(Inter)National Poetry Month + Poems: Lucille Clifton & Ai

It wouldn't be (Inter)National Poetry Month without some J's Theater poems, would it? So, to start us off, here are poems by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) and Ai (1947-2010), both of whom have left us with their words this year. I won't post bios, as those are widely available; I'll let their artistry, so differently and amply demonstrated in these works, speak for them.

wishes for sons

by Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

Lucille Clifton, "wishes for sons" from Next: New Poems. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Source: Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1987)

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Nothing But Color

by Ai

for Yukio Mishima

I didn’t write Etsuko,
I sliced her open.
She was carmine inside
like a sea bass
and empty.
No viscera, nothing but color.
I love you like that, boy.
I pull the kimono down around your shoulders
and kiss you.
Then you let it fall open.
Each time, I cut you a little
and when you leave, I take the piece,
broil it, dip it in ginger sauce
and eat it. It burns my mouth so.
You laugh, holding me belly-down
with your body.
So much hurting to get to this moment,
when I’m beneath you,
wanting it to go on and to end.

At midnight, you say see you tonight
and I answer there won’t be any tonight,
but you just smile, swing your sweater
over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck.
I hear you whistling long after you disappear
down the subway steps,
as I walk back home, my whole body tingling.
I undress
and put the bronze sword on my desk
beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper.
I smooth it open
and read its single sentence:
I meant to do it.
No. It should be common and feminine
like I can’t go on sharing him,
or something to imply that.
Or the truth:
that I saw in myself
the five signs of the decay of the angel
and you were holding on, watching and free,
that I decided to go out
with the pungent odor
of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death.
Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word
that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined.
Goddamn you, boy.
Nothing I said mattered to you;
that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself.
I tear the note, then burn it.
The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M.
I take the sword and walk into the garden.
I look up. The sun, the moon,
two round teeth rock together
and the light of one chews up the other.
I stab myself in the belly,
wait, then stab myself again. Again.
It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice,
but I’ll burn anyone who touches me.
I start pulling my guts out,
those red silk cords,
spiraling skyward,
and I’m climbing them
past the moon and the sun,
past darkness
into white.
I mean to live.

Ai, “Nothing But Color” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Ai. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.

Source: Vice: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1999)

Remembering Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

I didn't learn until this evening that poet Lucille Clifton passed away this morning. Just a few weeks ago I'd posted a congratulatory note here to her on her receipt of the Poetry Society of America's Centennial Frost Medal.  As J's Theater readers know, I'm a huge fan of hers and was fortunate to have this extraordinarily humble, generous, wise, perspicacious, funny, gentle, and fierce poet as a teacher, briefly, for several summers (1998-99) at the Cave Canem Foundation's Writers Workshops, where I was able to see up close how deeply and broadly she did see, into poems and people. Ms. Lucille, as we called her, once took a fellow poet's poem that was as forbidding as anything any postmodernist might have dreamt or typed up, and patiently read it, studied it--the rest of us were puzzling over it--and after rearranging several stanzas, offered in her kind way a suggestion of what resulted that brought amazement to all of us, including the poet: the poem was now not only highly original, but comprehensible, moving, a real accomplishment. I witnessed her do this again and again, which is to say, teach, even with work that was very unlike her own. It's probably fair to say that every poet who came into close contact with her, as a teacher, learned a tremendous deal, not only about how to write, but to think, about humility, about generosity, about how one's life is central to one's work, even if it's nowhere or everywhere apparent in the surface of the poem.  I often use the word "lovely" to describe people and artworks I like, in part because I love the word and because I think these fellow human beings and works are full of love, and Ms. Lucille was truly lovely, in the sense of being full of love despite the many difficulties she faced over the years.  She conveyed this love, of self, of life, of others, despite the hardships, in part through her work and in part through her wonderful stories, which she shared when she taught or read. One of the best conversations I ever saw, which brought tears to mine and others' eyes, involved Ms. Lucille and Ms. Sonia Sanchez, another remarkable poet and teacher. I use the word love too because I love how Ms. Lucille carried herself in the world, how she would wield her fierceness when necessary, how she used it to deflect the pain she probably felt at times when people could not appreciate how she distilled language into something often astonishing. She wrote about being a woman, being black, being a black woman from a working-class background, being a daughter and mother and wife; she wrote about living and surviving, surviving the loss of her mother and cancer and all the other things that life brought her; she wrote about the larger issues we as a society face, including the events of September 11, 2004; she wrote about the necessary courage to speak the truth, her truth, through writing, which her readers recognized as soon as they entered her poems.

My abiding appreciation of her really began back in 1995, when I was teaching 7th graders in New York City, and quickly learned that a few poets spoke directly and immediately to both them and me: Stanley Kunitz; Langston Hughes; Nikki Giovanni; Willie Perdomo; Nicolasa Mohr; and Lucille Clifton. The students could see and hear and feel in the poems of hers that we read from The Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 1992), which had only just appeared a few years before, that here was someone who knew how to take her life experiences and turn them into art. I want to repost the second poem in the book, "june 20," which captures the candor and simple but never simplistic power of Ms. Lucille's art:

june 20

i will be born in one week
to a frowned forehead of a woman
and a man whose fingers will itch
to enter me. she will crochet
a dress for me of silver
and he will carry me in it.
they will do for each other
all that they can
but it will not be enough.
none of us know we will not
smile again for years,
that she will not live long.
in one week I will emerge face first
into their temporary joy.

Copyright © Lucille Clifton, 1992, 2010. All rights reserved.

 

Lucille Clifton with two of her daughters

and her granddaughter before the Ruth Lilly Prize event

A few years ago, Lucille Clifton was in Chicago to receive the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, and I blogged about it, snapping photos as I'm wont to do, and offering one of my little writeups that probably sound to some readers like boilerplate. I mention that event because Ms. Lucille read some of work and spoke to the audience, showing her customary graciousness, bravery, and dignity, and letting everyone know that the award, which had never gone to a Black woman writer, was very well deserved.  I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to be present when Ms. Lucille received that honor, and to have witnessed her being in the world. She was one of the very best, in so many ways. I can only thank her, and know that her work will continue to live on, in me and many others.

Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles in Depew, New York, in 1936, and grew up in Buffalo. She graduated from high school at the age of 16 and won a scholarship to Howard University, where, as she noted in interviews and public discussions, she was a contemporary of Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka, and got to know with Sterling Brown. She later attended Fredonia State Teachers College, where she met her husband, Fred Clifton, and began writing poetry, a pursuit that would really flower when the great African-American poet Robert Hayden selected her poems for the YW-YMCA/Discovery Award, which led to her acclaimed first book, Good Times: Poems (1969). She went on to publish a dozen volumes, including Good News About the Earth: New Poems (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), Two-Headed Woman (1980), Next (1993), The Terrible Stories: Poems (1996), and Voices: Poems (2008). She also published two memoirs,  Generations (1976) and Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987), and many books for young and adolescent readers.  Ms. Lucille taught at Coppin State University, University of California-Santa Cruz, St. Mary's College, Maryland, and Duke University, among other institutions, and was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985. As I noted, she also taught at the Cave Canem summer workshops. Over the years, both inside and outside the classroom, she nurtured so many poets of all ages, and encouraged them to read widely and critically, and to write to the limits of their ability. Her many honors have included the 1997 Lannan Literary Award for poetry, the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the 1997 Los Angeles Times Poetry Award, the 1999 Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, the 2000 National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, and three Pulitzer Prize nominations. Lucille Clifton lived and wrote and taught for many years, and we are all the richer for it.

Zinn/Salinger/Auchincloss + Congrats to Lucille Clifton

What a week: first Howard Zinn, then J.D. Salinger, then Louis Auchincloss. Okay, you may say, I get why Jstheater is mentioning the first two, but Auchincloss?

Let me go backwards and begin by noting that there was nearly a personal link there. When I was in grad school, perhaps my second year, I was reviewing the possible courses I could take for the upcoming term, and I saw that Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010), the extremely prolific chronicler, in prose fiction, of America's northeastern bluebloods, was teaching a class. I thought I might have misread this, as I'm known to do--why on earth was he teaching and how did he have the time, and if I was just imagining it, why him? The man was still practicing law part-time and had also managed to write many dozens of books (I think he was up to about 50 at the time)--so I asked around and was told that yes, he really was teaching an evening class. I'd only read his most famous novel, The Rector of Justin (1964), so I went and looked him up, and when I saw how much he'd published and who he was, I seriously considered trying to slot the class into my schedule. As it turned out, I couldn't and had to pass, but I always wondered what that experience might have been like, given the unlikely pedagogue. Auchincloss briefly mentioned his teaching in the larger stream of this 1997 interview with The Atlantic's Ryan Nally, which gives some sense of his literary accomplishments, and his abiding interest in larger moral questions among his class and milieu, which, as the last 8 years suggest, have gone the way of the dodo bird. Adieu.

As for J. D. Salinger, I tweeted almost instantly after I'd learned of his death about how important The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and the stories in Franny and Zooey (1961) were to me as an adolescent; didn't half the people on Twitter do the same thing? It was instantly a cliché. (I did not tweet, however, about my immediate feeling after finishing the book for class--that's where I first read it--that were I to have tried anything along the lines of Holden's behavior, my parents' response, and those of my much wealthier private school classmates' parents, would have been swift and corrective.) But I hadn't touched his work for decades until last academic year, when my literature honors student, Harris S., decided to write his thesis on Salinger and David Eggers. I plunged back into Catcher, and found myself impressed by its narrative tautness and control. Holden's voice no longer beguiled as it once had, but his author's skill in creating it did, as did Salinger's ability to both encapsulate the particular moment when the story took place and simultaneously write through that moment to create a story that still resonates vividly today with young people and adults. The spectacle of Salinger's public withdrawal equaled a novel itself; perhaps he wrote it down and we'll see his take in the future, though perhaps Arts & Letters Daily has published a mammoth list of links of various writers' and critics' encomia to Salinger, and so I'll reproduce that list here: ... Charles McGrath ... AP ... Stephen Miller ... Elaine Woo ... London Times ... Bart Barnes ... FT ... Telegraph ... Mark Krupnick ... Richard Lacayo ... Tom Leonard ... Martin Levin ... Rick Moody ... Richard Lea ... Malcolm Jones ... Morgan Meis ... Chris Wilson ... Robert Fulford ... Ian Shapira ... Michael Ruse ... Christopher Reynolds ... David Usborne ... Joe Gross ... Stephen King ... John Walsh ... Henry Allen ... Mark Feeney ... Ron Rosenbaum (1997) ... John Timpane ... Alex Beam ... Verlyn Klinkenborg ... Tom McGlaughlin ... David Ulin ... his neighbors ... Mark Medley ... Stephen Metcalf and Slate staff ... John Wenke ... Jeff Simon ... Tom Leonard ... Andrea Sachs ... David Lodge ... Christopher Hitchens ... Lionel Shriver ... Barbara Kay ... Nathanial Rich ... Holden’s heirs ... Lillian Ross ... Adam Gopnik ... John Seabrook ... Dave Eggers ... new photos ... Mark Bauerlein et al. in NYT ... Adam Kirsch ... Colby Cosh ... A.M. Homes ... Martin Amis et al. ... Robert McCrum ... Julian Barnes et al. ... Joan Smith ... Adam Golub ... Jonathan Yardley on “Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism” (2004).

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) leaves us as one of the best known and most progressive living American historians. A professor for several decades at Boston University, an outspoken activist, a World War II veteran, and a prolific writer in many genres, Zinn published in 1980 what has become one of the most frequently read books of American history, A People's History of the United States. This thick, polemical volume overturned some longstanding assumptions and approaches in American historical writing, while also aiming directly for an audience outside academe, which it eventually found. It was like and fitting that Zinn produced such a book; before entering academe, he had worked as a pipefitter and ditchdigger, and his first academic job was at historically Black women's college Spelman, in Atlanta, where his students included Marian Wright Edelman and Alice Walker. Zinn was a pillar of courage; for joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNIC) and openly opposed racial desegregation, which led to his firing from Spelman. When he went to Boston University, as this account on the Common Dreams website by his friend and former student William Holtzman, makes clear, nothing dampened his outspokenness and his advocacy of "people power." Here's a video of Zinn on Bill Moyers' Journal that's appeared on a lot of blogs, but I think it gives a great sense of who Zinn was, right up to the end.


Let me also say goodbye to drummer Ed Thigpen (1930-2010), whose syncopation with the Oscar Peterson Trio and many other performers I've often grooved to.

***

On a different tip, congratulations to the one and only Lucille Clifton, who was awarded the Centennial (1910-2010) Frost Medal, one of the American poetry world's most august awards, by the Poetry Society of America on January 25 of this year. Recent recipients of this award, given for distinguished lifetime achievement, have included X. J. Kennedy (2009), Michael S. Harper (2008), Maxine Kumin (2006), Marie Ponsot (2005), Richard Howard (2004), and Sonia Sanchez (2001). In reading through the PSA site, I missed the Poetry Society's concurrent exhibit, "Portraits of Poets, 1910-2010," at the National Arts Club, which ran through January 15. Did any Jstheater readers catch it? How was it?