Monday, 5 March: Lucille Clifton, “Song at Midnight” UA 111-12

Reader: Lauralie Pope

On Strength Gotten from Others

When I was 5 years old I forgot my piece. It was the annual Christmas program of Macedonia Baptist Church-a splendid affair-and all of the young Sunday school members had been given poems and recitations to memorize. I forgot mine. I remember standing there on stage in my new Christmas dress, trying not to cry as the church members smiled, nodded and murmured encouragement from the front row.

"Go 'head, baby."
"Say it now, Luc."
"Come on now, baby"
But I couldn't remember, and to hide my deep humiliation, my embarassment, I became sullen, angry.
"I don' wanna."
And I stood there with my mouth poked out.

It was a scandal! This fresh young nobody baby standing in front of the Lord in His own house talking about what she don't want! I could feel the disapproval pouring over my new dress. Then, like a great tidal wave from the ocean of God, my sanctified mother poured down the Baptist aisle, huge as love, her hand outstretched toward mine.

"Come on, baby," she smiled, then turned to address the church: "She don't have to do nothing she don't want to do."

And I was at the same time empowered and made free...

References

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/clifton/clifton.htm

Beckles, Frances N. 20 Black Women. Gateway Press. Baltimore 1978.

Lucille (Sayles) Clifton , the mother of six children, was born in Depew, New York on June 27, 1936.  Even though her parents were not formally educated, they cultivated a love for books in their children.  She attended Howard University in Washington, and State University of New York College at Fredonia.  She worked for the Office of Education in Washington as a literature assistant, and was poet in residence at Coppin State College in Baltimore.  Maryland named her Poet Laureate of the state in 1979.  From 1982-1983 she was a visiting writer at Columbia University School of the Arts, and George Washington University.  She taught literature and creative writing at the University of California and was a professor of humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. 

She wrote over twenty children’s books, and won numerous awards.

Her poetry took on minimalist characteristics as she, “Developed such stylistic features as concise, untitled free verse lyrics of mostly iambic trimester lines, occasional slant rhymes, anaphora and other forms of repetition, puns and allusions, lowercase letters, sparse punctuation, and a lean lexicon of rudimentary but evocative words” (Moody, Jocelyn K.).

“Clifton has been likened to Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson in her style. Her poems are spare in form, deceptively simple in language, complex in ideas, and reflective of the commonplace, the everyday” (Houston, Helen R.).

Poetry reading: “Song at Midnight”

Questions:

1.  Who are the brothers in the poem? 

2.  Is the poem talking about the subjects age?

3.  Who is speaking?

Course Objectives:

5e.  To emphasize how all speakers and writers may use common devices of human language to make poetry, including narrative, poetic devices, and figurative speech.

5f.  To generalize the dominant-minority relation to philosophical or syntactic categories of subject and object, in which the subject is self-determining and active in terms of voice anfchoice,” while the object is acted upon,passive, or spoken for rather than acting or speaking.  The subject is being spoken for in the poem.  . 

References

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/clifton/clifton-biobib.html

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/clifton/clifton.htm

Beckles, Frances N. 20 Black Women. Gateway Press. Baltimore 1978.. 

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press.

From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Copyright © 1995 by Oxford University Press.