There has always been, in Lucille Clifton’s work, an abiding elegiac quality; she had many losses after all: her mother at a young age, then her husband, her father, two of her own children. Amid all her poems contending with grief and death, there was a kind of recognition of grace in acceptance of loss. She says in an early poem, “the lesson of the falling leaves,” “The leaves believe such letting go is loss / . . . / I agree with the leaves.” Later, in the poem “the thirty-eighth year,” Clifton bemoans her lack of accomplishment by that age—“i had not expected to be / an ordinary woman.” She’s on a short timeline: her mother died at forty-four. She catalogs the ways she has not met her own expectations: “i had expected to be / smaller than this, / more beautiful, / wiser in afrikan ways”; ultimately “i had expected / more than this.”
Though she begins in a broader address, Clifton shifts in the poem to speaking directly to her mother, Thelma Sayles, invoking her, summoning her into the poem and telling her about the family she has surrounded herself with. Interestingly, Clifton does not refer to her two sons when she tells her mother, “i have taken the bones you hardened / and built daughters.”
The end of the poem is complicated, because Clifton swings between expressing her sorrow and regret and stating something that feels like acceptance, a realization she has become “an ordinary woman.” Though haunted by the early death of her mother, she seems determined here to rise from that tragedy and make her own destiny, saying, “let me come to it whole / and holy / not afraid / not lonely / out of my mother’s life / into my own.”
In earlier books, Clifton strains to find herself in a position of comfort, ultimately, after contending with the shadows of doubt and danger. An early sequence of poems about riots in Buffalo, New York, ends with the resigned summary “nobody dead / everybody dying.” In another poem from this period, the Virgin Mary’s worried mother, knowing that her daughter is destined for greatness as the mother of Jesus because of an astrologer’s prediction, vows that “work is the medicine for dreams.” Throughout her work, Clifton moved deeper into realms of spiritual mysticism and connections between the present material world and what might be considered “otherworldly.”
Clifton was a witness to communal grief around her, including that of her parents. In one of her earliest published poems, “miss rosie,” she gives dignity to the abject Miss Rosie, who huddles “wrapped up like garbage”:
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up
The body of the woman here is tenuous; Rosie is not fully conscious (“sitting, waiting for your mind”) and in poor physical condition (“sitting, surrounded by the smell / of too old potato peels”) and yet still worthy of the younger woman’s respect.
This mythographic treatment of denigration and degradation, the mortification of the body, presents the speaker as heroic for being able to live through these types of traumas. In “poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young,” Clifton describes herself running a race, coming to the forty-fourth lap, the age at which Thelma Sayles died, calling that significant lap “the place where you fell.” She declares, “i might not even watch out for the thin thing / grabbing towards my ankles but / i’m trying for the long one mama, / running like hell and if i fall / i fall.” It is not so much a boast but another kind of resignation.
The full impact of the resignation present in both “the thirty-eighth year” and in “poem on my fortieth birthday” can be seen by comparing them to a later poem called “climbing.” In this poem, Clifton is approaching her sixtieth birthday, having long outlived her mother’s lifespan. She climbs up a rope after another woman with “dangling braids the color of rain.” She wonders about the lost potential of the past—“maybe i should have had braids / maybe i should have kept the body i started / . . . /maybe i should have wanted less,” but ultimately she has come to a different kind of relationship with her own age. As the woman ahead of her passes a notch in the rope marked “Sixty,” Clifton says, “i rise toward it, struggling, / hand over hungry hand.” Here Clifton is neither satisfied to accept her role as “ordinary” nor to not look at the “thin thing” that threatens her. She is immediately present in the struggle to rise, she is defiant and “hungry” to reach that notch in the rope.
But she will not arrive at this point before the significant rupture, both in tone and chronology, which followed the publication of the two-headed woman in 1980, the year Clifton turned forty-four. Clifton, who published regularly, releasing a new book every two or three years (five books in the eleven years between 1969 and 1980) did not release another book for seven more years, the longest gap in publication she would ever have. Much had happened in the interim, including the loss of her family’s Baltimore home to foreclosure and the subsequent death of Fred Clifton in 1984 from cancer, an event that would haunt Clifton the rest of her life. She relocated her family to California, where she had been offered a teaching position in Santa Cruz.
The tragedies she contends with in her 1987 collection Next and in the books which follow are less sociopolitical and communal and more intimate and personal. She becomes less forgiving of the failures of her father. As she herself ages, she contends with illness, loss, and mortality, though always with, as Hilary Holladay, in her book Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton, says, an “imaginative juxtaposition of hope and grief.” While these two qualities always existed in Clifton, perhaps they feel different in Next (and onward) because rather than being ancestral loss (both with the African community at large but also in Clifton’s own family) in the later books, the tragedies and illnesses come directly into Clifton’s immediate present, with the description of the death of a friend’s young daughter in Next, to Clifton’s own contending with cancer and kidney failure in The Terrible Stories (1996).
Clifton deals more directly with mortality and precarity than she ever had before in Next, the first to follow her period of not publishing. The first section of this book is called “we are all next” and the second section “or next.” The term “next” itself is inspired by the Galway Kinnell poem “December Day in Honolulu,” a quote from which serves as epigraph for the collection. The actual phrasing of “we are all next” and “or next” is drawn from a poem in the collection, “the one in the next bed is dying.” From these references, we already know that the collection as a whole will be concerned with mortality, but also with a forward-looking hope and belief in continuity: the Kinnell epigraph reads, “This one or that one dies but never the singer . . . one singer falls but the next steps into the empty place and sings . . .”
Because they are framed by three poems on the death of Thelma Sayles and four poems on the death of Fred Clifton, the series of nine poems regarding the death of “joanne c.,” Lucille’s friend’s daughter, in 1982 are necessarily amplified in position in the canon of Lucille’s grief. They are, as poems about a woman’s battle with cancer, also made even more resonant by present readers’ knowledge that Lucille herself will battle a virulent and recurrent cancer less than ten years later. There is no hope of survival in Joanne’s poems: the very first of the nine poems is called “the death of joanne c.” and includes a date. One particular image haunts from a poem written in Joanne’s own voice: she describes her chemotherapy treatment by saying “i host the furious battling of / a suicidal body and / a murderous cure.” Because of this line, one comes to understand the “death” to be metaphorical—i.e., the death engendered by the extreme duress of chemotherapy—but it nonetheless presages and privileges the actual death soon to follow. In another poem, Joanne’s mother enters, her presence made more poignant by the recent reminder of Thelma’s absence in Lucille’s own life. Joanne’s mother takes on mythic powers as she sweeps in, “the witch of the ward / . . . / incanting Live Live Live!”
In the following poem, “leukemia as white rabbit,” Clifton fuses the playful with the (deadly) serious, also fusing the mother roles: the voice of Joanne’s mother, the witch of the ward of the previous poem, and Clifton’s own lyric voice merge at the close of the poem:
running always running murmuring
she will be furious she will be
furious. following a great
cabbage of a watch that tells only
terminal time, down deep into
rabbit hole of diagnosticians shouting
off with her hair off with her skin and
i am i am i am furious.
Leukemia, the disease itself, is personified as the terrified white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, worrying about the mercurial queen. Followed down the rabbit hole, one only witnesses the diagnosticians pronouncing the dire sentences, while the mother—and Lucille Clifton herself—now share the fury, powerless to act before the onslaught of cure.
Toward the end of the section in which the “joanne c.” poems appear, we find the poem which gives the book its title, a two-line poem demonstrating the absolute power and mastery that Lucille Clifton had in the epigrammatic form:
the one in the next bed is dying.
mother we are all next. or next.
In this short couplet, Clifton continues the conflation of the women: Joanne speaks to her mother, trying to comfort her, but with Thelma’s voice echoing in our ears from other poems, one can also read this poem as Lucille speaking to her own mother. There is a resignation in the continuation of the word “dying” that we saw in the poem “buffalo war,” and will see in a moment in an earlier poem called “richard penniman,” a recognition that “dying” is not a terrifying or unusually dire exceptional condition but merely (merely. as if.) an ever-present component of what it means to be alive.
Each of the three sets of poems in this portion of the book, the poems about Thelma, the poems about Joanne, and the poems about Fred, end with a poem called “The Message of,” and what Joanne says to her mother after this epigrammatic summation is tinged with the kind of regretful acceptance that characterizes Lucille Clifton’s poems about illness and mortality: “death is life.”
Thelma, a poet herself who gave up her own poems, as Lucille describes in a later poem, “fury,” has a very different message for her daughter here. Speaking of her own epileptic fits and the swollen bitten tongue that sometimes followed, Thelma advises her daughter, “when you lie awake in the evenings / counting your birthdays / turn the blood that clots your tongue / into poems. Poems.” Thelma, in Lucille’s lyric voice, is aware of the poems Lucille writes, such as “the thirty-eighth year” and “poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young,” and admonishes her to convert the tragedy—both of Thelma’s death but also of her suppressed ambition as a poet—into her own triumph. It is a powerful affirmation of the creative urge: though Thelma was not able to live fully, governed by the gender politics and material realities of her time, she wants to ensure that her daughter will.
Following Joanne’s poems, there is a brief interlude, called “chorus: lucille,” that functions as a prelude to Fred’s poems, positioning Clifton in the classical role of the observer as in the ancient Greek dramas. But it is a mistake to think of the chorus in the dramas as mere witnesses describing the action; they are also meant to comment and react to the unfolding events, and in doing so they define the events for the audience. It’s the audience in the seats that are passive witnesses; the members of the chorus on stage are far more than that, and in many plays (particularly in the subversive Euripides) their thoughts and words can actually influence the outcome of the play.
chorus: lucille
something is growing in the strong man.
it is blooming, they say, but not a flower.
he has planted so much in me, so much.
i am not willing, gardener, to give you up to this.
The strong man is Fred Clifton himself, and what is growing in him may be the cancer. When Lucille says “not a flower,” she does call the actual flower to mind, and follows it up with “he has planted so much in me,” acknowledging the powerful synergy of the relationship, which resulted in six children after all. “All he had to do was walk by me,” Clifton joked once, “and I got pregnant.” As Mary Jane Lupton has described in her biography of Lucille Clifton, Fred Clifton was not only an academic and an activist but he too was a writer, publishing a young adult novel as well as numerous poems which he would read at various community events when the Cliftons were in Baltimore.
When Lucille Clifton speaks to the “gardener” in the last line, there is a conflation—she is both admonishing the gardener who planted the bloom—God?—that she will not give up Fred Clifton and telling the second gardener, Fred himself, who has planted “so much” in her, that she is not willing to give him up to the cancer. Though moving, it is nonetheless futile, the poem immediately following being called “the death of fred clifton”; in Fred’s case, unlike Joanne’s, the death is actual and the poems that follow are all narrated from beyond the grave, so to speak.
In “the death of fred clifton,” Lucille posits death as an achievement of knowledge—in this way the theological implications of death are less Christian and more in line with the Vedantic philosophy Fred Clifton believed in and studied. In Fred’s voice, Clifton realizes that after death, “i had not eyes but / sight” and that “there was all around not the / shape of things / but oh, at last, the things / themselves.” It’s not only the goal of reincarnation to realize more and more the connectedness of human and divine, but there is an achievement of the Platonic ideal in realizing the true nature of objects and beings rather than the signs and names by which we only partially apprehend them. “There is no deathless name,” Fred says in the subsequent poem, “a body can pronounce.”
As if to accentuate the difference between the person who died (who has now realized the boundlessness of the spirit released from human form) and the person who remains behind, Clifton includes now a poem called “my wife,” which tells of Lucille after Fred’s death, but still in Fred’s voice. The bereft wife wakes up from sleep, “having forgotten” momentarily the death of the husband, as survivors sometimes do, and is shocked into remembering by the closet, previously emptied of the deceased’s clothing, his shirts and his ties. It’s a small moment, an ordinary one, compared to the grand and metaphysical pronouncements of the ghostly Fred.
The concluding poem of the sequence is one of Clifton’s best known and oft-quoted:
the message of fred clifton
i rise up from the dead before you
a nimbus of dark light
to say that the only mercy
is memory
to say that the only hell is regret.
Fred Clifton’s death will continue to haunt Lucille throughout her life, and she will write about this death and its impact on her and her family in each of her following books. If there is a sense of closure here, it is only closure that mercy is a memory: in order to serve that memory, Clifton will continue to engage this grief; she will never let it go.
Later, when Clifton herself is diagnosed with cancer, undergoes a lumpectomy, and then, when the cancer returns, a mastectomy, the engagement with mortality becomes intimate and personal. Unlike in these earlier poems, each starting with the description of a death and concluding with a “message,” the poems on Clifton’s cancer from The Terrible Stories are more desperate, more fearful, and somehow, more tender.
In the opening lines of “amazons,” Clifton seeks to create a sisterhood for herself, linking the mythical warriors of ancient Greek mythology with the Dahomey warrior women from whom she is descended. As the mythic Amazon women have sacrificed one breast—so the legend goes—for greater skill in combat, the poet is asked what she is willing to sacrifice. Audre Lorde appears in the closing motions of the poem, which is a celebration of the early detection of Clifton’s cancer. In the following poem, however, Clifton tells the story of the night before the lumpectomy, a surgery meant to halt the cancer and save her life. The title of the poem, referring to time of day, nonetheless evokes the primordial mother figure as well as her somewhat diminished scriptural counterpart:
lumpectomy eve
all night i dream of lips
that nursed and nursed
and the lonely nipple
lost in loss and the need
to feed that turns at last
on itself that will kill
its body for its hunger’s sake
all night i hear the whispering
the soft
love calls you to this knife
for love for love
all night it is the one breast
comforting the other
The opening of the poem evokes multiple contexts: lips of a lover, lips of a child, and the nipple as something itself with agency, with a “need to feed.” The poem makes of cancer somewhat of a metaphor by implying it may have in its sources some kind of personal loneliness or emotional hunger. It is still love—or at very least, self-preservation—that leads a person to choose the surgery that can save them, and there is something tender in the closing image of the two breasts in their own private communion.
This dialogue continues in the next poem, “consulting the book of changes: radiation.” As we have watched Joanne C. suffer through chemotherapy (“a suicidal body / hosting a murderous cure”) and Lucille undergo surgery, now we will see the poet undergo radiation treatment. The poem is in a call-and-response format with alternating sections.
The main left-justified sections are in second person, an omniscient narrator speaking to the person undergoing radiation, opening: “each morning you will cup / your breast in your hand / then cover it and ride / into the federal city.” These discursive narrative sections are punctuated by indented sections that are always questions, meant to be understood as being asked by Clifton herself. One section reads, “if there are cherry blossoms / can there be a cherry tree?” Near the end of the poem, she dispenses with metaphor, asking, “what is the splendor of one breast / on one woman?”
In describing her life, Clifton highlights the loneliness of the experience: “after,” she says, “you will stop to feed yourself. you have always had to feed yourself.” It’s a poignant moment realizing that she is going through this experience alone, that whatever support system she imagined for herself in the earlier poem “amazons” is not present here, either in flesh or spirit. There is no comfort to be had from the omniscient, god-like voice in the poem either. As this same oracular voice once, in an earlier poem, admonished Clifton when she was looking for answers to questions too big to ask (“why cancer why loneliness?”) by saying “it does not help to know,” here it answers her sad question “will i begin to cry?” by warning, “if you do, you will cry forever.”
There is another turn toward a darker outlook in the next poem, “1994.” While the narrative voice in the other poems has been firm and determined, here she falters a little, saying, “you know that the saddest lies / are the ones we tell ourselves / you know how dangerous it is // to be born with breasts / . . . / to wear dark skin.” This invocation of her race and gender is far less empowering than the similar summoning present in her famous earlier poem “won’t you celebrate with me,” where she declares the strength in being “born in Babylon, both nonwhite and woman.” Published several years after that affirmative poem, in “1994” Clifton despairingly asks, “have we not been good children / did we not inherit the earth,” but before she can allow herself to sink fully into pity, she rouses herself in a moment of empathy with the listener and reader for the commonality of various human tragedies by conceding, “but you must know all about this / from your own shivering life.”
Let us leave these later poems aside for a moment and look at two earlier poems, from long before these shadows began gathering in Lucille’s life. These two earlier poems show how Lucille Clifton mythologizes or gives outsize emphasis to small individual moments. The first poem is “richard penniman.” You may know Penniman by his stage name, Little Richard. A gender-bending performer who was one of the pioneers of rock music, Little Richard was a forerunner to showman-musicians like Prince, Michael Jackson, and James Brown. Richard was more or less open about sexuality decades earlier than it was safe—or even legal—to be so, though he maintained a complicated and changing relationship to gender and sexuality throughout his life, even disavowing homosexuality at certain points. Interestingly, this conflicted swing between hedonism and religiosity was evinced also by Jackson and Prince during their own careers.
Lucille Clifton wrote about Little Richard in her second book, good news about the earth (1972), in the section of the book called “heroes” in which she was writing about other Black figures like Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Bobby Seale. The poem is interesting because it positions Little Richard in a relationship with these other figures, all political, but also because it defends Little Richard’s effeminacy and sexuality in a time and place when it might have been considered rare—even brave—for a Black woman poet, mother of six, publishing with Random House, to do so.
richard penniman
when his mama and daddy died
put on an apron and long pants
and raised up twelve brothers and sisters
when a whitey asked one of his brothers one time
is little richard a man (or what?)
he replied in perfect understanding
you bet your faggot ass
he is
you bet your dying ass
Here, Little Richard’s act of raising his siblings qualifies him as a “man” more than any gender-conforming behavior or sexuality would. The brother has a “perfect understanding” of both what the interviewer is implying and of Little Richard’s nature as a “man.” When he calls the interviewer a “faggot ass,” he turns the interviewer’s assumptions and behavior back around on him, i.e., it is the interviewer who has acted “unmanly” in posing the question at all. The term, which must have been used against Richard at some point, turns into a badge of honor. The use of the adjective “dying” here is reminiscent of other times Clifton has used the term as a condemnation of a life being lived without hope or spiritual connection, as in one of her earlier poems,“buffalo war.”
In this poem, as in “leukemia as white rabbit,” the light-hearted, or even humorous opening belies the seriousness within the poem and the reader is jolted into a different relationship with what one thought might be a witty or funny poem.
This same strategy of a jolt from playful to serious is used to great, even heartbreaking effect in the short poem “photograph” from good news about the earth. “Photograph” begins with a brief descriptive text that sets up the scenario of the poem. It reads “my grandsons / spinning in their joy,” presumably the subject of said photograph. The poem begins:
universe
keep them turning turning
black blurs against the window
of the world
In this entreaty or prayer, we are reminded of the woman in Clifton’s earliest book, Good Times (1969), pressing her breasts against the window. In that case it was the window of a house, but metaphorically functioning as a window of the world, the same window through which the young gleeful boys are seen and in much the same way, “black blurs,” instead of the earlier “black birds” that are pressed against the window in “if i stand in my window.”
But it’s the close of “photograph” that includes the gut-wrenching turn:
for they are beautiful
and there is trouble coming
round and round and round
An innocuous poem about two little Black boys whirling around takes on new awful meaning in our contemporary age of Trayvon, Tamir, Elijah, Sandra, George, Breonna, Eric, Ahmaud, Sonya, and all of the countless Black youth and Black grown folk who have been the victims of violence, structural racism, and policing. The final line turns the childlike play of the movement of the spinning into something ominous and terrifying. Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen includes a page which has constantly added to it in subsequent printings additional names of Black people killed by police; Clifton’s final lines have the same kind of ongoingness, and carry with them the same kind of warning.