"Good Woman: Lucille Clifton"

“Where you sing | i poet.” Lucille Clifton’s volume of collected work “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980” is as much a selection of song and short story as it is poetry. Her voice booms and whispers, pauses and carries. And her narrative is of the revisionist kind.

I couldn’t imagine being a poet in the sixties and seventies (let alone an African American poet) and not writing about the civil rights issues that so heavily permeated that period. Many of the poems found in “Good Woman” were written during these two decades, still a tumultuous time for the nation regarding racial equality. Lucille Clifton is a voice of this generation and of her race. The “tyrone” and “willie b” poems examine the attitudes of marchers and demonstrators during the civil rights movement, with race and segregation as the core. “willie b (1)” reads “mama say…my daddy was a white man | the mother fucker”. She is obviously not afraid to use language as a tool. She’s also not afraid to introduce popular culture into her work, as she does in “tyrone (3)” when the narrator speaks of Jackie Robinson – “and if we buffalo soldiers was sports fans we sure would cheer”. More than just injecting pop culture into a poem, Clifton is questioning the accepted view of Robinson’s “breaking the baseball color line.” What did it really mean at the time? What did it mean to those who were fighting for it?

From a craft (reader’s) perspective, the lack of punctuation and capitalization and oddly broken lines sometimes make her poems difficult to get a good read on. The sentence is compromised, often resulting in run-ons and fragments. This is the voice Clifton has chosen to emulate a dialect, a southern black language. There is a music to it, a simplicity that is representative of her culture and background.

She weaves themes like sexuality and labor with old stories of spirituality into revisionist renditions. Poems such as “anna speaks of the childhood of mary her daughter” paint the picture of a working class family – “we rise up early and | we work. work is the medicine | for dreams.” – and their struggle with circumstance and spirituality – “that dream | i am having again; | she washed in light, | whole world bowed to its knees, | she on a hill looking up, | face all long tears”.

The African-American culture is one that has endured and endures. Lucille Clifton’s poetry is representative of this. Every culture creates a mythology throughout their history, composed of music, literature, stories, art (among other things). I would dare say that Lucille Clifton has contributed significantly to the African-American, and indeed American, mythology.