Lucille Clifton: good woman: poetry and a memoir 1969-1980

In honor of National Poetry Month, our selection for The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series is Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, by Lucille Clifton. A work that consists of her first four published collections and her 1976 memoir. This combined manuscript was published in 1987 by BOA Editions. and is accessible through hoopladigital.com.

Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles in 1936 and passed away in 2010. Clifton was an African- American poet, children’s book author, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland and was nominated twice in the same year as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Although Lucille Clifton went on to publish six more manuscripts after good woman, this particular book was chosen because it includes both her early poetry and her memoir.

The memoir,entitled Generations starts on the day of her father’s death and flashes back through his life all the way back to the life of her enslaved great-great grandmother Caroline Sayles who had been born in Dahomey (now Benin, West Africa). An often repeated phrase throughout Clifton’s work is “Get what you want, you from Dahomey Women”

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.

Lucille Clifton

(left to right) June Jordan, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton,

and Audre Lorde at the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.

Nov. 1973.

Lucille Clifton in her later years

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