Inspired by Children Lucille Clifton

Poet, juvenile fiction writer, autobiographer, and educator, Lucille Clifton nee Sayles was born June 27, 1936 in New York. Throughout her career as a writer, Clifton has won laurels. In 1987 she was one of the three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1992, she received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She was inducted into the National Literature Hall of Fame for African American Writers, 1998. Among Clifton’s most notable achievements was the National Book Award for Poetry, 2000, for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.

Its when Clifton was attending Fredonia State Teachers College that she started experimenting and exploring poetry, drama, and various other things that went on to shape her writing. Clifton had six children to Fred Clifton, her husband, which invariably brought about the interaction with many other children. Clifton has indicated that she saw so many children that she was inspired to write about them.

An author of poetry and prose for adults as well as for children, Lucille Clifton has published extensively since 1966. Her canon includes more than twenty children’s books, eleven volumes of poetry written for adults and a memoir. Clifton’s works deal with children, family, domesticity, and the concerns of ordinary women. Her characters and speakers dwell usually in inner-city African American neighbourhoods and occasionally multicultural American neighbourhoods.

During the late 1960s, Clifton’s works began to appear in print. In 1969, her short story The Magic Mama, parts of which appeared later in Generations, was published in Redbook; the focus of the story is Clifton’s mother’s epileptic seizures and their effect on the family.

Good Times, her first collection of poems for adults, was published in 1969. This prolific writer has published nine additional books of poetry for adults and one prose work for adults since Good News about the Earth appeared in 1972. The poems in An Ordinary Woman, published in 1974, celebrate mundane things - marriage, motherhood, sisterhood, continuity, and blackness. It is in this work that Clifton achieves her promise as a writer.

Generations, Clifton’s only prose work for adults, was published in 1976. Four years later, in 1980, Two-Headed Woman appeared. It was the winner that year of the Juniper Prize, an annual poetry award given by the University of Massachusetts Press. Characterized by dramatic tautness, simple language, and original groupings of words, the poems are tributes to blackness, celebrations of women in general and black women in particular, and testimonies to familial love.

Compiled by Ishara MUDUGAMUWA

ishara@sundayobserver.