After the tribute reading to Lucille Clifton at the CUNY Graduate
Center, I have but one thought on my mind as I levitate out of the auditorium
and make my way home.
I have to hear them—those wholly engulfing, full-body-wrenching
poems—again. I have to hear them again now.
(What was that Wordsworth said about the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”?)
I don’t have time for my Collected
Poems of Lucille Clifton to arrive in the mail. I must sit and be with
these poems, digest them, take comfort in the fact that “tragedy while vast /is
bearable.”
How does she do it? How does Clifton make us feel everything will
be okay by telling us nothing is okay?
When I get home I look up her poem “dialysis.” It sticks with me
this night, perhaps the most, for its ending: “after the cancer i was so
grateful / to be alive. i am alive and furious. / Blessed be even this?”
“Right?” the poem begs—it’s worth it just to be alive…right ?
The words creep hauntingly from Sherman Alexie’s mouth as he
recites the poem to the packed auditorium.
I come across “dialysis” on a blog that aggregates poems—it calls
itself ”Punch-in-the-Face Poetry.”
“Poems that leave you reeling…Poems that leave you sore,
grasping…and bring you out swinging.”
Well, yes. But when it comes to Clifton, that’s only a
start.
* * *
Last week, 12 renowned writers and one operatic singer came
together to celebrate Clifton’s life and legacy on the occasion of the
publication of her collected poems.
“Clifton most astutely imagines the self and others in her
poetry,” explains poet Tonya Foster.
“She contained multitudes,” adds Michael S. Glaser, who co-edited
Clifton’s Collected Poems, echoing Whitman. “Her poems should be spoken by many voices.”
Throughout the night, Clifton’s poems are spoken, whispered, spat
and literally sung. Excerpts are repeated, voices echo one another, infusing
the evening with added dimensionality. With Clifton’s two daughters in the
front row, and Marie Howe waving Clifton’s image in front of us, telling us
“this is what God looks like,” it is truly as though Clifton herself moves
among us.
It is as though she is directing the occasion, as poems humorous
and jaunty brush up against the more chilling and devastating. We are not to
get too comfortable, too complacent. We are to feel the entire possible range
of what can be felt and more.
A lighthearted note to Superman is followed by a reflection on
the black father’s struggle to be the best “In the whole white world.”
“Another child has killed a child,” Clifton writes in “the
times,” a poem which feels as heartbreakingly relevant as ever when read aloud
by Toi Derricote.
Clifton notes: “these too are your children this too is your
child.”
When we’re asked to picture a cockroach holocaust, the room
erupts with easy—if slightly uncomfortable—laughter. Why do we laugh? Clifton
anticipates this and stops us in our tracks. No sooner have we laughed than she
makes us regret it. We’re still collecting ourselves when the punch hits us
square in the face.
“i didn’t ask their names. / they had no names worth knowing.”
Eyes recur in many of the poems and it’s hard to escape the
feeling this night that we’re being watched ourselves by a master who
orchestrated it all.
If you think you know the work of Clifton, chances are you still
have so much to learn. As Glaser points out, “Lucille…continues to live in
and among us. There are seeds in the poems she wrote still waiting to be
discovered.”