Lucille Clifton
(b. 1936)

"I am a black woman poet, and I sound like one."

Lucille Clifton was born Lucille Sayles in 1936 in Depew, New York. She attended Howard University (1953-1955) and Fredonia State Teachers College. She married Fred James Clifton in 1958. She worked as a claims clerk in the New York State Division of Employment, Buffallo), and then as literature assistant in the Office of Education in Washington, D.C.

In 1969, she received the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award, and her first collection, Good Times, was selected as one of the ten best books of 1969 by the New York Times. In 1979 she was named poet laureate of the state of Maryland.

Clifton's later poetry collections include Next: New Poems (1987), Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991), and The Terrible Stories (1996). Generations: A Memoir (1976) is a prose piece celebrating her origins, and Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969-1980 (1987) collects some of her previously published verse.

Clifton's many children's books, written expressly for an African-American audience in mind, include All Us Come Cross the Water (1973), My Friend Jacob (1980), and Three Wishes (1992). She also wrote an award-winning series of books featuring events in the life of Everett Anderson, a young black boy. These include Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (1970) and Everett Anderson's Goodbye (1983).

She has received a Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970 and 1973, and a grant from The American Academy of Poets. She has received the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Charity Randall prize, the Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, and an Emmy Award. In 1988, she became the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize (Good Woman: and Next: ).

Clifton is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She lives in Columbia, Maryland and has raised six children.

seeker of visions

what does this mean.
to see walking men
wrapped in the color of death,
to hear from their tongue
such difficult syllables?
are they the spirits
of our hope
or the pale ghosts of our future?
who will believe the red road
will not run on forever?
who will believe
a tribe of ice might live
and we might not?.

fury - for mama

remember this.
she is standing by
the furnace.
the coals
glisten like rubies.
her hand is crying.
her hand is clutching
a sheaf of papers.
poems.
she gives them up.
they burn
jewels into jewels.
her eyes are animals.
each hank of her hair
is a serpent's obedient
wife.
she will never recover.
remember. there is nothing
you will not bear
for this woman's sake.

won't you celebrate with me

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Homage to my hips

These hips are big hips
They need space to
Move around in.
They don't fit into little
Pretty places. These hips
Are free hips.
They don't like to be held back.
These hips don't like to be 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 know them
To put a spell on a man and
Spin him like a top!

Forgiving my father

It is Friday.
We have come to the paying of the bills.
All week you have stood in my dreams like a ghost,
asking for more time but today is payday, payday old man,
my mother's hand opens in her early grave
and I hold it out like a good daughter.

There is no more time for you.
There will never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher
old liar.
I wish you were rich so I could take it all
and give the lady what she was due
but you were the son of a needy father,
the father of a needy son,
you gave her all you had which was nothing.
You have already given her all you had.

You are the pocket that was going to open and come up empty andy friday.
You were each other's bad bargain, not mine.
Daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man
What am I doing here collecting ?
You lie side by side in debtor's boxes
and no accounting will open them up.