1960s—‘‘are so mad. I’m the one what took the
stuff.’’ And I thought, ‘‘Now that’s really inter-
esting, isn’t it?’’ That he was mad but he didn’t
feel himself enraged in the same way. What he
also felt was that they [‘‘these young kids’’]
weren’t mad about him. They were mad about
themselves. And he saw them as having it better
than he did.
ROWELL: Will you talk about the 1960s?
You also wrote during that period.
CLIFTON:Yes, I did.
ROWELL: And yet you, as far as I can tell,
did not subscribe to what, at that time, was
referred to as the Black Aesthetic. Neither did
you subscribe to the politics of the Black Power
Movement. I was never convinced that your poetry
was part of the Black Arts Movement.
CLIFTON:It did not reflect it. At the time I
didn’t even know what that was.
ROWELL: You are right. Your poetry does
not reflect the mainstream of that movement. But
we were all influenced by the new concept that
‘‘Black is beautiful,’’ which suggested possibilities
and self-affirmation.
CLIFTON:Let me tell you what I think.
Well, during the 1960s, I was pretty much preg-
nant. I have six kids, and they’re six and a half
years apart in age, from the oldest to the young-
est. The Black Aesthetic. I am a black person;
everything I write is a black thing. How could I
not? But, on the other hand, it’s always struck
me as strange that all of a sudden people discov-
ered that when somebody said ‘‘nigger’’ they
were talking about them. Charles, I’ve been
knowing that. Do you know what I mean?
I had known that a long time. The inequities
and all of that! I knew that. So what was new?
At that time, I thought, well this must have to do
with going to college. [Laughter] That’s terrible.
But I’m talking about my young self. I had not
done that. I had come from poor folks in Buf-
falo, New York, which was not an interesting
city at the time, and had seen that my parents
were not even elementary school graduates. My
grandparents—I don’t know if they’d seen a
school. So the kind of struggles and things that
were happening were not things that I had sud-
denly discovered involved me too; I hadbeen
knowing that. I also think that in trying to see
things wholly—which I’ve done all my life, tried
to see what is whole—I could see some possible
repercusions of some of the things that were said
and that happened that were not positive for our
race. That was for me something I had to think
about. In those days, I lived a very regular life,
the life of a poor black person. I’m the only poet
I know who’s been evicted twice in her life. In my
family we have some of everything, even a lot of
relatives in jail. So these things people were talk-
ing about were not new to me. But I was trying, I
think, to see if I could live a life of courage—
which I admire greatly—and a life that did not
fill my head with white people, positively or
negatively, so I could go on, because my family’s
quite short-lived. My mother died at 44. My
father was a youngish man; he was in his early
60s. My husband died at 49. Somebody had to
remember. I also thought that there had been in
history some people who were positive people. I
thought that there had been some black people
that I knew were negative. And I didn’t see why I
should pretend that was not so. But that doesn’t
mean I did not notice and that I do not notice
what goes on in the world, because I do. I know
what the person looks like who hasgenerally
offended people who look like me; I know what
that person looks like. I am not crazy. I don’t
know if that explains it or not. I also am not a
person to pretend. Well, I talk about being
human all the time. But I’m not a person who
does not notice that I’m a black person; that
would be ridiculous. My children, for instance,
because they’ve never got anything about black
history in school, got it at home. I know that
black is beautiful; they know it too. I knew I was
cool. [Laughter] My mother was beautiful. Even
though I know he was a challenging and difficult
man, I saw my father’s strengths, many of which
I inherited.
ROWELL: Will you look back for a moment
and think about the Black Arts Movement, which
was a part of the Black Power Movement? What
did the Black Arts Movement do for our
literature?
CLIFTON: Well, I think it brought to
American literature a long missing part of itself.
I think it made a gateway for younger non-white
people to come into American poetry, into
American literature. And I think that’s impor-
tant. When I was young, I didn’t see a gate
through which I could come, so it didn’t occur
to me that I could be a part of American liter-
ature, or part of what is read, etc. But I think the
Black Arts Movement...to tell the truth, when
I was a young woman I didn’t even know whathomage to my hips