maker, and avocational 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 Eurocentric 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 trimeter 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.

Poet Robert Hayden entered her poems into competition for the 1969 YW-YMHA Poetry Center Discovery Award. She won the award and with it the publication of her first volume of poems, Good Times. Frequently 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. Acclaimed by the New York Times as one of the best books of 1969, Good Times launched Clifton's prolific writing career.

In 1970 Clifton published two picture verse books for children, The Black BC's and Some of the Days of Everett Anderson. Everett Anderson, a small boy living in the inner city, became the protagonist of eight of the fourteen works of juvenile fiction she published between 1970 and 1984. One in this series, Everett Anderson's Goodbye, received the Coretta Scott King Award in 1984. Another of her children's books, Sonora Beautiful (1981), represents a thematic departure for Clifton in that it features a white girl as the main character. 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.

Clifton's prose maintains a familial and cultural tradition of storytelling. Adapting a genealogy prepared by her father, Generations: A Memoir (1976) constitutes a matrilineal neo-slave narrative; it traces the Sale/Sayles family from its Dahomeian ancestor who became known as Caroline Sale Donald (1823–1910) after her abduction in 1830 from West Africa to New Orleans, Louisiana. Most of the biographical sketches in Generations are written from a first-person perspective in which various family members are represented as narrating their own stories. In them, Clifton further honors African American oral and oratorical traditions with her use of black vernacular.

In 1987 Clifton reprinted her complete published poems in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, which, in addition to Generations, contains Good Times, Good News about the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), and Two-Headed Woman (1980), a Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Juniper Prize. The themes of these 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. 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.

Good Woman also narrates a personal and collective history as it addresses the poet's enduring process of self-discovery as poet, woman, mother, daughter, sibling, spouse, and friend. Some of its most complex and effective poems mourn Thelma Sayles's epilepsy, mental illness, and premature death when Clifton was twenty-three. A persistent witness to America's failed promises to former slaves, Native Americans, and other victims of its tyranny, 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.

In 1987 Clifton published Next: New Poems, most of which are constructed as “sorrow songs” or requiems. Some lament personal losses—the deaths by disease of the poet's mother at age forty-four on 13 February 1959; of her husband at age forty-nine on 10 November 1984; and of a Barbadian friend, “Joanne C.,” who died at age twenty-one on 30 November 1982. Other poems grieve for political figures or tragedies, including an elegy sequence for the American Indian chief, Crazy Horse, and a trilogy mourning the massacres at Gettysburg, Nagasaki, and Jonestown. The persona also testifies to the crime and tragedy of child molestation, a theme developed in poem sequences featuring the mythical African shape-shifter in both Next and The Book of Light (1993). In the tradition of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Etheridge Knight, Clifton's heroic meditations in The Book of Light offer pithy and grievous contemplations of diverse epistemological and metaphysical questions.

Clifton served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1982. Her achievements also include fellowships and honorary degrees from Fisk University, George Washington University, Trinity College, and other institutions; two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts; and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Clifton is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College in Maryland and had a position at Columbia University from 1995 to 1999.

Bibliography

• Andrea Benton Rushing, “Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice for Changing Times,” in Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, eds. DianeWood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, 1985, pp. 214–222.
• Lucille Clifton, Quilting, 1991.
• Shirley M. Jordan, ed., Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers, 1993.
• Alicia Ostriker, “Kin and Kin: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton,” in Literary Influence and African American Writers, ed. Tracy Mishkin, 1996, pp. 301–23

Joycelyn K. Moody

poet; writer; educator

Personal Information

Born June 27, 1936, in Depew, NY; daughter of Samuel Louis Sayles (a coal miner and laborer) and Thelma Moore Sayles (launderer)--both deceased; married Fred James Clifton, 1958 (deceased); children: Sidney, Fredrica, Gillian, Alexia, Channing, Graham.
Education: Howard University, Washington, D.C. 1953-55; Fredonia State Teachers College, New York, 1955.

Career

New York State Division of Employment, Buffalo, claims clerk, 1958-60; U.S. Office of Education, Washington, DC, literature assistant for Central Atlantic Regional Educational Laboratory, 1969-71; Coppin State College, Baltimore, MD, poet-in-residence, 1974-79; Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland, 1976-85; University of California, Santa Cruz, professor of literature and creative writing, 1985-89; St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, MD, Distinguished Professor of Literature, 1989-91, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, 1991--; Duke University, Durham, NC, Blackburn Professor of Creative Writing, 1998--. Visiting writer, Columbia University School of the Arts; Jirry Moore Visiting Writer, George Washington University, 1982-83; Woodrow Wilson and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest visiting fellowship to Fisk University, Alma College, Albright College, Davidson College, and others. Trustee, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore.

Life's Work

An author of poetry and prose works for adults and children, Lucille Clifton has been published extensively since 1966. Her canon includes more than twenty children's books, eleven volumes of poetry written for adults, and a memoir. Over the years, Clifton's poetry and prose have appeared in more than 100 anthologies, magazines, and journals. Characterized by a feminine sensibility rooted in the history of African American women, Clifton's works treat children, family, domesticity, and the concerns of ordinary women. Her characters and speakers dwell mainly in urban settings--usually inner-city African American neighborhoods and occasionally multicultural American neighborhoods. Affirmative, her works have a political agenda. They exude black racial pride and celebrate black womanhood.

The vision that pervades Clifton's works is summarized in her memoir Generations. Implicitly countering the cataclysmic vision of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Clifton proclaims in Generations, "Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept." The recurring theme in her works is that hope exists alongside despair and that personal or racial suffering does not necessarily translate into individual or collective defeat. Consistently hopeful, her works posit that humans determine their own fates and can conquer evil if they are strong and if they have the support of their families. As her frequent recourse to biblical allusions implies, Clifton's hopefulness is rooted in Christian optimism.

Born to Samuel Louis Sayles, Sr. and his second wife, Thelma Moore Sayles, on June 27, 1936, in Depew, New York--a small, primarily Polish town 12 miles from Buffalo, New York--Clifton was named Thelma Lucille Sayles by her father. She is a descendent of Caroline Donald Sale, a Dahomey woman who was "born free in Africa" in 1822 and who "died free in America" in 1910, and of Sam Louis Sale, who was born a slave in America in 1777 and who died a slave in America around 1860. Clifton appears to have been guided through much of her life by the mantra of her foremother Caroline, who, Clifton says in Generations, urged her family, "Get what you want, you from Dahomey women." Owned by the Sale family of Bedford, Virginia, Clifton's ancestors changed their name to Sayle after the Civil War so that they could be distinguished from the white Sale family. After the war, her grandfather Gene Sayle was born to Harvey Nichols, a white man from Connecticut, and Clifton's namesake, Lucille Sayle, whose distinct place in family history was won when as punishment for killing Nichols, she allegedly became the first black woman hanged legally in the state of Virginia. Clifton says in Generations that her father Samuel changed his surname from Sayle to Sayles "after finding a part of a textbook in which the plural was explained. There will be more than one of me, my father thought, and he added the s to his name." Lucille Clifton's father had three children in addition to Lucille: Josephine, an older daughter who was born to his first wife, Edna Bell Sayles; Elaine, a daughter born to a neighbor woman six months after Clifton's birth; and Samuel, Jr., a son born to his second wife, Thelma Moore Sayles, two years after Clifton's birth.

Neither of Clifton's parents completed elementary school. A coal miner and a laborer in the South, her father worked in a steel mill after he migrated to the North. Her mother worked in a laundry. The family was poor; however, because their love sustained them, they were not worn down by penury. She attributes her interest in writing and reading to her parents, both of whom were voracious readers. Her mother, who wrote verse during her spare moments, was her only role model as a poet other than the white male poets whose works were traditionally taught then in schools. Her mother's poetry was good enough to warrant acceptance by a publisher, but the family disapproved. In response, her mother burned her poems and ceased writing.

When Clifton was a small child, her family moved to Purdy Street in Buffalo. As her poetry and prose reflect, her childhood years there were happy--so happy that they are the foundation of her first book of poems, Good Times (1969). Academically talented, Clifton left Buffalo when she was 16 years old to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C. Supported by a full scholarship provided by her church, she attended Howard from 1953 to 1955, a period during which Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), A. B. Spellman, Owen Dodson, and Sterling Brown were there. Pursuing a major in drama at Howard, Clifton appeared in the first performance of James Baldwin's The Amen Corner. In Generations, Clifton explains that when she went to college she was frightened. She had never been away from home before; she had little knowledge of what to expect, for neither of her parents and no one in her church had attended college. Seeing herself as a special person and believing that she did not have to study, she did not--a decision that in time cost her the scholarship that made her university education possible.

After returning to Buffalo, Clifton entered Fredonia State Teachers College (now the State University of New York at Fredonia) in 1955, where she joined a group of African American students who met to read and perform plays. During this period, she was coming into her own as a writer, but publication was not uppermost in her mind. Ishmael Reed, a member of the group, showed some of her poems to Langston Hughes, who included a few in his anthology Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970.

In 1958, Clifton wed Fred James Clifton (1935-1984), a philosophy teacher at the University of Buffalo who was also a member of the Fredonia State group of black intellectuals. In seven years, they had six children--four daughters (Sidney, Fredrica, Gillian, and Alexia) and two sons (Channing and Graham). A busy wife and mother during these years, Clifton was also writing. Additionally, she was employed from 1958 to 1960 as a claims clerk in the New York State Division of Employment in Buffalo.

During the late 1960s, Clifton's works began to appear in print. In 1966, she saw a prose dialogue, "It's All in the Game," published in Negro Digest. In 1969, her short story "The Magic Mama," parts of which appeared later in Generations, was published in Redbook; the focus of the story is Clifton's mother's epileptic seizures and their effect on the family. Later that year, a poem, "In the Inner City," appeared in the Massachusetts Review. Also in 1969, Clifton sent some of her poems to poet Robert Hayden, who showed them to poet Carolyn Kizer, who sent them, in turn, to the YW-YMHA Poetry Center in New York City. That year Clifton won the center's Discovery Award, presented annually to a promising but undiscovered poet, and Random House published Good Times, her first book of poems, which was subsequently cited by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. She also received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. While winning accolades for her accomplishments as a published writer, Clifton began employment as a literature assistant at the United States Office of Education in Washington, D.C., where she remained until 1971.

In 1974, she became poet-in-residence at Baltimore's Coppin State College; she held this position until 1979. During her first year at Coppin, Clifton was selected as Maryland's poet laureate, a governor-appointed position that paid an annual stipend of one thousand dollars and that had as its only official duty the creation of new poems for specific state occasions. Widowed in 1984, Clifton assumed the position of professor of literature and creative writing in 1985 at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she remained on the faculty until 1989. That year she returned to Maryland, where she assumed the position of visiting distinguished professor of literature at St. Mary's College of Maryland; she held the position for two years. Since 1991, she has held the rank of distinguished professor of humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Since fall 1994, Clifton has taught at St. Mary's College one semester during the academic year and at Columbia University in New York City one semester. She was named Blackburn Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 1998.

Over the years, Clifton has written for two audiences--children and adults. According to critic Audrey McCluskey, in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, Clifton's children's books are "her most prolific literary product, and no analysis of her work could ignore their overall importance." Her universe is one in which self-love and self-acceptance reign and self-abnegation is subordinated. It is a world in which children experience joy and pain and in which they learn to accept both emotions; it is a literary world that children visit and leave reassured. Characterized by Christian values, racial pride, and an affirmative perception of "uncelebrated man and woman," according to McCluskey, Clifton's vision in her works for children as well as in those for adults is akin to that of African American writer Gwendolyn Brooks, whose canon is grounded in a similar "racial and spiritual legacy." Also, states McCluskey, Clifton's Christian optimism resembles that of early twentieth-century African American women writers Effie Lee Newsome, primarily a children's writer, and Anne Spencer, a writer for adults.

Among Clifton's best-known children's books are those that focus on Everett Anderson, a young African American boy. The first book in this series, Some of the Days of Everett Anderson, published in 1970, was selected for the American Institute of Graphic Arts's Children's Book Show and was chosen as one of the School Library Journal's Best Books of 1970. The following year, the second Everett Anderson book, Everett Anderson's Christmas Coming, appeared. Additional books on Everett Anderson and other children followed in subsequent years. Having had six children of her own, who attracted other children, Clifton has indicated that she saw so many children that she got ideas from observing them and was thus inspired to write about them.

Her Everett Anderson books present stages in the title character's changing life. Rudine Sims in Language Arts, February 1982, quotes Clifton as saying the works in this series are not poetry in the purest sense but are instead "very good verse" that may serve as useful and valuable means of introducing poetry to children. Among the series' assets are the free-flowing rhythm of the lines and the succinct presentation of themes. A faithful adherence to African American vernacular, a straightforward manner, and an understanding and accurate depiction of children's psychology lend authenticity and immediacy to the works.

Clifton's other books for children include The Black BCs (1970), which teaches the alphabet from an Afro-centric perspective. In the tradition of Langston Hughes's A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, The Black BCs refigures American history by invoking black contributors such as cowboys, inventors, and musicians. Fostering black pride, Clifton's work clearly has a political agenda. Similar to The Black BCs are Clifton's children's books such as Don't You Remember? (1973); All Us Come Cross the Water (1973); The Times They Used to Be (1974); Good, Says Jerome (1974); and Amifika (1978). These books also celebrate the African American experience, proclaim the beauty of blackness, and insist that poverty need not mean a lack of love, warmth, or dignity.

In some of Clifton's children's books, including The Boy Who Didn't Believe in Spring, My Friend Jacob, and Sonora Beautiful, white children are the protagonists. However, most of her major characters are African Americans and have names children can associate with. According to Sims, the abundance of black protagonists in Clifton's works is consistent with her unequivocal proclamation that her "whole thing is geared to black children."

During the years when her children's books were being published steadily, Clifton was also writing for adults. Good Times, her first collection of poems for adults, was published in 1969. Described by Haki Madhubuti in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980 as "unusually compacted and memory-evoking," the poems in this collection treat black lives that are rescued from desperation by love. Three years later, in 1972, her second volume of poetry for adults, Good News about the Earth, appeared. Good News is a group of brief, powerful, and simply expressed poems that place biblical stories in black and contemporary contexts.

A prolific writer, Clifton has published nine additional books of poetry for adults and one prose work for adults since Good News about the Earth appeared in 1972. The poems in An Ordinary Woman, published in 1974, celebrate everyday things--marriage, motherhood, sisterhood, continuity, and blackness. According to Madhubuti, it is in this work that Clifton achieves her promise as a writer. The major images in the poems are bones, which represent strength and connection among generations, and light, which represents knowledge, existence, and life.

Generations, Clifton's only prose work for adults, was published in 1976. An ode to the survival of the African American family, the memoir is indebted to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" for its inscriptions and its structure; Generations chronicles and celebrates Clifton's family history through five generations while also recording her own journey of self-discovery.

Four years later, in 1980, Two-Headed Woman appeared. It was the winner that year of the Juniper Prize, an annual poetry award given by the University of Massachusetts Press. Characterized by dramatic tautness, simple language, and original groupings of words, the poems are tributes to blackness, celebrations of women in general and black women in particular, and testimonies to familial love.

Both Good Woman and Next were published in 1987. Good Woman contains 177 poems and a fifty-three page memoir in which the writer "celebrates the beauty and strength of a creation that endures," according to the Christian Science Monitor, and "challenges her readers ... to do more than grieve over life's inconsistencies." Among the major themes in Next, a collection of sixty-five poems, are women's strength and sisterhood, war's cruelties, the horrors of the African American experience, the deleterious effects of racism on African Americans' self-esteem, and death and dying. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the poems collectively denounce finality, denounce endings.

Ten Oxherding Pictures and Quilting were followed in 1993 by The Book of Light (1993), in which light signifies creativity, spirituality, and love. As in her earlier writings, the work celebrates African American womanhood, here in poems such as "daughters" and "won't you celebrate with me." Also, in The Book of Light, the speaker pays tribute to dearly departed family members in poems such as "thel," in which the speaker describes her mother as a "sweet attic of a woman," and "sam," in which the speaker laments her father's being denied an opportunity to go to school, where "he would have learned to write his story and not live it." Additionally, The Book of Light has a social agenda; "move" and "Samson predicts from Gaza the Philadelphia fire" protest the 1985 bombing in Philadelphia of a house occupied by dreadlocked members of an Afro-centric back-to-nature group, while "seeker of visions" resurrects the destruction of Native Americans by white men, "the pale ghosts" of the Indian speaker's "future." As "brothers" indicates, Christianity is another major theme in The Book of Light; in this eight-part poem, an aged Lucifer explains God's silence in the face of change on Earth.

Throughout her career as a writer, Clifton has won laurels. In 1987 she was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1988 she received the Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review. That same year she received the Woman of Words Award from the Women's Foundation. In 1992, she received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a year earlier she had won the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum Lannan Literary Award for poetry, 1997, and National Book Award nomination, both for The Terrible Stories. She was inducted into the National Literature Hall of Fame for African American Writers, 1998. Among Clifton's most notable achievements is the National Book Award for Poetry, 2000, for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000. Additionally, over the years, she has received honorary doctorate degrees from such academic institutions as the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Towson State University, and Albright College.

These honors and awards have been acknowledgments of a vision and a style that have made Clifton's works both meritorious and accessible. Regardless of their genres, her works have been characterized by a deceptively simple language, by frequent reliance on African American dialect, by understatement and subtlety, by concreteness, by wittiness, by economy, and by musicality. In the main, Clifton's major thesis has consistently been that African Americans have triumphed because of inner strength that has its genesis in familial love and self-love. Her works have consistently proclaimed that African Americans, even the most "ordinary," possess the stuff of greatness, for without this capacity they would not have triumphed--by surviving--in the Western world.

Awards

Discovery Award, New York YW-YMHA Poetry Center, 1969; Good Times: Poems was cited as one of the year's ten best books by the New York Times, 1969; National Endowment for the Arts awards, 1969, 1970, and 1972; Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland, 1974-85; Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts, 1980; Pulitzer Prize nominations for poetry, 1980, 1987, and 1991; Coretta Scott King Award, American Library Association, 1984, for Everett Anderson's Goodbye; named a "Maryland Living Treasure," 1993; Andrew White Medal, Loyola College of Baltimore, 1993; Lannan Literary Award for poetry, 1997, and National Book Award nomination, both for The Terrible Stories; inducted into National Literature Hall of Fame for African American Writers, 1998; Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize and Los Angeles Times poetry award, both 1998; Phi Beta Kappa, 1998; Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, 1999; National Book Award for Poetry, 2000, for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000. Recipient of honorary degrees from Colby College, University of Maryland, Towson State University, Washington College, and Albright College.

Works

Writings

• Things Fall Apart, 1959.
• Good Times, 1969.
• Poetry of the Negro, 1970.
• The Black BCs, 1970.
• Generations, 1976.
• Good Women, 1987.
• Next, 1987.
• Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, 1991.
• The Book of Light, 1993.
• The Terrible Stories, 1996.
• Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, 2000.

Further Reading

Books

• Madhubuti, Haki. "Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry." In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.
• ------. The Book of Light. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1993.

• ------. "A Simple Language." In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.
• Clifton, Lucille. Generations. New York: Random House, 1976.
• Hull, Gloria T. "Black Women Poets from Wheatley to Walker." In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1979.
• Kirkpatrick, D. L., ed. Twentieth-Century Children's Writers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

• The American Poetry Review , November 1, 1993.
• The Antioch Review, Summer, 2000.
• Booklist, August 1, 1996
• Christian Science Monitor, February 5, 1988.
• The Horn Book Magazine, March 1, 1993.
• Journal of Negro Education, Summer 1974, pp. 380-400.
• New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1971.
• New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1976.
• New Yorker, April 5, 1976, pp. 138-139.
• The North American Review, May-August, 2001.
• Poetry, March 1, 1994.
• Publishers Weekly, May 31, 1991.
• Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1993.
• Washington Post, August 9, 1979.

— T. J. Bryan

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