Video: Lucille Clifton reads “won’t you celebrate with me”

Lucille Clifton reads her poem “won’t you celebrate with me.” Part of the Poetry Everywhere project airing on public television. Produced by David Grubin Productions and WGBH Boston, in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed at the 2009 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Running time: one minute

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won’t you celebrate with me 

.

won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

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© 1993 by Lucille Clifton.  From Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 1993). Included in Vox Populi for educational purposes only.

Bio:

Born Thelma Lucille Sayles, Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) grew up in Buffalo, New York. She attended Howard University with a scholarship from 1953 to 1955, leaving to study at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

In 1958, Lucille Sayles married Fred James Clifton, a professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, and a sculptor whose carvings depicted African faces. Lucille and her husband had six children together, and she worked as a claims clerk in the New York State Division of Employment, Buffalo (1958–60), and then as literature assistant in the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. (1960–71). Writer Ishmael Reed introduced Lucille to Clifton while he was organizing the Buffalo Community Drama Workshop. In 1966, Reed took some of Clifton’s poems to Langston Hughes, who included them in his anthology The Poetry of the Negro. In 1967, the Cliftons moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Her first poetry collection, Good Times, was published in 1969, and listed by The New York Times as one of the year’s ten best books. From 1979 to 1985, she was Poet Laureate of the state of Maryland. From 1982 to 1983, she was visiting writer at the Columbia University School of the Arts and at George Washington University. In 1984, her husband died of cancer.

From 1985 to 1989, Clifton was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. From 1995 to 1999, she was a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 2006, she was a fellow at Dartmouth College.

Lucille Clifton traced her family’s roots to the West African kingdom of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin. Growing up, she was told by her mother, “Be proud, you’re from Dahomey women!” She cites as one of her ancestors the first black woman to be “legally hanged” for manslaughter in the state of Kentucky during the time of Slavery in the United States. Girls in her family are born with an extra finger on each hand, a genetic trait known as polydactyly. Lucille’s two extra fingers were amputated surgically when she was a small child, a common practice at that time for reasons of superstition and social stigma. Her “two ghost fingers” and their activities became a theme in her poetry and other writings.

Often compared to Emily Dickinson for her short line length and deft rhymes, Clifton wrote poetry that “examine[d] the inner world of her own body”, used the body as a “theatre for her poetry”. After her uterus was removed, for example, she spoke of her body “as a home without a kitchen”. In a Christian Century review of Clifton’s work, Peggy Rosenthal wrote, ‘The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.’

(bio adapted from Wikipedia)