The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

by Lucille Clifton

  If we ended with Mercy and Voices, that would perhaps be enough—they are poems of benediction in a sense, aware of mortality, and aware of our constant longing for more. We are fortunate however that the poet seems to have left behind the start of a manuscript, “Book of Days,” that extends her reach and wishes even further.

  It is a book that almost did not survive. My fellow editor, Michael S. Glaser, worked with Clifton at St. Mary’s in Maryland for years; when she cleaned out her office after retiring in 2006, she threw away a number of things, including poems, many in her hand or with her clear edits—all of which are now part of her archive (and reprinted here in “Last Poems & Drafts”). The typescript for “Book of Days” was among these discards, complete it seems, without any editorial markings or even her name. (This is not unusual: we can almost judge a poem as hers among her papers because it doesn’t bear her name.) As I mentioned, Clifton was perfectly capable of tossing away her own poems, even good ones; I myself rescued a few from the maw of the trash. Perhaps she felt there were often other copies on her computer? Fortunately for us Glaser resurrected “Book of Days”—a title Clifton’s daughter Alexia recalls her working on—for the sequence is a wonder, a manuscript that seems quite complete, mournful yet mindful, concerned with birth, death, and that “what we will become / waits in us like an ache.” These new poems, found in 2006, seem to be ones that extend her concerns and provide an alternate ending to what she herself lived to publish. If it indeed is what it appears to be, this is a poet in the mood of reckoning with the death of children and of the poet herself. It is tempting to see the final lines of the sequence as a grace note: “this earth, this garden, this woman, / this one precious, perishable kingdom.”

  Yet Clifton kept writing; this is what true writers do. There are three other chief sources for this last set of poems that we have included, all in different stages of completion, but all also in clean condition—suggestive if not of being final, then of no longer being “in progress” to the extent that some other drafts are.

  The first source of the last poems includes what I out of habit call “daybooks,” but might more properly be called day planners, several of which are found among her papers at Emory. These eight-by-eleven inch, month-by-month calendars include her busy schedule of readings, and often serve as a kind of portable desk, with work memos, invitations to read, and travel itineraries tucked in; they also include drafts of poems in progress and what appear to be reading copies of new poems. Several poems in the “Last Poems & Drafts” section come from these daybooks, either in typed or occasionally handwritten form. The title “Book of Days” seems all the more fitting given this practice.

  The poem “some points along some of the meridians” is a find from her 2007 daybook—it is immediately proceeded by a printed set of “point references” to what might be acupuncture or other localized medicines based on the body, the list a gift from a friend on her birthday. From this follows the “meridians” poem which at first seems merely a further list—but much like the poem that begins The Book of Light, consisting of merely the dictionary definition of light, there seems a purposeful ordering to the sections and even in the new title. All poems question the idea of what makes up a poem, or they should—and none more than the list poem—but here you can see her poet’s sensibility, whether in the ordering of the body or her love of it, expressed through language. How poignant for someone at this time struggling with her health, and with an organ transplant, to call the kidney “deep valley” and “spirit storehouse” and “spirit burial ground.” In this way, these last poems have not only survived, they are poems of a survivor.

  The more immediately recognizable style of “6/27/06 seventy”—the date and age of her birthday—recasts a poem of a similar title that appears in Voices. The poem was written, we know, from early drafts in 2006 and appears completed in 2008. Like many of the last poems, Clifton started this on the computer: often not using her computer’s word processing program, but e-mail, which appears to have provided less in the way of interfering “autocorrections”—capitalizing every “i” we can only imagine—with the directness of her old typewriter. Or even her Videowriter, a machine made only for word processing whose small screen may have impacted her line in ways we haven’t quite fully understood—much as we haven’t yet understood the ways the spirit writing impacted her work, with its different kind of daily log and practice, filled with connected, looping words from the pen never leaving the page. She often turned this page horizontally, like a landscape; the result is a quite different effect than those short, relineated “Ones” in Mercy.

  While her computers are undergoing the kinds of forensics and archival investigations that may yet yield other poems—not to mention drafts of those poems we have here—processing this kind of “born digital” work is still underway. However, a number of poems here were clearly composed in e-mail then printed, including “6/27/06 seventy” and “after the children died.”

  Another set of her late work comes from Squaw Valley workshops in California. I taught at one session with her in 2005; as attendees to that conference know, all poets there, including workshop leaders, write a poem a day, handed out in the morning and workshopped that same day. Clifton, who attended the conference many times (and commented on the awkwardness of its place name), often used the daily practice to full advantage—indeed, a number of poems from Voices appear to have taken first form, or perhaps been polished further, at Squaw Valley. The poems “haiku” and “An American Story” stem from files from that conference.

  These poems may be the start of the project that Alexia Clifton remembers her mother mentioning toward what would be the end of her life: a book to be called God Bless America. While we have not yet encountered the full manuscript, the typescript three-line version of “God Bless America” we do have is far more than a fragment. Rather, like her “haiku,” Clifton seems to be moving by suggestion. She was always one whose questions and love of paradox informed her best poems, like “why some people be mad at me sometimes”:

  they ask me to remember

  but they want me to remember

  their memories

  and i keep on remembering

  mine.

  The poem “God Bless America” was found among her last daybook, from 2010, where it was tucked in the short days of February, the month she would die in—fifty-one years to the day after her own mother. Right behind that poem is another poem, what appears to be the last poem Clifton wrote and the last poem in this book. There are two handwritten drafts to this poem that starts “In the middle of the Eye”; the second one, reprinted here as is, appears remarkably clean and direct. Prescient and powerful, the poem is both a testimony and an example of Clifton’s strength to the end; she not only stands, but withstands, and stands up amidst “the fiery sight.”

  The last words in the 2010 daybook are the start to the acceptance speech Clifton began for the Frost Medal she was to be awarded by the Poetry Society of America in April of that year. While she did not live to give that speech, we still have her spoken, written, near sung voice in lines echoing her most reprinted poem: “I stand here before you having survived 3 bouts with cancer, a kidney transplant, the loss of my husband and two of my children and arthritis like you wouldn’t believe. Indeed won’t you celebrate with me?”

  —Kevin Young

  Lucille Clifton Bibliography

  Ordered chronologically, this bibliography accounts for first editions of all published books and limited editions by Lucille Clifton, including poetry (noted in bold), children’s books, and memoir. All genres other than poetry are identified in parentheses, including a selection of broadsides. Thanks to Amy Hildreth Chen for her help with the bibliography.

  What Watches Me? A Writing and Drawing Book for You. (Children’s Book) Washington, DC: US Dept. Health, Education & Welfare and the Central Atlantic Regional Educational Laboratory, c. 1968. This spiral-bound booklet of Clifton’s rhyming set of riddles was
written for schoolchildren who were meant to illustrate it. Apparently limited to 40 copies.

  “Mae Baby.” (Short Story) Highlights for Children (February 1969): 28-9. Clifton’s first national magazine appearance.

  Good Times. The Massachusetts Review Signature Series of Poets 4 (Winter 1969): 82-96. Separate offprint that includes sixteen poems from the forthcoming book Good Times.

  Good Times. New York, NY: Random House, 1969. The book appeared in November.

  The Black B C’s. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970.

  Some of the Days of Everett Anderson. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.

  Good News About the Earth. New York, NY: Random House, 1972.

  All Us Come Cross the Water. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1973.

  Don’t You Remember? (Children’s Book) New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973.

  Good, Says Jerome. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973.

  An Ordinary Woman. New York, NY: Random House, 1974.

  “Three Wishes,” Free To Be…You and Me, ed. Francine Klagsbrun. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 114. Clifton won an Emmy Award for the television broadcast of this popular program.

  Everett Anderson’s Year. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974.

  The Times They Used to Be. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974.

  “All of Us Are All of Us.” (Broadside) Detroit, MI: Broadside Press, March 1974. Broadside Series No. 81.

  My brother fine with me. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975.

  Generations: A Memoir. New York, NY: Random House, 1976.

  Five Magic Words. (Children’s Book) Randallstown, MD: The Agnihotra Press, 1976. “Pictures by Sidney Clifton.”

  Everett Anderson’s Friend. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.

  Amifika. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: E .P. Dutton, 1977.

  The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1978.

  Everett Anderson’s Nine Month Long. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978.

  Two-Headed Woman. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

  My Friend Jacob. (Young Adult) New York, NY: Dutton Juvenile, 1980.

  Sonora Beautiful. (Young Adult) New York, NY: Dutton Juvenile, 1981.

  “Here is aanother bone to pick with you.” (Broadside) Iowa City, IA: Toothpaste Press, 1981.

  Everett Anderson’s Goodbye. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983.

  The Lucky Stone. (Young Adult) New York, NY: Delacourt Press, 1986.

  “Let There Be New Flowering.” (Broadside) New York, NY: New York City Transit Authority, 1987.

  Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir: 1969–1980. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd. 1987.

  Next: New Poems. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1987.

  Ten Oxherding Pictures. (limited edition) Santa Cruz, CA: Moving Parts Press, 1988. Two hundred copies, thirty of which are numbered and signed.

  Quilting: 1987–1990. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd. 1991.

  Everett Anderson’s Christmas Coming. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1991.

  Three Wishes. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Doubleday Book for Young Readers, 1992.

  Everett Anderson’s 1-2-3. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1992.

  The Book of Light. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1993.

  The Terrible Stories. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1996.

  Selected Poems. (Limited Edition) Minneapolis, MN: Tunheim Santrizos Company/Minnesota Center for the Arts, 1996. Print run of around 400 copies not for sale.

  The Terrible Stories. London: Slow Dancer Publications, 1998. British edition.

  “At the Cemetery, Walnut Grove Plantation, South Carolina, 1989.” (Broadside). Wells College Press, 1998.

  Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2000. National Book Award winner.

  One of the Problems of Everett Anderson. (Children’s Book) New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co., 2001.

  Mercy. 2004. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004.

  “Surely I Am Able to Write Poems.” (Broadside) Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2004.

  “Blood.” (Broadside) Chicago, IL: Poetry Center of Chicago, 2004.

  “Aunt Jemima.” (Broadside) Atlanta, GA: Emory University, 2006. Printed letterpress by Littoral Press, Oakland, CA.

  “Mulberry Fields.” (Broadside) Chicago, IL: Poetry Foundation, 2007.

  from the fenceless field. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007. Promotional pamphlet including the poems “why some people be mad at my sometimes,” “faith, “lu 1942,” “in amira’s room,” “aunt jemima,” “cream of wheat,” “horse prayer,” “raccoon prayer,” “sorrows,” and “won’t you celebrate with me.”

  Voices. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008.

  “Study the Masters.” (Broadside) New Haven, CT: Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series, 2008.

  Index of Poems

  Titled poems are shown in roman. Untitled poems are indicated by their first line and appear in italics. First lines beginning with a, an, or the are alphabetized under A or T.

  adam and eve, 111

  adam thinking, 399

  admonitions, 71

  africa, 93

  afterblues, 661

  after kent state, 77

  after one year, 575

  after oz, 590

  after the children died she started bathing, 723

  after the reading, 389

  alabama 9/15/63, 553

  albino, 646

  album, 257, 519

  All of Us Are All of Us, 130

  amazons, 489

  American Story, An, 725

  angels, 223

  angelspeak, 693

  anna speaks of the childhood of mary her daughter, 227

  Anniversary 5/10/74, 187

  apology, 82

  april, 574

  armageddon, 709

  as he was dying, 386

  astrologer predicts at mary’s birth, the, 226

  at creation, 264

  at gettysburg, 265

  at jonestown, 267

  atlantic is a sea of bones, 268

  atlas, 455

  at last we killed the roaches, 176

  at nagasaki, 266

  at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989, 331

  auction street, 508

  august, 556

  august the 12th, 202

  aunt agnes hatcher tells, 210

  aunt jemima, 640

  a woman who loves, 354

  bathsheba, 535

  begin here, 444

  beginning of the end of the world, the, 364

  being property once myself, 78

  beloved, 534

  birth-day, 689

  birthday 1999, 561

  birth of language, the, 348

  BLACK WOMEN, 3

  blake, 512

  blessing the boats, 405

  blood, 586

  breaklight, 178

  brothers, 466

  buffalo war, 66

  cain, 112, 458

  california lessons, 318

  ca’line’s prayer, 53

  calling of the disciples, the, 121

  calming Kali, 164

  cancer, 584

  carver, the, 180

  catching the ox, 675

  c.c. rider, 420

  CHAN’S DREAM, 6

  chemotherapy, 301

  children, 577

  chorus: lucille, 306

  cigarettes, 447

  climbing, 413

  come home from the movies, 145

  come to here, 612

  coming home on the ox’s back, 677


  coming of fox, the, 482

  coming of Kali, the, 159

  COMING OF X, THE, 11

  confession, 250

  consulting the book of changes: radiation, 491

  Conversation Overheard in a Graveyard, 12

  conversation with my grandson, waiting to be conceived, 224

  crabbing, 435

  crazy horse instructs the young men but in their grief they forget, 292

  crazy horse names his daughter, 291

  cream of wheat, 642

  cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty, 269

  cutting greens, 173

  dad, 659

  daddy, 29

  daddy, 105

  dancer, 527

  daniel, 116

  Dark Nursery Rhymes for a Dark Daughter, from, 7

  daughters, 415

  david has slain his ten thousands, 530

  david, musing, 538

  dead do dream, the, 662

  Dear, 19, 20

  dear fox, 483

  dear jesse helms, 441

  Dear Mama, 18

  death of crazy horse, the, 289

  death of fred clifton, the 307

  death of joanne c., the, 297

  death of thelma sayles, the, 294

  december 7, 1989, 376

  defending my tongue, 344

  dialysis, 548

  discoveries of fire, the, 47

  dog’s god, 645

  donor, 549

  down the tram, 496

  dream of foxes, a, 486

  driving through new england, 86

  dying, 571

  each morning i pull myself, 432

  earth, 95

  earth is a living thing, the, 436