somebody needs to write about that. And I may
as well since I’m one of the ones, I’m sure, who
can feel that.
I don’t think that critics, and perhaps read-
ers as well, have ever quite known where to put
me. [Laughter] I suppose I’m not sure where to
put myself. [Laughter] But I know that I write
poems, and I also know, Charles—this is true,
I know—that what I’m doing is what I’m sup-
posed to be doing. Whatever it is, whatever is
next. I have a poem that says ‘‘What is coming
next? I don’t know.’’ But I know that I accept
what is coming next, and I will try to do it.
ROWELL: It’s interesting that people say
they don’t know where to put you. That is prob-
ably a good thing. You don’t sound like any of
your contemporaries that I have read. But some of
your poems remind me of Langston Hughes.
CLIFTON: Now, people have said that.
I don’t think I sound like Langston Hughes. I
read him more after I started writing than before.
But I did at one point know him, and in fact
I received a letter from him about a week before
he died, because he had gone to Paris—they were
doing a thing from Hughes’ Semple stories, and
he was going to come to the house when he came
back. But he had died. I think maybe the idea of
language in that I always wanted to use language
to its fullest possibility. And so I think of my
poetry as many-layered. You know, that you can
understand it on a lot of layers; and I certainly,
purposefully, wish to be read and understood in
some way by literary critics and theoreticians,
and also by my Aunt Timmy and my Uncle
Buddy. [Laughter] I always wanted to be under-
stood and to speak to and for, if possible, people
in a whole lot of levels—I guess you’d say, of
whom we all are. I have been told that I have
been compared to so many people: Langston
[Hughes], quite a lot, but often to Langston
because of our color; Emily Dickinson, and
that’s often because we write short poems. Who
else? H.D., somebody said, which I didn’t see at
all, but somebody said that I wrote like the
French something and the African griots. I’ve
been compared to a lot of people. But I think I
sound pretty much like myself. And somebody
said they could always tell a poem of mine; they
said because it’s musical. Some people are trig-
gered by the eye. I am triggered by the ear. I need
to hear a poem, and I do read them aloud and
hear them in my head. But maybe it’s because I
had to learn and to learn my own voice. This is
what I sound like. Now who else sounds like
that, I don’t really know. I give honor to Gwen-
dolyn Brooks for many things, and one of them
is her poem ‘‘the mother’’ because it is after read-
ing that poem that I could write the poem called.
‘‘The Lost Baby Poem.’’ I give honor to Gwen-
dolyn Brooks not only for her wonderfulness but
for that poem, which allowed me to write a
poem.
ROWELL: What do you mean when you say
‘‘I had to learn my own voice’’?
CLIFTON:Well, I had to learn that poetry
could sound like me. When I was a girl writing,
I wrote sonnets. [Laughter] Isn’t that great?
That’s sort of the kind of poems I read in
books. And that was form, that sort of thing.
But the first poem I ever wrote that I remem-
ber—I thought ‘‘Now, I don’t know if this is a
poem or not but this is what I sound like’’—was a
poem that—I don’t think it has a title—the poem
that opens my first book, the first poem inGood
Times.
...And I thought ‘‘Now that’s what I want
to say in the way I would say it. That’s what I’m
going to do. I don’t know if it’s going to be a
poem or not. I don’t know if others will call it
that. But I know that’s what I’m supposed to
do.’’
ROWELL: People have commented also on
the deceptive simplicity of your lines. Take that
very ending, for example, of the poem you just
read: ‘‘like we call it / home.’’ Simplicity, yes, but
so much history, so much meaning. One reality
implied against another...
Source:Charles H. Rowell, ‘‘An Interview with Lucille
Clifton,’’ inCallaloo, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 1999,
pp. 56–72.Sources
Anaporte-Easton, Jean, ‘‘Healing Our Wounds: The
Direction of Difference in the Poetry of Lucille Clifton
and Judith Johnson,’’ inMid-American Review, Vol. 14,
No. 2, 1994, pp. 78–82.
Clifton, Lucille, ‘‘homage to my hips,’’ inTwentieth-Cen-
tury American Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, David
Mason, and Meg Schoerke, McGraw-Hill, 1994, p. 874.
Holladay, Hilary, ‘‘Song of Herself: Lucille Clifton’s
Poems about Womanhood,’’ inThe Furious Flowering
of African American Poetry, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin,
University Press of Virginia, 1999, p. 281.homage to my hips