Black History Month and Poet Lucille Clifton

BY CLAIRE LYNCH

In honor of Black History Month this February, I am highlighting writer Lucille Clifton. Clifton was a prolific poet, children’s book author and professor. Born Thelma Lucille Sayles on June 27, 1936, in Depew, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, her father worked in the steel mills and her mother in a laundry.

Clifton has said that as a child she was poor but she was not deprived. She grew up loving books and began writing poetry at the age of 10, inspired by the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She has also said that she was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

During her childhood in Buffalo, Clifton listened to oral histories told to her by her grandmothers and aunts. She was fascinated by them. Her parents loved to read even though they did not finish elementary school. Her mother also loved to write poems. As Clifton said in her memoir, “Generations”: “Oh she made magic, she was a magic woman, my Mama. She was not wise in the world but she had magic wisdom.”

In 1953, Clifton started attending Howard University in Washington, D.C., but she left Howard and attended Fredonia State Teacher’s College near Buffalo to join a group of poets and intellectuals. In Buffalo she met Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University of Buffalo. They married in 1958 and were married for 26 years until Frederick James Clifton passed away in 1984 after suffering from cancer. He was 49 years old.

Clifton’s poetry focuses mainly on the strength and endurance one must possess in order to live as an AfricanAmerican, although it also explores other aspects of her life such as being a woman and a poet. She taught at several different universities throughout her life, including Dartmouth and Columbia. Clifton was a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Over the years Lucille Clifton credited her six children with inspiring much of her writing. She added that they taught her patience and they also kept her grounded. Her writing took so much of her time but so did the work around the house.

Clifton’s first book of poems, “Good Times,” published in 1969, was rated one of the best books of the year by the “NY Times.” Clifton worked in state and federal government positions until 1971 when she became a writer in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore, Md., where she completed two collections: “Good News About the Earth” (1972) and “An Ordinary Woman” (1974).

She was the author of several other collections of poetry, including

“Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000” (2000), which won the National Book Award; “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980” (1987), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and “Two-Headed Woman” (1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee as well as the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize.

Clifton also wrote “Generations: A Memoir,” which was published in 1976, and more than 22 books for children, written specifically for an AfricanAmerican audience. Clifton’s mission in writing these children’s books was to help them understand their world and their African-American heritage.

Her daughters Sidney, Gillian and Alexia Clifton wrote that their mother authored several children’s books to fill an obvious void: “Prior to the publishing of ‘Some of the Days of Everett Anderson’ in 1970 there were very few children’s books depicting the lives of black and other children of color. And of those few; even fewer were written by black or ethnic authors. Creating characters whose lives, language and experience were a mirror to the lives, languages and experiences of thousands of underserved children across the country was important to her …”

In 1973 Clifton was the author of a children’s book called, “The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring” and Brinton Turkle did the illustrations. It is a simple story about a young boy who doesn’t believe in spring because he lives in the city where there are few trees, flowers, insects and green grass until one day he takes a walk beyond his neighborhood to an abandoned lot that features a spring flower just starting to grow. It introduces young children to what it’s like to live in the city.

Lucille Clifton’s honors include an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize.

In 1999, Clifton was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Lucille Clifton died on February 13, 2010, in Baltimore at the age of 73.

Lucille Clifton never knew any poets as a young girl, in fact she only thing she ever saw were the portraits that used to hang on the walls of the elementary school that she attended. She never really knew what it meant to be a poet, but she started writing her feelings down. That is how her profession as a writer and a poet began.

About poetry, Clifton has noted that there is definitely a connection between American history and her own personal history.

Lucille Clifton said, “One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected. There is so much history that we have not validated.”

When asked how she would like to be remembered, Lucille Clifton has said:

“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.”

Lucille Clifton was such an expert at combining craft and storytelling. An American poet known for her work focusing on the African-American experience and family life, Lucille Clifton’s work will live on for years to come.