Poetry of Lucille Clifton, Holladay argues that
Clifton’s focus on female uniqueness places her
‘‘in the long tradition of poets mythologizing
womanhood.’’
Clifton’s reputation seems likely to increase
in the coming years. Mark Bernard White asserts
in theCLA Journal, ‘‘That Lucille Clifton is one
of the most engaging, gifted, and significant of
contemporary poets is a critical evaluation more
and more commonly held.’’ Equally complimen-
tary about Clifton’s work is her biographer Lup-
ton, who writes that ‘‘Lucille Clifton is a major
figure in contemporary American poetry, a
woman whose intense exploration of her body
and psyche has helped make possible a new hon-
esty, a new perspective.’’ The first full-length
critical studies of Clifton’s work appeared in
the early years of the twenty-first century, some
twenty years after the publication of ‘‘homage to
my hips.’’ It is likely that more will follow.
CRITICISMDiane Andrews Henningfeld
Henningfeld is a professor of literature who writes
widely for educational publishers. In the following
essay on ‘‘homage to my hips,’’ she analyzes Clif-
ton’s undermining of traditionally held assump-
tions about racial and patriarchal power.
The poem ‘‘homage to my hips’’ appears in
Lucille Clifton’s 1980 collectionTwo-Headed
Woman, in a segment titled ‘‘Homage to Mine.’’
This collection is an important one for Clifton; it
garnered her first Pulitzer Prize nomination, and
she chose to include the entire collection of
poems in the 1987 volume Good Woman:
Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980. Many readers
will recognize ‘‘homage to my hips’’ as well as its
sister poem, ‘‘homage to my hair,’’ as two of
Clifton’s most frequently anthologized works.
In her biographical workLucille Clifton: Her
Life and Letters, Mary Jane Lupton asserts that
it is Clifton’s ‘‘intense exploration of her body’’
in poems such as these that has led to ‘‘a new
honesty, a new perspective’’ in poetry. Certainly,
‘‘homage to my hips’’ offers a new and honest
perspective on the sources of feminine power.
In this poem (as well as in the other poems
fromTwo-Headed Woman), Clifton asserts her
right to speak of her own body and to claim her
own physical nature. Such a claim might seem
unnecessary; everyone is, after all embodied. No
mind can live independently from the physical
body. Moreover, few contemporary readers
would doubt that each person owns his or her
own body.
However, for Clifton, the great-great-grand-
daughter of a woman taken from Africa and
brought to North America as a slave, such an
assertion cannot be taken lightly. Her own
genetic and ancestral histories demonstrate that
the ownership of one’s body is something that
must be guarded and proclaimed. Further, as a
woman, she has inherited long histories ofWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? Gwendolyn Brooks’sBlacks(1987) is a com-
prehensive collection of the Pulitzer Prize–
winning writer’s best work. Brooks was a
close personal friend and role model to
Clifton.
Maya Angelou’sI Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings(1970) is a memoir of a young African-
American woman who was sexually abused
as a child. Her memoir complements the
autobiographical detail of Clifton’s poetry.
Clifton’sGood Woman: Poems and a Mem-
oir, 1969–1980(1987) remains the essential
text for any student wishing to become bet-
ter acquainted with Clifton’s work. The vol-
ume includes all of the poems ofTwo-
Headed Womanas well as Clifton’s memoir
Generations.
The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nation-
alism in the 1960s and 1970s(2005), by James
Edward Smethurst, offers a historical
assessment of the movement that nurtured
writers like Clifton. Smethurst traces the
connections between the black arts move-
ment and the black power movement and
argues that the black arts movement
changed the way that Americans viewed
the connection between art and popular
culture.homage to my hips