Miss Rosie

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Miss Rosie

Lucille Clifton 1969

Published in Clifton ’s first poetry collection Good Times in 1969, “Miss Rosie” is one of many powerful portrait poems of urban black experience Clifton is well known for. Using a conversational and often bluesy tone, these poems focus on characters from Clifton’s childhood who, although often poor and wracked with hardship, somehow rise above their problems and prevail. By using vivid images, this poem paints a dim picture of Miss Rosie, an old woman sitting alone near the end of her life, cast aside by an uncaring society. The speaker describes her through comparisons to other “cast aside” items: garbage, rotting potato peels, an old grocery bag. Later in the poem, though, we learn Miss Rosie wasn’t always like this; in fact she once was “the best looking gal in Georgia.” Clifton ends the poem pledging not to let this same tragedy happen to herself, a lesson learned though close observation of the older woman. This personal example also relates to other situations of human suffering, encouraging anyone in a similar situation to “stand up” and fight against those forces holding you down.

Author Biography

Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936, where her father, Samuel Louis Sayles, Sr., worked in the steel mills, and her mother, Thelma Moore Sayles, was employed in a laundry. Although neither

parent had much education, Clifton’s mother wrote poems, which she read to her four children, and her father often told stories about his ancestors, particularly his grandmother Caroline, who was abducted from her home in the Dahomey Republic of West Africa and brought to New Orleans, Louisiana, as a slave. The image of her great-grandmother appears in a number of Clifton’s poems, and her story is fully told in Clifton’s memoir Generations (1976). In 1953 Clifton attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she met such writers as LeRoi Jones, A. B. (Amiri Baraka), Spellman, Owen Dodson, and Sterling Brown. A drama major, she acted in the first performance of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner. Clifton left Howard after two years and attended Fredonia State Teachers College, where she often read and performed plays with a small group of black intellectuals and developed her craft as a writer. Her submission of poems to Robert Hayden resulted in her receipt of the YW-YMHA Poetry Center Discovery Award in 1969—an event that was followed by the publication of her first collection, Good Times: Poems. The work was cited by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year. Clifton has often been associated with the Black Aesthetic Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which promoted African-American arts as tools to overcome racial oppression. She has remained a highly productive poet and children’s author, winning numerous awards and serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1982. In addition, Clifton has had a distinguished career as a humanities and literature professor at several universities.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Line 1

In this first line Clifton introduces a speaker talking directly to Miss Rosie, placing them in the same scene together. This line also establishes the refrain, which is repeated several times throughout.

Lines 2-4

Here, the poet begins describing the older woman, using a simile to compare Miss Rosie to garbage and the awful smell of decaying food in order to emphasize her poverty and isolation. She’s “wrapped up,” “sitting” and “surrounded,” all three descriptions helping create a sense of non-movement, of being stuck the way she is.

Line 5

Using a one word line almost like a hinge or fulcrum, the poet separates the descriptions earlier from those to follow

Lines 6-8

These lines continue to describe the woman, this time focusing on her shoes. Not only are they so worn-out the poet can glimpse a little toe (continuing

Media Adaptations

An audio cassette titled “Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton” was released in 1983 by the American Academy of Poets.

to suggest poverty), they’re also men’s shoes. This portrays Miss Rosie as more masculine than feminine in her old age, any romantic appeal long past. It is important to note as well how the repeated vowel sounds, “you,” “old,” “shoe,” “toe” and “out” help slow down the rhythm of these lines, reinforcing the sense of stillness and old age. This use of repeated vowel sounds is a type of alliteration, specifically called assonance.

Lines 9-10

Here, we’re reminded again of the woman’s stagnancy, motionless; and the poet also introduces a possibility of Rosie’s senility. The grocery simile continues the domestic theme throughout.

Lines 11-13

As if Miss Rosie wasn’t listening to anything said earlier, the poet takes on an even more forceful voice, repeating herself a third time. This “wet brown bag” image also suggests the dark color of the woman’s skin.

Lines 14-15

Whereas all the descriptions up to this point are in present tense, focusing on the aged woman sitting before her, here the poet introduces the fact that as a younger woman growing up in Georgia, Miss Rosie was quite good looking. This contrasts the present against the past, the beauty of youth against old age and the effects of a hard life in the South. Note, too, that in a poem packed with so much garbage, worn-out shoes and stale smells, suddenly a rose appears. On a literal level she was once called “the Georgia Rose” because of her beauty and probably a pun on her name; also the fragrant, bright flower perhaps works as a metaphor for the youth she once possessed.

Lines 16-18

In these last lines the speaker makes a decision: I will not let this happen to me. Contrasting the repeated descriptions of Miss Rosie as a woman sitting in place, burdened in old age and unable to move or take control of her situation, the poet declares “I stand up,” still young herself, able yet to make a change. It’s only after the poet looks long and hard at Miss Rosie’s life, though, does she make the declaration, a lesson learned through this other woman’s experience, “through your destruction,” as she says. Ending the poem this way leaves the reader with a sense of hope, and reinforcing this feeling, the three single syllable words repeated in lines 16 and 18 perhaps sound like an enthusiastic fist pounded on a table.

Themes

Appearance and Reality

A person running into Miss Rosie on the street would see a woman with little to be proud of, to say the least: Clifton uses starkly unflattering imagery such as “garbage,” “potato peels” and “wet brown bag” to describe her. We are told that she dresses oddly and that she is “waiting for” her mind, implying that the things she presently does are done mindlessly. She fits the profile of a mental illness so severe that she is just barely able to function in public and will only be able to sustain herself if next week’s groceries arrive. Just when the reader’s feelings of pity are almost complete, though, the poem reveals another side to Miss Rosie, her glamorous past. In the present she is pitied, but back then she was admired so much that, judging from the nickname Georgia Rose, she was a source of pride for her whole community.

The poem raises the question regarding which one is the real Miss Rosie. The most obvious answer would be the one spoken of in the present tense, an idea supported by the words “I watch you” being repeated twice, driving home the reality of the woman who lives in filth. But there is nothing admirable about Miss Rosie as described, and it is clear from the final lines of the poem that the speaker admires her. There is no reason to believe that what is being described to be happening is not real, but in the emotions felt for Miss Rosie the speaker is responding to what remains of who she once was, and in this way the poem is redefined in terms of a moral reality that is not generally noticed or acknowledged. The first part of the poem gives us reality as we generally experience it through our senses, and even makes that reality particularly grim, but the last five lines of the poem allow for our ability as humans, with memories and imaginations, to cherish a reality that goes beyond the here and now.

Strength and Weakness

The speaker who says “I stand up / Through your destruction” is responding to Miss Rosie’s strength, her ability to survive in the streets in spite of absolute poverty. The poem portrays Miss Rosie’s survival as being an especially admirable feat by contrasting it with her earlier life. We can assume that “The best looking gal in Georgia” would have led a somewhat pampered life, being cushioned from life’s harshness by the recognition she received from her admirers. Similarly, it does not take a great stretch of the imagination to guess that the woman nicknamed “the Georgia Rose” was known more for tenderness and gentleness than for strength. In these few short lines late in the poem Clifton paints for us a portrait of someone who had every right to expect an easy life, one in which she would be admired and be the center of attention. Miss Rosie’s current suffering is therefore twice painful: not only is there her physical desperation, but there is also the pain of seeing how her life did not, in fact, turn out. Either of these would be enough to defeat a weak woman. This poem does not show Miss Rosie as doing anything grand—she cannot even pull herself together enough to improve her situation for the sake of self-preservation. For this poem’s speaker, though, just having the strength to survive day-by-day under these conditions, “through your destruction,” is enough to win admiration.

Identity

This poem is not only about Miss Rosie, it is also about the person who is telling it, the “I” that speaks for the author. This speaker’s story is a simple one: she watches Miss Rosie and, as a direct result of what she sees, she stands up. The poem does not make clear exactly what standing up is meant to signify, and there are a number of different interpretations that the reader could assign to it. The gesture could be an attempt to draw Miss Rosie’s attention, or it could be an act of defiance against the forces that have caused Miss Rosie’s situation, but if either of these was the case we could expect to include a response with the action. Since standing is meant to be significant in and of itself, it must have a personal meaning for the speaker. It is an act of pride, of self-affirmation. Accepting this interpretation,

Topics for Further Study

Write a poem to some older person whom you do not understand, describing what that person looks like to you and what you are going to do as a result.
Give a few different explanations for the phrase “I stand up.” How will this change the speaker’s life? How will it change Miss Rosie’s?

the question then becomes how watching Miss Rosie could make the speaker feel proud of herself. The key is in the final three lines, where the symbolic gesture is wrapped around the phrase “through your destruction.” The speaker sees within herself the possibility for a similar destruction (if it could happen to someone who was once the Georgia Rose, it could happen to anyone) and has learned from Miss Rosie that she can survive through whatever is to come. If this speaker feels uplifted by Miss Rosie’s victorious perseverance, it is because she would like to think she has that kind of uncrushable spirit herself.

Style

“Miss Rosie” is written in free verse, utilizing the varying rhythms and music of conversational speech to carry each line. “Free” doesn’t mean without any form; rather every line’s length and rhythm changes depending on the mood of its subject matter. In this poem, Clifton uses a refrain “When I watch you” three times throughout to perhaps reflect a speaker talking to a person who might not be listening, or in this case, an older woman who might even be hard of hearing. Repeating a line stresses its importance, as if saying it only once is not enough. It also creates a musical pattern throughout, in this case much like a chorus of a blues song.

Generally, the shorter the line in free verse, the more emphasis each word of the line holds. Clifton uses several very short lines throughout—one or two words each—perhaps to indicate and reflect important pivots, or moments of turn, in the poem.

Historical Context

Poverty has always been part of civilization, and at various times in history it has been seen in different lights: as a breakdown of the political system; as a welcome measure of the wealth of those who are fortunate; as a religious issue; as a sign of weak character; as tough luck. Economist Karl Marx, whose philosophy inspired Communism, said that poverty is necessary to Capitalist society. In twentieth-century America, the issue of poverty has been ignored, stigmatized, celebrated in song, and denied. By the 1960s it was viewed as a major social concern across the nation; Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made poverty a central concern of their domestic policy programs. Published in 1969, “Miss Rosie” reflects Lucille Clifton’s humane concerns and her great ability to recognize dignity even in those at the bottom of the social ladder, but the poem also shows us an attitude about the poor that had evolved over time.

The largest single event to affect our nation’s idea of poverty occurred on October 29, 1929, when the stock market crashed. Investors who had counted on stock earnings were unable to pay on loans, causing a chain reaction that almost immediately drove the country into the Great Depression. During the Depression, which lasted through the 1930s right up to America’s entry into World War II in 1941, unemployment reached as high as twenty-five percent of the population. As a result, poverty became more socially acceptable: the poor, who had been pitied in the past for their weakness of character, became so commonplace that poverty was no longer looked upon as the fault of the impoverished. It was common during the Depression to lose one’s job or house, or at least to know someone who had, and as a result most people came to understand poverty as being beyond the power of individuals. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1933 at the height of the Depression, and, whether because of true compassion for the poor or to win votes (which he certainly did: he was to become the only U.S. president elected four times), he established a number of government programs to hire unemployed workers and monitor fair employment practices. These programs are collectively referred to as The New Deal. During the New Deal, Americans started to view poverty as a governmental concern.

The economy expanded during World War II, as industries manufactured items needed for the war. After the war ended, America emerged as the world’s leading industrial power, the one large economy that had not suffered from bombings. Unemployment was low throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but there were still areas of the country, mostly in inner cities and in rural areas, that were poor. Resting comfortably on a strong economy, Americans began looking at poverty as a social problem, and started asking why a country with so much economic success could not defeat poverty once and for all. One key element in making middle-class Americans aware of the problems of the poor was Michael Harrington’s best-seller, The Other America, which showed how vast the problem was and made readers see that there were people in this country with no houses or food. In 1963, President Kennedy announced his program to provide for the poor, but he was assassinated before the program could be implemented. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, carried on with many of Kennedy’s popular social programs: in his first State of the Union address in January of 1964, Johnson announced, “This Administration, today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty.” This war, and the “Great Society” program that Johnson proposed the following year, led to such actions on the behalf of the poor as the establishment of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, The Food Stamp Act, and Medicare and Medicaid. These programs helped provide food, housing, and medical attention to those lowest on the economic scale. The concern for those who are less fortunate that helped make these programs possible is reflected in “Miss Rosie”.

Of course, the War on Poverty did not put an end to hunger and homelessness, and in the years since 1969 public opinion has shifted several times. Sociologists agree that a record number of homeless people ended up on the streets during the 1980s, for a variety of reasons: a shortage of cheap housing occurred when Single Residence Occupancy hotels—“flop houses” of legend—were torn down during the 1980s condominium boom; median rent had increased twice as fast as income during the 1970s; and three fourths of the patients at state mental facilities were “deinstitutionalized,” or put out on the street to fend for themselves, which many proved unable to do. Due to improvements in telecommunications and transportation, unskilled jobs are now being handled in other countries, driving unskilled laborers into poverty. Budget-balancing proposals are putting limits on the government aid available.

Compare & Contrast

1969: 43 percent of all women over the age 16 were part of the labor force, up from 38 percent in 1960.
1980: 51 percent of all women over 16 were in the labor force.
Today: The rate of women entering the labor force has come to a stop, hovering around 57 to 58 percent.
1969: The cost of the Medicare program enacted in 1965 shot upward as physicians began submitting patients to hospitals for even minor complaints: at the time, Medicare, a health insurance program for the aged and disabled, paid all hospital costs.
1975: The average annual benefit paid by Medicare was $326.
1980: The average annual benefit paid was $863.
1985: The average annual benefit paid was $1587.
1990: The average annual benefit paid was $1987.
Today: Medical costs have slowed somewhat but are still the fastest-growing expense in the American economy.

The lowest 2/10ths of the population is making a lower proportion of income, while the highest 1/lOth is making more. Despite these social trends, there is still a growing portion of the American population that holds impoverished individuals personally responsible for their situation.

Critical Overview

”Miss Rosie” has been cited as an example of the way Clifton, from very early on in her career, uses portrait poems to highlight those inner city people forgotten by society. Critic Audrey T. McCluskey, writing in her essay “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille Clifton,” calls Miss Rosie one of “the unsung, the unvindicated for whom the poet speaks.” Pointing out Clifton’s use often “highly charged sensory images” in the poem, McCluskey writes “the theme of human waste and uselessness is suggested throughout—by the placement of key words and phrases like “sitting” “Waiting for your mind” and metaphors like “too old potato peels” and “wet brown bag of a woman.” Although the poem focuses on the “commanding presence” of Miss Rosie, Clifton doesn’t dwell on destruction; rather the poem’s closing lines convey “the speaker’s resolve to fight the forces that caused that human waste and suffering.” Similarly, Haki Madhuduti, in the essay “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry,” agrees that Clifton learns from Miss Rosie’s example, taking “experiences and observations and squeez[ing] the knowledge from them.” Writing for The Southern Review, Hank Lazer terms the speaker’s declaration made at the end of the poem a “form of solidarity, celebration, and witness ... [an] act of commemoration and community.

Clifton’s first collection, Good Times, from which “Miss Rosie” appeared in 1969, was praised by the New York Times as one of that year’s ten best books. Madhuduti, referring to the last lines of the poem, relates the lesson learned to the theme of the entire collection, insisting “standing up is what Good Times is about.

Criticism

Ted Humphrey

Ted Humphrey is a freelance writer whose essays frequently appear in Magill’s Literary Annuals. He currently teaches in the Department of English

What Do I Read Next?

Written by Herself: Literary Productions of African American Women, 1746-1892, was written by Frances Smith Foster and published in 1993. The point of examining a distant historical period like this is to draw strength from these writers’ ability to live through adversity, in the same way that Clifton’s speaker learns about her own strength by watching Miss Rosie.
Published in 1981, Shopping Bag Ladies is a book of photos and text by Ann Marie Rousseau that brings Miss Rosie’s situation to life. The text is not too academic—usually consisting of interviews with urban homeless women—and the black-and-white photos are fascinating.
Clifton has cited poet Robert Hayden as a strong influence, a mentor in her early career. There was much mutual admiration between the two. The poems in Kaleidoscope, a collection of poetry by African-American writers, bear some resemblance to Clifton’s works, although the book was published in 1967, too early to include any of Clifton’s poetry.
Gloria Naylor’s 1987 best-seller The Women of Brewster Place examines women in a certain city block, representing different ages and economic backgrounds, coming together to understand each other.

and Foreign Languages at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA. In the following essay, Humphrey analyzes how Clifton “render[s] big ideas in a simple way” and argues that, in this 18-line poem, the poet reminds her audience of the humanity and worthiness of an “overlooked” woman.

Lucille Clifton has said, “I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way.” Reading the poems in the volume Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, which contains “Miss Rosie,” one is immediately struck by Clifton’s success in reaching her goal. Her ideas are big: love, respect, race relations, sacrifice, religion, loss, and childhood, to name a few. These ideas and more are present in her short poems, which are characterized by their short lines, their unambiguous syntax, and a tone—tough sometimes, tender others—that is always under control. On an Internet site devoted to poets, Toi Derricotte writes that “in the end, our connection to the past is more than a personal connection; it places us within a lifeline that extends before and beyond us, it places and holds us between the wings of something vast and eternal. Lucille Clifton in ’Greens’ finds, in this simple ritual of preparing a traditional African American food, that ’the greens roll black under the knife/ and the kitchen twists dark on its spine/ and i taste in my natural appetite/ the bond of live things everywhere.’” Derricotte captures an essential aspect of Clifton’s poetry, “the bond of live things everywhere,” that is revealed clearly in “Miss Rosie.” In this eighteen-line poem, Clifton connects with and celebrates the life of a “wet brown bag of a woman / who used to be the best looking gal in georgia / used to be called the Georgia Rose” by “standing up” for her, by standing up in respect for this human life, “wrapped up like garbage” and “sitting, surrounded by the smell / of too old potato peels,” wearing her “old man’s shoes / with the little toe cut out / sitting, waiting for [her] mind / like next week’s grocery.”

These phrases reveal just how Clifton renders “big ideas in a simple way.” Sharp but sympathetic observation is the first quality one notices—the particular detail that stands for the “big” idea and the responses one must feel to those like Miss Rosie, whose life has taken turns that no one anticipated, and who has made the journey from beautiful youth to a homeless old woman bereft of mind and memory, of health and resources. Clifton establishes the narrator’s voice and point of view with the first line, “when I watch you.” At first, the narrator’s point of view invites the rest of the world to share her view of Miss Rosie, and the suggestion seems to be that a sight such as Miss Rosie will elicit at best a shrug, a turning away, and a refusal to acknowledge Miss Rosie’s humanity or her sisterhood. But as the phrase “when I watch you” is repeated twice more, the narrator initiates a serious shift of attitude—from one of probable disdain to one of sharp and articulate celebration of Miss Rosie’s survival and her dignity despite her “destruction.” With each repetition of the phrase “when I watch you,” it’s as if the emphasis and the vision shift from “when” to “I” to “watch you.” This shift requires a move from an egocentric perspective to a communal one that really sees the homeless woman as ironically heroic in her survival because of her humanness. And here, of course, we approach what is at the center of most of Clifton’s poetry—Christian love, or, if that is unfashionable, then a spiritual connectedness and toughness that permits, or perhaps requires, that we remember how connected we are or should be with each other.

Does Clifton’s poetry, and in particular this poem, have a political agenda? Is it possible that this apparently simple poem describing a “bag lady,” a “homeless person,” a “derelict” might have a moral and political purpose behind its surface simplicity? Consider the suggestion above about the shift in focus created by the repetition of the refrain “when I watch you.” Consider how necessary it is to see a problem before one may see a solution. Consider how necessary it is for one person to have such a vision before a “political” solution can be dreamed, articulated, shared, and enacted. What is the solution to the “problem” of the homeless, the derelicts, the abandoned, the “brown bag” of this particular woman and the thousands like her? Clifton suggests that the solution is, first, to see her, to acknowledge her, and then to “stand up / through your destruction” as the speaker emphatically does in the last line.

Critic and poet Alicia Ostriker has analyzed the effect Clifton’s minimalist poetry has on her. Clifton employs simple, short sentences with between one and four beats per line; there are no rhymes, capitalization, or punctuation. Also characteristic of Clifton’s poetry is the adroit use of space and placement and (though not the case in the poem at hand) the frequent lack of titles. Her poetry has a sculptural quality, not abstract but figurative, in which the negative spaces have as much to do with defining and interpreting the form as do the filled spaces, the spaces we tend to think of when we first perceive the sculpture. When we study the sculpture (and its spaces) and begin to respond to it emotionally and intellectually, then we begin to understand how totally we must “see” both sorts of statements to do justice to the artist’s clarity and totality of vision. Ostriker suggests that the contemporary poet Clifton most resembles is Robert Creeley—”in cadence, quality of ellipsis, and syntactic ambiguity.” Ostriker also comments that “Miss Rosie” structurally resembles a Shakespearean sonnet with the line “when i watch you” functioning as does the triple refrain (”When I have seen ... “) in “Sonnet 64.” In addition to the structural and ideational functions of this refrain, the poem is formed by subtle and adroit sound patterns that are fully within the American idiom and thus ring true and natural to the American ear. There is subtle assonance in the broad, open sounds of the “a’s” of “wrapped,” “garbage,” “watch,” “man’s,” and “waiting.” Likewise, there are soft sibilants such as “peels,” “shoes,” “sitting,” “week’s,” “say,” “destruction,” and “stand.” These are the tools of a poet who pays attention to the music and power of language truthfully heard and powerfully sung.

In her reading of “Miss Rosie,” Ostriker points out that the speaker does not touch Miss Rosie; she watches her and stands up “through” her destruction, but remains separate and apart from this “wet brown bag of a woman.” The speaker does not reach out for Miss Rosie or enfold her in her arms. But, as suggested above, clearly seeing the object of one’s gaze is a necessary first step toward engagement and toward religious and political action. We cannot “save” or even acknowledge what we do not see, and if we cannot “see” such a one as Miss Rosie, how can we see even ourselves? Yet it is true that the lines “i stand up / through your destruction / i stand up” reflect the ambiguity of one’s thoughts about seeing the decay of beauty and promise, of being in the presence of talents, of worth, of humanity reduced at last to a woman “in ... old man’s shoes /with the little toe cut out / sitting, waiting for [her] mind.” It is certainly possible to utter the age-old prayer of thanksgiving, “There but for the grace of God go I,” but it is also possible to connect, through the agency of one poet’s vision with the humanity, the human-ness of the objects of gaze and be made better by it—especially by taking action. And it is action that, in my view, Clifton calls for with the repeated phrase, “i stand up.” She seems to say, “I bless you with my attention, with my seeing, with my mind” (even when yours has left you). “Perhaps I cannot physically save you” (the final fact that all religious persons who hold to the principle of “agency” cannot avoid), but I can ’stand up’ and acknowledge and accept and celebrate your divinity.” Reading Clifton’s poems leaves no doubt that the concept of agency, of responsibility for oneself and for doing what one can for one’s fellow creatures, strongly informs her work and worldview. But her poems also insist on community—on connections of person to person and of generations past with generations present and future. We are connected to each other whether we like it or not, and whether by success or by failure, our memories, collective and individual, frame and define that connection. Our actions when we acknowledge that fact measure

“I like to think, I write from my knowledge not my lack from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way.”

—Lucille Clifton

sure our worth. Thus, are the largest ideas embodied and enacted in this “simple” poem, this simple yet subtle pattern of sounds and syllables and words.

Source: Ted Humphrey, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Hank Lazer

A discussion of the works of Lucille Clifton is presented here.

Lucille Clifton’s name is fairly well known, but perhaps her writing is not. With each new book she receives consideration for a Pulitzer Prize, and, up to a point, her poems are widely anthologized. But due to the deceptive simplicity of Clifton’s work—a function of its conciseness, compression, and reliance on an oral tradition—her poetry is undervalued. When written about, her poems are described and praised but rarely given a reading that grants their depth and complexity. As readers, we fail to appreciate Lucille Clifton’s full accomplishment if we exclude from the scope of our attention her twenty-one children’s books. For they too, as fully as the poetry, establish the ethical and artistic dimensions of her work as a writer. With the publication of Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems, all of Clifton’s previously published poetry is back in print, and we can begin to see the magnitude of her accomplishment.

Beginning with her first book of poems, Clifton attends to the enigma of pain fused with grace:

running across to the lot
in the middle of the cement days
to watch the big boys trembling
as the dice made poets of them
if we remembered to despair
i forget
i forget
while the streetlights were blooming
and the sharp birdcall
of the iceman and his son
and the ointment of the ragman’s horse
sang spring
our fathers were dead and
our brothers were dying

Usually the ethic of the poetry, unlike the children’s stories, is subdued or indirect. Wonder and suggestion often replace didacticism, as in the example of the scissors man and his sharpening wheel:

still
it was nice
in the light of maizie’s store
to watch the wheel
and catch the wheel—
fire spinning in the air
and our edges
and our points
sharpening good as anybody’s

When the ethical imperative of the poetry gets stated, it takes the form of solidarity, celebration, and witness, as in the act of commemoration and community which concludes “miss rosie,” one of Clifton’s most often anthologized poems:

when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

As in the first poem in her first book of poems, the physical setting is usually urban, with a mixture of death and joy. That place or setting—“the inner city”—gets defined by someone else (who holds the power of definition), but it is also given another name by its actual inhabitants:

in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
we think a lot about uptown
and the silent nights
and the houses straight as
dead men
and the pastel lights

and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
and in the inner city or
like we call it
home

That “or” by itself on a line typifies the care of Clifton’s writing: it is the pivot upon which the names “inner city” and “home,” the opposed definitions of place, turn to face each other.

But the primary task of Clifton’s writing is for “us” “to learn ourselves,” which in the context of “album” (the first poem in Clifton’s volume of new poems) means resisting the desire (in 1939) to turn young black children into images of Shirley Temple. Instead, to gain self-possession, or at least the dignity of fashioning and naming themselves in and by a history of their own devising, “we had to learn ourselves / back across 2 oceans / into bound feet and nappy hair.” As Houston Baker has made abundantly clear, African-American literature constitutes “an expressive tradition grounded in the economics of slavery.” For Baker and for Clifton that fact leads to a refiguring of American history, where, as Baker describes it, “the transportable stock on American vessels is no longer figured as a body of courageous Pilgrims but as ’black gold.’” For Clifton, who early in her poetry asks what “if the sea should break / and crash against the decks / and below decks break the cargo” and what “if the seas of cities / should crash against each other / and break the chains / and break the walls holding down the cargo,” this refiguring of history takes several forms: her own familial history as recounted in Generations: A Memoir (included in Good Woman), her twenty-one children’s books (especially The Black BC’s and All Us Come Cross the Water), and her employment of and insistence upon the richness and beauty of vernacular expression. The latter strategy matters precisely for the reasons developed by Baker, who concludes “that writing the culturally specific is coextensive with discovering vernacular inscriptions in American culture. What must be summoned to view are not Grecian urns, but ancestral faces.” And thus for Clifton, the last poem in Two Headed Woman asserts

in populated air
our ancestors continue.
i have seen them.
i have heard
their shimmering voices
singing.

The story of Clifton’s ancestral lineage goes back to Caroline Donald, born in Dahomey in 1822, seized and taken to America, but who as a child of seven walked all the way from New Orleans to virginia. A portion of that history appears in Good News, juxtaposed to Clifton’s own shorter walk:

walked twelve miles into buffalo and
bought a dining room suit

mammy ca’line
walked from new orleans
to Virginia
in 1830
seven years old

always said
get what you want
you from dahomey women.

Caroline’s child Lucille shoots and kills the white father of her only son. Out of respect for the much admired Caroline, the mob that seizes Lucille does not lynch her; instead, they try her and accord her the “dignity” of being the first black woman legally hanged in Virginia. Lucille’s son Genie was the father of Samuel, who married Thelma Moore, and they are Thelma Lucille Sayles Clifton’s parents. Beginning with this accounting—”Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of the slaves. The names are Caroline, and Lucy and Samuel, I say. Slave names”—Clifton tells and re-tells her history in Generations. After her first recording of that history, Clifton writes, “I look at my husband and our six children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”

The history that Clifton records and affirms, as relayed to her by her father, is one of a community of strong women: “and she [Caroline Donald] used to always say, ’Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.’ And she used to tell us about how they had a whole army of nothing but women back there and how they was the best soldiers in the world.” Generations tells and re-tells Clifton’s lineage, clarifying and verifying as it goes. Clifton’s father’s version of it begins, “The generations of Caroline Donald, born free among Dahomey people in 1822 and died free in Bedford Virginia in 1910... and Sam Louis Sale, born a slave in America in 1777 and died a slave in the same place in around 1860.” His account ends with his daughter Lucille, the poet, to whom he says, “We fooled em, Lue, slavery was terrible but we fooled them old people. We come out of it better than they did.”

In her poetry a telling of these events, an account which reveals the great compression of her poetry, is

light
on my mother’s tongue
breaks through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.

lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in Virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.
light breaks from her life
to her lives ...

mine already is
an afrikan name.

In “A Simple Language,” Clifton explains:

I use simple language. I have never believed that for anything to be valid or true or intellectual or “deep” it had to first be complex. I deliberately use the language that I use. Sometimes people have asked me when I was going to try something hard or difficult, as if my work sprang from my ignorance. I like to think, I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way.

Such a poem as “light,” depending as it does on the Latin root lux, meaning light, at the heart of Lucille, begins to demonstrate how much Clifton accomplishes with a few simple words. Besides explaining why Clifton did not change her name to an Afrikan name—her name was already figured into an Afrikan-based history—the poem offers a motivation for her grandmother’s deed, as well as establishing her own lineage as one based on light. So that in subsequent poems, when Clifton declares “the light that came to lucille clifton / came in a shift of knowing,” or in the impressive sequence of poems entitled “the light that came to lucille clifton” when she asks “who are these strangers peopleing this light?,” we know that that light is a history, a narrative refiguring of an otherwise often ahistorical image of inward illumination. The strength of Clifton’s mysticism is that it is grounded in history and in a familial mother tongue:

someone calling itself Light
has opened my inside.
i am flooded with brilliance
mother,

someone of it is answering to
your name.

Clifton answers back with her poetry and prose. In the poetry, one other definition of that light occurs in “roots”:

call it our wildness then,
we are lost from the field
of flowers. we become
a field of flowers,
call it our craziness
our wildness
call it our roots,
it is the light in us
it is the light of us....

The other equally effective affirmation in Clifton’s poetry is akin to a power of the blues, what Houston Baker hears as the blues’ “powers at the junctures of American experience—its power to wed quotidian rituals of everyday American experience to the lusters of a distinctively American expressive firmament.” For Clifton, that wedding is accomplished in poems such as “homage to my hips,” “homage to my hair,” and “what the mirror said,” but nowhere as effectively as in “cutting greens”:

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

If, as many readers and writers of poetry are aware, a dominant feature of poetry in our time is its diversity, the absolute fragmentation of audience and the decentralization of its production and distribution, then many important consequences ensue from Ron Silliman’s conclusion that “the result has been a decentralization in which any pretense, whether from the ’center’ or elsewhere, of a coherent sense as to the nature of the whole of American poetry is now patently obvious as just so much aggressive fakery.” It especially matters that white male readers, writers, and professors reach out and resist the drawing of xenophobic boundaries so that they can begin to live in the fullness of the present moment, so that we might have, as Gertrude Stein had wished, “all of our contemporaries for our contemporaries.” In so doing, we can begin to undo one of the most damaging, lingering, and conservative goals of high modernist poetry. Instead of seeking to “purify the language of the tribe,” we can begin to acknowledge with and through Lucille Clifton’s writing, and the poetry of many other African-American poets, that “there are / too many languages for / one mortal tongue.” What we need is not a purification of the language of the tribe, but an attentiveness to the languages of the many tribes constituting American expression.

Source: Hank Lazer, “Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 25, No. 3, July, 1989, pp. 142-48.

Audrey T. McCloskey

In the following excerpt, McCloskey provides a discussion of Clifton’s works and her use of various techniques, images and themes.

“The optimism that permeates all of Clifton’s work is fueled by her Christian faith. The tenets of Christianity are a natural vehicle for the espousal of her belief in the ultimate triumph and deliverance of an oppressed people.”

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Source: Audrey T. McCloskey, “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille Clifton,” in Black Woman Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Man Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 760–70

Sources

The American Poetry Review, Vol. 22, November/December, 1993, pp. 41-48.

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

Derricotte, Toi, “The Bond of Living Things: Poems of Ancestry, Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton,” http://www.poets.org/poets/lit/exhex002fst.htm, June 6, 1996.

Lazer, Hank, “Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton,” in The Southern Review, Vol. 25, No. 3, July, 1989, pp. 139-49.

Madhubuti, Haki, “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980); A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1924, pp. 150-60.

McCluskey, Audrey T., “Tell the Good News: A view of the Works of Lucille Clifton,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980); A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 760-70.

For Further Study

Johnson, Paul, Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties, New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

The author takes a conservative, disapproving view of the social spending increases started by President Lyndon Johnson in his attempt to eliminate poverty.

Madhubuti, Haki, “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry,” in Black Woman Writers (1950-1980), edited by Mari Evans, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984.

Madhubuti, a famous poet himself (formerly known under the name Don L. Lee), is very familiar with Clifton’s works and appreciates her for her strength and humanity.

Miller, S. M., and Martin Rein, “Will the War on Poverty Change America?” in How We Lost the War on Poverty, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1976. pp. 187-203.

Written just ten years after President Johnson announced the War on Poverty, the authors of this article (and of the book in general) portray the heightened concern for the poor in the 1960s as a passing phase.

Stem, Mark J., ‘The Emergence of the Homeless as a Public Problem,” in Housing and the Homeless, edited by Jon Erickson and Charles Wilhelm, New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1986. pp. 113-23.