You may recognize the name Lucille Clifton as one of the major American poets of the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries, in the genealogy of Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni. Perhaps you may recognize her poetic personality in the mainstream inspiration of Ms. Clifton, the high school English teacher of the animated tv show Family Guy.
Readers flock to the poetry of Clifton for spiritual relief, for sharp social and political critique, for reverberating musicality, for wit and humor, and certainly for a mastery of the economy of language. She condensed powerful emotional impact into often brief, nevertheless dramatic forms. Clifton’s poems explore the intimacy of personal trauma and the urgency of global tragedy.
My first encounter with Lucille Clifton was through her poignant “The Book of Light,” a collection of poems in three parts: “reflection,” “lightning bolt,” and “splendor.” To me, reading “The Book of Light” was a form of truth-telling and truth-witnessing.
Clifton sometimes uses the rhetoric of prayer itself; she often wrestled with the big questions about the nature of God and the afterlife by making ordinary the scriptural figures that populate her writing. I returned to Clifton last year in preparation for my work with Transformation Waco’s After School Academies. Clifton uses a powerful metaphor about children and literature, which she borrowed from Rudine Sims: All children need mirrors and windows. Mirrors in which they can see themselves, windows through which they can see the world. I think that all adults, as well, need mirrors and windows. Now that seems to me obvious - American children's literature ought to mirror American children. However, there are some children in our culture who have only seen mirrors. There are some children in our culture who have only seen windows. For Lucille Clifton, whether window-privileged or mirror-privileged, that exclusivity is a disadvantage.
For the early weeks of the Spring semester, our Transformation Waco students engaged with Clifton’s short stories, illustrating the journey of Everett Anderson. During the first five years of the series, the idea was to represent Everett Anderson's world as one wherein the threat of unhappiness is kept at bay, completely, by the mother's love.
Her first book in the series, Some of the Days of Everett Anderson introduces the character who is six and who lives with his mother. The father is mentioned as being absent, missed, but the reason for the absence is perfectly ambiguous. Her last book is Everett Anderson's Goodbye. We learn in this book that the absent father is dead but the book does not say where or how. Everett goes through the classic five stages of grieving, which frame the storytelling.
In the end, life goes on.
"Love doesn't stop, and neither will I," says Everett Anderson.