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.

Tata Nano Coming + Boulez Becalmed + CC & Kundiman in Bkyn

A few years back I posted about MDI compressed-air automobile technology, developed by Guy Negre in France, which seemed to me to be an option that US automakers in Detroit or elsewhere might consider investing in. The ongoing problems with US automaking, symbolized at the time by the faltering Chrysler-Daimler Benz deal, were central in my mind. One of the articles I'd linked to said that Indian auto powerhouse, Tata Motors, had leapt on the technology and was going to start producing compressed-air models later that year. Three years later, it doesn't appear as though Tata has gotten that far with the compressed-air technology, but it has produced the least expensive car on earth ($2,500 US), the Nano, which it'll begin selling over here very soon. The Christian Science Monitor writes that Tata is finalizing a European model, which will require changes to the system's engine to meet the EU's much higher auto-emission standards, and is said to be "tinkering" with its US version. The images remind me of some of the tiny cars C and I saw in Sicily and have seen in other parts of Europe. The price, which is expected to come in at about $8,000 US for the EU and US models, would beat the best current offerings on the market, and I'd love to test one out. I also wonder how well they'd sell in the US, where size, safety, and comfort are paramount. Hitting one of the Evanston or Chicago Sheridan Road potholes might twist the tiny car's axles like a pretzel, and the snow and heavy rains in many parts of the country would also pose a challenge. But I'm excited about seeing one of these in the metal, and even taking one for a spin. Just not on Sheridan Road.



***

L'enfant terrible est actuellement un vieillard sage.  Or so you could say about a true bad boy of the 1950s era, Pierre Boulez (at right, Guardian.co.uk), who infamously proclaimed in an obituary he wrote, with both glee and spite, that Arnold Schoenberg was "dead," by which he meant, among other things, that Daddy was in the ground and the kids now had control of the joint.  But Schoenberg's ghost shouldn't have worried, because Boulez shed even fewer tears over the demise of Igor Stravinsky, Leos Janacek, and some of the other major early 20th century avant-garde figures. Boulez, and the great experimenters of his generation, had surpassed them and the music establishment in general. Only a few of these forebears, including Schoenberg's pupil, Anton Webern, and Boulez's former teacher, Olivier Messaien, offered a way forward. Eventually even some of Boulez's peers, like John Cage, had to be cast aside. Or at least that's one reading of the narrative of le jeune polemeciste Boulez, who is now known across the globe for his sensitive conducting of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Janacek, and other modernist composers. Heis also a highly respected composer, essayist and memoirist, and institutional founder. As in establishmentarian.

Michael Kimmelman explores the contemporary Boulez in a recent New York Times piece, "Boulez's Gentler Roar," which discusses the now 84-year-old composer's visit to New York's Carnegie Hall to conduct works by Schoenberg, Mahler, Webern, and himself, with the Vienna Philharmonic.  What Kimmelman gets at, as Andrew Clements and Tom Service did a few years ago in the Guardian Online, is Boulez's somewhat mellower approach to everything, including the music he had imagined himself and his generation superseding. He also touches upon how aspects of Boulez's vision, in such matters as his approach to the New York Philharmonic's programming and self-presentation, was ahead of its time. Instead of a figure to be feared, a "Don Corleone" as one critic put it, these days he's beloved by his students at the Lucerne Festival Academy. Yet he doesn't apologize for his combative approach or his embrace of the new. Quoting Boulez in Kimmelman's piece:

“I like virtuosity, although not for the sake of virtuosity but because it’s dangerous,” was Mr. Boulez’s description of “Répons” when we sat down to talk for a few hours after the rehearsal. By danger he meant that music, to be worth anything — which is to say to be new — can’t stick to safe ground but must entail some risk and effort.

“If you want to have a more interesting life, you will make some effort,” is how he put it. “It’s about the organization of one’s life. I am still shocked that so many people are not more creative, by which I mean more demanding of themselves.

“The main question we need to ask ourselves is: Do I try to be necessary to the evolution of language? Do I try to be original? And being original means using the tools necessary to be original, not just having the desire to be original.”

That was part of his criticism of Cage, who was, admitted, creating or finding the tools, which many others then adopted and ran with. In fact it might be apt to say that in many cases, in many works, the process was as important for Cage as the outcome. (Think, for example, of 4'33".) This wasn't enough for the mathematically trained, severely doctrinaire Boulez, but from Kimmelman's article, it appears that perhaps he might not be so rigid about such things these days. I wonder if that will include finally coming out too?

If you haven't checked out iLike, which features musical artists of every type, including Pierre Boulez, in a simple to view and understand audio snippet-and-purchase format, I recommend it. iTunes, watch out!

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Coming up very soon, a real treat for New Yorkers: Cave Canem and Kundiman-affiliated poets will be reading together, at Cave Canem's new home in Brooklyn. From CC:

Cave Canem and Kundiman invite you to an evening of outstanding poetry in Cave Canem's new loft, featuring Regie Cabico, Jacqueline Jones LaMon, Tan Lin and Mendi Obadike.

www.cavecanempoets.org
Cave Canem & Kundiman Poets Read
January 20, 7 pm
20 Jay Street, Suite 310-A
Brooklyn, NY

Recommended admission $5 - $10

The Wire: Finis + Travels & Brain Camp

The Wire: is it really over? What a finale! I know folks who haven't yet seen all the prior four seasons, so I'll keep my thoughts to a minimum, but what a series of climaxes and denouements, with narrative braiding and unexpected twists superior to many a novel out there. Another of the strongest and most appealing aspects of the show for me was the way that David Simon, his writers and producers, and his cast, maintained a consistency and depth of characterization over multiple seasons; the only character whose motivation was least clear to me this season was Kima, which I attribute to the writers' inability to find the right character to take the potentially devastating steps she did. Who else could have done it? The characterizations of the newsroom people, save Gus Johnson, were also shallower than what Simon and company served up in previous seasons, and I attributed this to the lack of narrative space and time to fill them out. 10 shows simply were not enough. I cannot figure out what drove the yuppy reporter to his unethical actions, because even his early statement and demonstration of his ambition rang more than a little hollow--and I can't attribute it solely to bad acting--and yet his behavior, reflecting the many journalistic scandals over the last ten years, was all too plausible.

My favorite final notes tonight included the utterly cynical and predictable take on the newspaper industry, with the racial and gender critiques woven in without being uttered; the ridiculously random yet perfect resolution to the "homeless killer" plotline, with its manifold ramifications for all involved; Marlo Stanfield's return, replete with a bit of streetfighting, to the only thing he truly knows; Daniels' final demonstration of an inner ethical compass, despite the consequences, as a counterstatement to the cynicism filling the air of nearly every other space in the show; and little Michael's figurative and literal reprise of the series' anti-hero, Omar, with a hooded accomplice in tow. (Bernie, Reggie and I had broached a possible reading of this after a domestic scene early this scene.) The show's culmination also represented one of the best multi-season explorations of local and state politics that I can recall. I told C that given how close the show sometimes hewed to reality down there I imagine Maryland's governor, the former Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley, is probably more relieved than almost anyone else that it's finally ended. Then again, I think the most relieved party may be the Baltimore Sun.

◊◊◊

This past week was like brain camp! I want to go back! (Photos coming soon....)

After getting an opportunity to spend some time at home, on Tuesday evening I participated in a Poets House-sponsored panel, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited, which included the marvelous scholar-poet Evie Shockley, who inimitably brought to light the work of poet Anne Spencer, and the amazing multitalented duo Mendi + Keith Obadike, who spoke about the influence of several Harlem Renaissance-era musicians and poets on their own work. I offered some remarks on a longtime hero, Richard Bruce Nugent, whose life and works, such as "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," like other pathbreaking texts from this period and group I see as being integral, in key ways not only to the subsequent development of Black queer literary and cultural production, but also to Black avant-garde and American avant-garde traditions. Amiri Baraka drawing from the notebooks of Nugent and Hughes, Hurston and Spencer: can you picture it? Before the panel, I met with several Borough of Manhattan Community College classes, and answered their questions on the Harlem Renaissance, which ranged from the paucity of high profile female poets, to why Langston Hughes got so many props, to when exactly the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance ended and why. Great questions, and many thanks to the professors and students, one of whom was analyzing a Langston Hughes poem as we walked to the auditorium--you gotta love it!

I was so glad that friends like Tisa, Patricia Spears Jones, and Kaemanje were present, and it was also a pleasure to see Tom Wirth, who edited the Nugent omnibus volume, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance (Duke) several years ago, and passed on a copy of Nugent's posthumous roman à clef, Gentleman Jigger, which he edited and I am reading now and cannot put down! Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Carl Van Vechten, Aaron Douglas, Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, A'Lelia Bundles, and many other high-profile Harlem Renaissancers make their appearances herein, sometimes to shocking effect. Had he published this back when he wrote it, he not only might have provoked Wallace Thurman--a central figure ("Rusty") in the text and the foil of Nugent's alter ego, "James 'Stuartt' Brennan"--whose Infants of the Spring is like a mirror of this text (Nugent calls the Thurman character a "plagiarist" in the book, though Wirth's introduction argues that the matter remains unresolved), to an even earlier death, but he might have found himself exiled from New York permanently. I recommend it, and if I hadn't already crammed my spring course with reading material (how on earth is that going to work?), I'd be adding it to the list. Thanks to Stephen Motika of Poets House, and Alison Meyers of Cave Canem, among many others, for making this event possible.

On Wednesday I flew out to Indiana University to participate in a reading with Evie Shockley; our host was the gentle, brilliant, beautiful poet-scholar Ross Gay, along with poet Cathy Bowman, who heads the Creative Writing Program, and Margo Crawford, one of the smartest people I have met. (Margo's mind moves like subatomic particles, and I'm not kidding.) The reading was lots of fun: I read a new story, and Evie TORE IT UP with her poems! I had never heard her read more than a poet or two from her collection, A Half Red Sea--in fact, I don't think I'd ever heard Evie read outside of a CC reading, incredibly enough--so this opportunity was platinum. She also read newer poems whose concision, subtlety and punch could serve as models for any poet, and three final pieces which closed out the evening perfectly. Along the way she invoked Ella Fitzgerald, Henry Bibb, Gwendolyn Brooks, mathematics, Nappyphilia, and countless other things in utter congruence in that way that only Evie can. If only I could figure out a way to bring her and Ross to the university, at least for a day! I will only add that Ross's introductions set the bar high, and you know you gotta bring it when he sets the standard. Later we all hung out, and I got to chat with Cathy and Margo, and Ross and Evie, and another colleague of theirs, who wrote an award-winning bio of Nella Larsen, and had the sort of conversation I often dream would or could occur regularly in these parts. The next day we met with some of the graduate writing students, and Ross, Margo and they all posed excellent questions, with Evie supplying her customary super brain power, and some of which I didn't think of the answers to until I was on the plane back to O'Hare, but what can you do? I still ran my mouth. Oh--and the "non-objective" was part of the philosophical underpinnings of the Black Arts Movement, referring back to the central African principle of muntu. If only I'd have thought of that definition a few days ago. As I said, what can I do? Nevertheless, I felt like my head had expanded from all I learned and I was in one of the best moods I could imagine in Chicago in a long time, even after I got on the road and nearly destroyed my axle on a pothole the size of Lake Michigan.

Then it was back to grind, but Friday provided a LOT more brain-nourishment when, after meeting with highly accomplished prospective graduate students to the English department, and a very talented young person who's been admitted to the African American Studies program, I went to hear Gayatri Spivak give a talk on "Rethinking Comparativisms." One of the most eminent of my colleagues and her former graduate school classmate at Cornell, Samuel Weber, introduced her, and then he let her do her thing. I have seen Spivak talk before, and I place her in the avatar category, so it was a thrilling ride she took me and everyone else on, not only in the lecture, which was supposed to include clips from Sissoko's film Bamako (Keguro, I thought of you!)--only no one could figure out how to work them in that "smart" lecture hall, which meant that Spivak had to act them out! Just imagine that!--but also in the question and answer period. Afterwards, I was able to attend a dinner with Spivak, whom I didn't get to speak to until the very end, as she was departing, but I did meet some new colleagues in the German and Comparative Literature departments, with whom I gabbed about several figures we were mutually interested in (Yannis Ritsos, Alexander Kluge, Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, etc.), I learned a strange new fact about how many Enlightenment philosophers and mathematicians made their keep, and I got to chat at length with a colleague I rarely see on campus, Jillana Enteen, who had some perceptive and enlightening takes on the talk.

One aspect of the talk that most interested me was Spivak's reading of Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, a book of the month pic on here years ago and also the subject of a short post; I even taught a little of the book a few years ago, to the bafflement of my students, in part because Casanova's theorization was only tangentially germane, though useful I thought, to the subject matter at hand. But Spivak's breakdown of the terms of Casanova's premise, concerning minor literatures' relations to the hegemonic languages and their literatures, as well as the larger global field of literary production and publishing, caught my attention, I only wished she'd have said more about this, though it was clear that her argument's aims were different: "policy," as she put it. And not policy regarding the question of global literary production, reputation-making and historicization, which are Casanova's, as I read them. For that's for another day, of course; perhaps when Casanova returns to the university to speak, since I unaccountably missed her talk here a month ago.

Then on Saturday evening, I went to see Toni Asante Lightfoot participate in a dance performance at Link's Hall in Boystown: Choreographing Coalitions: Dancing the Other in the Self's first show, which included dances by Darrell Jones, Gesel Mason and David Roussève. I'm nobody's dance critic, so I'll keep it brief: Gesel performed two works, the first a brief, smooth piece "No Less Black" (2000), with a text she'd originally written in 1998 or so, which Toni read in accompaniment. After a video interlude, the second startled me beyond speech: called "Jumping the Broom" (2005), it was one of David Roussève's pieces, and linked the horrors encountered by two enslaved people who dared marry to the battles facing many LGBTQ people who want to marry nowadays. As it was a Roussève piece and given Gesel's performance, which was visceral in the pain and struggles it portrayed (she was bound wrist and ankle, crawled and dragged herself across the floor, and wrenched the text out of her core), the equivalence (the subject of Spivak's critique) came off as fitting. After a short break, during which I wasn't sure where my emotions were, a group of five very fabulous young people, four gorgeous young people (Darrell Jones, Damon Demarcus Greene, JSun Howard, and Awilda Rodriguez Lora, accompanied I'm told by a member of the House of Avant-Garde who was wearing a gas mask and white jumpsuit!) began practicing for their piece, excerpts from third Swan from the end (2007), which was perhaps the blackest, gayest dance performance I've seen that wasn't in a club or at a spot like the old, pre-Giuliani West Side Piers. Evoking all manner of black gay public and private (dance) performance and gesture, from keekeeing to vogueing to strutting to runway walking to bodily reads, all to a House soundtrack, these four dancers turned it out (serve!), and even managed to include a hilarious bit that C and I had witnessed live years ago at the Octagon, a performance of one of Oprah's bits from The Color Purple! (Darrell Jones told me afterwards that he indeed gotten it from there!) Had they included Harmonica Sunbeam/Sheila Noxzema's Spiderman hustle, which C and I also saw live years ago (and which I hope appears in a film somewhere someday), I swear I would have jumped through the roof in astonishment or joined them myself. As it was, it was hard not to stay in my seat. Part of what made it all so much fun was that Krista, Abegunde, Toni (after her performance), and Toni's husband Setondji were there, and did our own keekeeing. Thank you Gesel, thank you Darrell and your crew, and thank you Toni, for always coming up with ways to make Chicago feel like one of the most exciting cities in the world!

Tonight I finished an introduction that has been needling me for weeks, to another author's book, and my brain is tired, which means back to the grindstone!