Buffalo has produced a number of prominent poets. But when Langston Hughes chose the work of Lucille Clifton, a then little-known poet from the East Side, for inclusion in his influential 1970 anthology “The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970”, it kicked off Clifton’s long career as one of America’s most beloved bards.
Lucille Clifton, nee Thelma Lucille Sayles, was born in Depew, the daughter of a steelworker and a laundress. She grew up in the Cold Spring neighborhood at 254 Purdy Street until she was 11 or 12, then moved with her family to nearby 11 Harwood Place. At 16, she went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., on a full scholarship for two years. After two more years at Fredonia State, Clifton returned to the East Side, where she, her husband and her children lived at 11 Harwood till 1967. That year, Clifton moved away to Baltimore, but in her imagination she stayed in Cold Spring.
Clifton published her first book of poems, “Good Times,” in 1969 (that was the book that was brought to Hughes’s attention by a mutual friend, Buffalonian Ishmael Reed). In the early ‘70s she began publishing what eventually amounted to 22 children’s books. She taught for many years at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, and from 1979 to 1985 was that state’s poet laureate. She won many prestigious awards during her career, including the National Book Award for “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000”; the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; and, just a few weeks before her death in 2010, the Frost Medal, the Poetry Society of America’s lifetime achievement award. Many readers were familiar with Clifton’s work from Bill Moyers’s “Life of the Mind” series on PBS.
Literary critics compared Clifton’s work with that of Emily Dickinson---plain-spoken, able to compress rich ideas into a few words, poignant. Clifton could also be funny (“Children/when they ask you/why is your mama so funny/say/she is a poet/she don’t have no sense”). Early in her career, she sounded like a feminist poet of the early ‘70s, celebrating sisterhood and women’s bodies. Later in her career, her voice had evolved into something more formal, even classical.
But always, there was Cold Spring, where her soul still dwelt 22 years after leaving Buffalo:
lot’s wife 1988
each of these weeds is a day i climbed the stair
at 254 purdy street
and looked into a mirror
to see if i was really there. i was there. i am there
in the thousand days.
the weeds. and these weeds
were 11 harwood place
that daddy bought expecting it
to hold our name forever
against the spin of the world.
our name is spinning away in the wind
blowing across the vacant lots
of buffalo, new york,
that were my girlhood homes.
sayles, i hear them calling, sayles,
we thought we would live forever;
and i look back like lot’s wife
wedded to her weeds and turn to something
surer than salt and write this, yes
i promise, yes we will.
Perhaps the quality in Clifton’s poetry for which she was most admired was resilience, perseverance and survival, something which Clifton had plenty of experience in. Two of her six children died as young adults, prompting her to write, “When I get to where I'm going, I want the death of my children explained to me.” Clifton endured many other deep personal adversities and sadness---the early death of her husband, as well as her own battles with kidney failure (which required a transplant) and cancer in several parts of her body—yet she invariably treated them with profound dignity. As she did in this beautiful 2001 tribute to a departed sister:
my sister Josephine,
born july in '29
and dead these 15 years,
who carried a book
on every stroll.
when daddy was dying
she left the streets
and moved back home
to tend him.
her pimp came too,
her Diamond Dick,
and they would take turns
reading
the bible aloud through the house.
when you poem this,
and you will, she would say,
remember the Book of Job.
happy birthday and hope
to you Josephine,
one of the east's
most wanted.
may heaven be filled
with literate men,
may they bed you
with respect.
As the poet, memoirist and scholar Elizabeth Alexander wrote in The New Yorker a few days after Clifton died: “I do not think there is an American poet as beloved as Clifton, or one whose influence radiated as widely.” That her influence radiated out to the world from Cold Spring makes that East Side neighborhood something that will live---yes, she promised---forever.
Cast (in order of appearance):
Narrator: Susan Banks
Lucille Clifton: Mary Craig
Script: Jeff Z. Klein
Sound recording: Charles Gilbert
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Councilmember Mitch Nowakowski and the Buffalo Common Council for their generous support