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The
Old Sincerity During his February visit to The Shedd, Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman spoke of the need in the arts for "neo-sincerity," a turning away from irony and cleverness (wink, nudge) for its own sake and a recalibration of our attention toward feeling and meaning, toward art that says something. This idea of "new" sincerity has received attention in the poetry world as well as more poets begin to take James Longenbach's words seriously: "Poetry's greatest power is to instill in us a longing for something other than poetry." Thank heavens then that Lucille Clifton is coming to town. At a time when many young poets think of themselves as rock stars rather than writers; when, in fact, some young poets are rock stars; when the audience for poetry is both more educated and seemingly smaller than at any time in history; when many of our brightest minds seem content to churn out poems that are little more than linguistic games or narratives so drolly written that they effectively ironize themselves out of feeling, it is a pleasure to turn to the poems of Lucille Clifton. Clifton's work has always eschewed flash in favor of substance and direct communication. To call her poetry minimalist, however, would do a disservice to the generosity and lucidity of her vision. Words like "direct" or "unadorned" are often used to describe her style, and these are not unfair characterizations. If Clifton's poetry is one of plain surfaces and common language, though, it is anything but simple. It is rich with the details of real lives and the complex history of the African-American experience, with the triumphs and defeats of urban life and with female identity. Characteristically humble, when asked about her poems, Clifton said, "[When my first book came out] my babies were 7, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. Of course the stuff was short — people wanted dinner." The brevity of the poems belies Clifton's wide tonal range. She modulates from quietly celebratory:
listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own.
to desperate:
someone has stolen my parents and hidden my brother. my extra fingers are cut away. i am left with plain hands and nothing to give you but poems.
to incantatory and jubilant:
these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!
Clifton chronicles common human experience — not that which makes us different, but that which binds us together. Suspicious of those who would try to pigeonhole her work or her audience, she says she writes "for whoever is able to receive it. I write out of being human. I write for [the poet] John Ashbery and for my uncle the cab driver." Like her predecessor Walt Whitman, her song is the echo of America — all of America — singing. Clifton speaks on "Circling Home: Stories and Sustainable Communities" at 10 am Thursday, May 4 at LCC's Performance Hall. At 2:30 pm, she will give an informal discussion and Q&A at the Center for Meeting and Learning (room 104). Her appearance is the keynote event of LCC's Reading Together project; Clifton's Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 is one of this year's Reading Together selections. For more information on the program, see www.lanecc.edu/readingtogetheror call Ellen Cantor at 463-3660.
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