Poetry Friday: Lucille Clifton (born on this date)
- NYS Writers Institute
- Jun 27
- 2 min read
Today we celebrate the late poet Lucille Clifton, born on this date in 1936.
Thelma Lucille Sayles was born June 27, 1936, in Depew, Erie County, raised in Buffalo, and graduated from SUNY Fredonia.
In 1958, she married Fred Clifton, a professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo. The Cliftons raised six children together and she worked as a claims clerk in what was then called the NYS Division of Employment in Buffalo before the family moved to Baltimore in 1967.
In his 2024 book, Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton, poet and UAlbany alumnus Kazim Ali writes:
"Championed by such giants as Robert Hayden, Toni Morrison, Carolyn Kizer, and Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton was one of the major American poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Readers flock to the poetry of Clifton for spiritual relief, for sharp social and political critique, for plangent music, for wit and humor, and certainly for a mastery of the economy of language and prosody. She condensed powerful emotional impact into often brief, even epigrammatic forms.
She has become somewhat of a legend for a whole generation of poets, and even inspired a character on the animated program "Family Guy" (on the writing staff of which her son-in-law served), the high school English teacher Ms. Clifton."
Clifton was a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, and was a featured guest at an event at Page Hall in Albany in 1995.
Toni Morrison, who edited Clifton’s memoir Generations, once described her verse as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom” and “highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.”
She is perhaps best known for poems of triumph and self-definition, like “won’t you celebrate with me.” But today, we share a lesser-known poem that speaks to the quiet reckoning of the soul:
it was a dream
in which my greater self
rose up before me
accusing me of my life
with her extra finger
whirling in a gyre of rage
at what my days had come to.
what,
i pleaded with her, could i do,
oh what could i have done?
and she twisted her wild hair
and sparked her wild eyes
and screamed as long as
i could hear her
This. This. This.
Originally published in The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton, Copper Canyon Press, 1993