A few month's ago the beloved poet Lucille Clifton passed. it's not my purpose or place to sum up her career and life. Yet I can add my own thoughts.
See, I had it out with Lucille a couple of years back at the Squaw Valley Writer's conference and it was over that word you just read, Squaw. I was in one of her workshops and she laid into one of my poems, which has since been published and read on NPR, Winter Olympics. You can listen to it here. It was about the line: fierce California sun split the clouds. Since the poem was about the Winter Olympics and had the word California in it, the reader would be able to infer that I meant the 1960 games at Squaw. And that, Squaw, said Lucille, is a derogatory racial slur. The other conference goers, eager to please Lucille and jump aboard, all began making well-meaning suggestions how to change that line. This was right before they went off and got in the vegetarian lunch line. Sigh. Never one to back down, I told Lucille that I didn't think that was a valid reading. I didn't use the word Squaw. Lucille made the point that this is what she did nowadays, stand up for those who don't have a voice, the ghosts of the Native American dead at squaw.
I thought then and still do that the whole thing was silly. When the conference was over, she gave me a big hug, the matter forgotten. There were far more interesting things that happened that week, sharp in my memory was reading one of Lucille's poems, at Squaw even the workshop leaders have to submit material. It was about one of her sons that died too early. In talking about the poem, she shared part of her remarkable life. This was an African American woman who had known pain, she had buried parents and husbands and children far too early and she had survived, persevered and thrived through it all.
Lucille Clifton was in my book, the best African American woman writer of her generation. Miles better than massively overrated Oprahite Toni Morrison. I wonder what Lucille thougth of Ms. Morrisons grand entrances, as if she was some kind of divine royalty on a visit- on Oprah. I think she would have graciously shrugged it off. But make no mistake, it was Lucille who should have been getting those Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. Toni Morrison is at times a good writer, but she's not in Lucille's league. And the world at large is poorer because it wasn't Lucille who got all the attention. High school classes read Toni Morrison like it's gospel, Lucille won't be read at all by the general public.
That, I can say with certainty, is more of the damage Oprah has caused.
Squaw valley writers has a fine summary of Lucille's accomplishments here.
Particularly moving, I think, is the poem she wrote in the 2008 workshop, her final poem. It is as close to perfection as a poem of such brevity can come. It is readily accesible by anyone who cares to read it, as all of Lucille's work is, unlike the poetry for poets only that is so widely published these days. As to our disagreement those few years ago, it was well-intentioned, but a little off. Her poetry is what remains:
over the mountains
and under the stars it is
one hell of a ride
